I Am A Republican Caricature
A tragic hipster on how food stamp cuts hurt small farmers and the self-employed
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The news yesterday that the Republican-majority House of Representatives voted to cut the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program by $40 billion over five years struck many of my bleeding heart betters as ridiculous, which it is, because it’s pure negotiation theater. As any of my fellow cord-cutting iPhone elite know from watching Netflix original series House of Cards, the current fight over the details of the new farm bill is part real politik, part melodrama.
Many of the changes and cuts are meant to address “waste, fraud and abuse” in SNAP, a common rallying cry by Republicans against any public program, really. (Well, except for farm subsidies, but we’ll get to that later — do note, however, that this three-year “nutrition bill” essentially splits SNAP off from the larger five-year farm bill, protecting direct subsidies and price guarantees from the close scrutiny of a debate in the press.) Last Month, Fox News put together a package on Jason Greenslate, who was interviewed by Fox News’ John Roberts for “The Great Food Stamp Binge” special report. Really, you just have to watch it! It is pretty special.
Of course, it’s an old story. What may be most remarkable is that the “undeserving” seen here is a white man, and a white man with some education at that. On the one hand, maybe this is progress? On the other, it completely ignores the other angle (and larger structural issues) that suggest even a white man with half an education can’t get a fulfilling, living-wage job in California — which might really scare the shit out of your typical Fox News viewer — and has essentially taken himself out of the labor force (thereby keeping unemployment numbers artificially low).
One of the anti-fraud provisions in the bill which just passed the house would allow states “to conduct drug testing on SNAP applicants as a condition for receiving benefits” and “remove the ability for states to get waivers for the work requirement for able-bodied adults without dependents.” Note, the video report somewhat absurdly segues immediately into a debate among Fox commentators over the feelings of the founding fathers over the pursuit of happiness through smoking marijuana, though the implication that Greenslate smokes weed runs as a subtext throughout the piece. Maybe not coincidentally, California’s largest cash crop is marijuana — and it is, frankly, the only reliably profitable crop for the small, independent farmer in my state.
However you feel about Greenslate’s career (and music or fashion) choices, I, for one, can relate. It wasn’t so long ago that I was a drunk, stoned SNAP recipient crashing at times with friends and family through 2009 and 2010 — and working at least twenty hours a week as a freelance writer, more when I could find it, and sometimes even for free just to “promote my brand!” As go aspiring heavy metal musicians today, so go aspiring feature columnists, I guess. Also like Greenslate, I certainly enjoyed some jokes along the lines of “if only Bill O’Reilly could see me now, buying pate from a Trader Joe’s with my food stamps in San Francisco.”
Because humor is how I deal with heartbreak. So yesterday I remarked on Twitter that “I’d talk about how SNAP helped me get through 2009 and 2010 (while freelancing part-time) if I didn’t think it would be used against SNAP.” The premise rather overstates any impact I might have, but then it’s really two jokes in one — nobody would pay me a living wage to write such a thing, so why bother? Better to spend that time worrying about how low my unemployment insurance benefit is going to be since many of the quarters it will be calculated from I was on disability after getting hit by a car and had neither income nor the freedom or ability to work.
Clearly, I have made some terrible choices, and would make a terrible poster child for the legal aid, human rights and civil liberties organizations that sued multiple states (including major farm-bill beneficiary Texas) in 2009 over structural problems like under-staffed and under-funded Human Resources and Health and Human Services Departments at the state level leading to months and months of delays in processing SNAP applications from individuals and families just as the need was most severe.
(Note, one of the states that wasn’t sued was California, which has a lower percentage of SNAP recipients as a percentage of the population than any state in the Bible Belt.)
Never mind that I was primarily addicted to products derived rather directly from the very crops most heavily subsidized by the farm bill, like corn (distilled into bourbon) and tobacco, or that I couldn’t spend my SNAP benefits on booze, cigarettes or drugs in the first place. (Unless you are verifiably homeless, you also can’t spend SNAP benefits on “hot, prepared food” either — the loophole through which you might buy cold, pre-cooked lobster and sushi, but only then at SNAP-eligible retailers like grocery stores and not from restaurants.)
I do remember a time in the 90s when I worked at a health food store in downtown Manhattan and remarked on the number of relatively affluent-appearing white people buying free-range chicken with actual food stamps. Some probably did qualify, others may have purchased them for pennies on the dollar along the geographic and cultural frontier between the rapidly gentrifying East Village and Alphabet City during the Giuliani years. But that sort of fraud pretty much ceased with the advent of debit card disbursement, which has been implemented in all 50 states since 2005. According to the anti-poverty advocates at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Despite the recent rapid caseload growth, USDA reports that states achieved a record-low SNAP error rate in fiscal year 2011.”
Certainly I could, and did, spend my benefits at the spendy Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market or Rainbow Grocery here in San Francisco — even while getting paid a measly $15 a post to snark about a Salon“Hipsters on food stamps” story reporting that SNAP spending had doubled at the Rainbow. Which is exactly in line with the total program spending overall, which also basically doubled from 2008 to 2010 according to the Congressional Budget Office, further noting in its report on the program in 2011 that “About one-fifth of the growth in spending can be attributed to temporarily higher benefit amounts enacted in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The remainder stems from other factors, such as higher food prices and lower income among beneficiaries, both of which have boosted benefits.”
While the CBO forecasts that “the number of people receiving SNAP benefits will remain high by historical standards,” the increased benefits which the 2009 act made possible are set to expire with the current 2008 farm bill at the end of September, immediately cutting the cost of the program by a significant degree. The cost of SNAP is going to go down no matter what, it’s just an issue of by how much, and who loses. (The Senate version of the bill being debated has proposed $4 billion in cuts to SNAP.)
The most direct losses will, maybe unsurprisingly, be faced by women, who receive the majority of SNAP benefits — as well as many women-owned farms which disproportionally benefit from conservation programs also on the chopping block like land retirement. To be fair, the farm households hardest hit tend to have an order of magnitude more income than the SNAP households. In general, direct subsidies paid out through the farm bill — which will actually increase under the proposed House legislation, making it one of the few national issues that both libertarians and leftists can agree on besides marijuana decriminalization — primarily go to only the wealthiest farmers.
So city dwellers will suffer most widely, but who the money also won’t go to are small, independent farmers. Partly because they simply can’t compete in the market for commodity crops, but largely because they can’t receive any benefits from the farm bill for growing fruits and vegetables, which are specifically excluded. The only way fruit and vegetable farmers see any subsidies is indirectly through spending on school lunch programs and, you guessed it, through SNAP.
Even while prices for agricultural products are surging across the board, your local farmer’s market vendor isn’t necessarily going to benefit. And if you’re looking to try and start a new farm, good luck, because as the price of crops goes up, so does the price of farmland, increasing the cost of entry for anyone looking to reform the food supply from quite literally the ground up. Sure, you can make money from high margin goods like dry-farmed organic tomatoes, but only at a scale that operations with existing land and favorable banking relationships can implement and sustain, and only by perpetuating existing farmworker pay and labor conditions.
If you think school lunch programs across the country are going to start buying organic produce from local vendors like they do at public Tamalpais High in Marin County, think again. In the current fight over the farm bill, Susan Collins, a House Republican from Maine, wants the Secretary of Agriculture to “review the economic and public health benefits of white potatoes on low-income families who are determined to be at nutritional risk.” In other words, how can potato farmers (and their Florida counterparts growing tomatoes) continue to capture the lion’s share of what fruit and vegetable subsidies do exist on a structural scale through federal, state and local school lunch programs? Because while macronutritionally white potatoes and grains have a lot in common, legally, white potatoes are a vegetable (and hence qualify as such on school lunch menus).
In the debate over the farm bill in 1990, fruit and vegetable growers were specifically excluded from consideration for subsidies in part thanks to Maine Senator William Cohen, who argued that if Maine potato farmers had to compete against, say, subsidized Illinois grain producers rotating potatoes onto 25% of their land (which would have been allowed under proposed crop diversification reforms) it would be unfair. He was backed by the Western Growers Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, the United Fruit and Vegetable Association, the National Potato Council — national lobbying organizations representing large-scale, industrially fertilized fruit and vegetable farmers.
The way most of the fruits and vegetables served to children in schools arrives on the plate is by passing through processors like Aramark and Sodexo where tomatoes are pasted, potatoes fried, and apples and oranges concentrated — before being liberally salted and sugared to reduce “plate waste” by competing with more familiar, heavily marketed and processed food found at home and in restaurants. This has the added benefit of destroying union jobs in public school kitchens and replacing them with factory food processing work done by non-union labor.
In 2010, it was reported that some schools were undermining even that indirect fruit and vegetable subsidy by forgoing federal assistance, which is now contingent on meeting nutritional requirements like providing actual fresh fruits and vegetables and limiting total calories under new legislation passed that year which was heavily promoted by Michelle Obama and signed into law by her husband. The loudest, or at least most oft-repeated voice in these stories was one Gary Lewis of Catlin Public Schools in Catlin, Illinois — a district of fewer than 1,000 total students located deep in the heart of ConAgra country where grain elevators dominate the skyline. (Illinois ranks in the top three states receiving farm bill subsidies, along with the aforementioned Texas and Republican Party Primary kingmaker Iowa. To be fair, the Obamas have probably been unpopular in Catlin since well before they moved from Chicago to Washington.)
As for SNAP, most of that money ends up in the hands of commodity grain producers anyway — through the purchase of meat and dairy raised on grain and the processed, packaged foods which take up the vast majority of floor and shelf space in supermarkets. I see these decisions made all the time at my neighborhood grocery discounter, FoodsCo, where the majority of my own SNAP money went. That I could occasionally choose real, whole food was a grace and blessing, and an act of self-preservation, but mostly a rare treat. There I was, writing about the venture-backed startups coming out of ramen-fueled incubators while subsisting on ramen myself with no VC meetings on my schedule forthcoming.
Before that, and shortly before the larger financial collapse, for a few months in 2007 I moved back to New York to finish my degree in the arts (I told you I was a hipster). I remember walking into a neighborhood supermarket in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn with a dwindling stash of student loan money and chuckling to myself “I remember seeing these same tomatoes and heads of iceberg lettuce three days ago at a Safeway in California.” By which I mean they were both more expensive and less appealing for their cross-country travels. I couldn’t afford to be a snob, and bought them anyway, but under the coherent logic of hardship it makes them an even more difficult sell to a busy householder on a limited budget.
I was within walking distance of the Park Slope Food Co-op. While the prices there are admirably low for the quality of the produce, you can’t just walk in and start feeding your family as I was informed by one of the co-op members in that not uncivil but not exactly cheery way New Yorkers often have. You have to pitch in by volunteering on-site some period of the month in order to enjoy the selection, which, offer that deal to the majority of working people in Brooklyn and see the response you get? Frankly, offer that deal to former Entourage star Adrien Grenier and see the response you get. I did take home a brochure, which touted that their selection of “local” fruits and vegetables which were sourced from within a 500-mile radius — closer than California, sure, but that’s still a lot of miles on a lot of trucks.
I was recently talking to a friend that graduated from a graduate program in sustainable agriculture at the University of California, Santa Cruz who said her friends had all drawn circles around the Bay Area in the hopes of finding a sweet spot where land prices and distance to market provided a profitable balance and kept coming up short. Even the most successful of her cohort who are making an independent living for themselves today were resigned to having to give up the business if they wanted to get married and grow their own families in the future.
What if some small percentage of the farm bill was tipped into their hands? Could that make a difference, I asked? Maybe, she granted. Of course, my question was based on the assumption that any of the farm bill went to fruits and vegetables, which, as I only learned in researching this essay, it does not. Turns out school lunch programs and SNAP spending is all they can hope for, and probably only a small percentage of that at best.
So say what you will about lazy hipsters giving up on the job market to smoke pot all day — at least here in California, the money you spend on weed has a much better chance of going to local farmers than most of what you might spend at a grocery store. As for SNAP? Every dollar spent by starving artists, failed entrepreneurs and, yes, actual working families at your neighborhood farmer’s market is a dollar diverted from $1 trillion in subsidies away from agribusiness and into the pockets of local, independent producers.
Seems like small potatoes, but even if only a small percentage of that $40 billion that was going to pass from urban hipster to rural hipster is lost, in aggregate it makes a huge difference in tipping the delicate balance away from making a living as a modern farmer — or freelancer for Modern Farmer, for that matter — possible.
Photo by Flickr user Cpt. Obvious.
