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Saturday, July 28, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

IN NEED: Paul and Paula Carpentier say the food they receive from the Fairfield Interfaith Food Pantry is vital in helping to feed their three children.

enlarge Staff graphic by Sharon Wood

Today's Top Headlines
from the Kennebec Journal

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YOUTH SOCCER: Local team gives 'care package' to children in Afghanistan

All of today's: News | Sports
from the Kennebec Journal

Today's Top Headlines
from the Morning Sentinel

YES ON 1 BACKER REBUTS CLAIM
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All of today's: News | Sports
from the Morning Sentinel

Georgia Wrona, aged 74 and wizened like a fairy tale grandmother, is sitting at her friend Sandy Kalloch’s kitchen table in Farmingdale. She’s reminiscing about her recent trip to the grocery store.

“I was looking at asparagus,” she says. “I was dying for them, like when you want stuff so badly you can taste it.”

“Like peppers?” asks Kalloch, eagerly.

“Yeah, stuffed peppers,” trails off Wrona, a small smile drifting across her lips. Then, a sigh.

“But you can’t even afford the peppers,” she says. These two women, Wrona and Kalloch, are tough old birds, not given to sentimentality. They’ve worked all their lives, they smoke like chimneys, they speak with the gravelly voices and rough kindness of women whose lives have been hard ... and continue to be so.

So to hear them is to bear witness to the power of their deprivation. There is no fresh spring asparagus for these two, no crunchy and astringent green pepper to grace their plates. And those unobtainable asparagus spears are a paradise lost for Wrona and Kalloch; the missing green pepper a piece of sweet and spirited summer gone from their lives.

Welcome to the world of Maine’s hungry. Asparagus are expensive, sure — but green peppers, too? For most of us, a green pepper is a pretty routine purchase. For these two women and the tens of thousands of others who are hungry in Maine, green peppers, asparagus, tomatoes, peaches, grapes, a nice head of lettuce — these are luxuries often out of their reach. Just getting the essentials can be a daunting, if not impossible, task.

“You’re hungry and the stress that goes along with it, you have a nervous breakdown, because you don’t know where the next piece of bread comes from,” says Wrona.

“We eat a lot of rice and baked beans.”

Kalloch is a paraplegic who lives alone; Wrona’s a survivor of three heart attacks who’s taking care of her husband, who was disabled by three strokes. Their lives are a constant challenge: Thriftiness, penny-pinching (what Wrona calls “squeezing the nickel until the buffalo sh-ts”), the kindness of strangers at the local food pantry — all these supplement the meagre social security income of these two older women.

And then there are the food stamps. The two represent both sides of the food stamp world: Kalloch is poor enough, so she gets $123 a month in food stamps. Wrona’s monthly Social Security income of $1,500 is too high an income, even when adjusted to reflect expenses, to qualify for food stamps.

“They tell me that I have too much money,” says Wrona. “With the price of food, how can they tell me I have too much money?”

For both women, after paying paying for rent, heating, electricity and telephone service, there’s not much left in food dollars — either food stamps or Social Security. “We stretch ‘em right to the limit,” says Kalloch, leaning forward in her wheelchair. “With food stamps, you have to pick and choose, you have to buy something you can stretch out ... macaroni, beans, hot dogs, spaghetti, you can’t buy the nutritious things. You’d like to — but you can’t.”

As for all those people who say the country gives too much in assistance to the poor? “Let ‘em live for a month on what you get,” says Wrona gruffly, smiling. There’s a perverse kind of pride in being able to survive such deprivation, and being given no credit for having done so.

Every month last year in Maine, an average of 160,294 people got food stamps. Eighty percent of benefits went to families with children. Eleven percent of food stamp recipients were over 60 years old, like Kalloch, who is 64. In Franklin county, 13.6 percent of residents were food stamp recipients; in Kennebec county, 13.5 percent got food stamps and in Somerset county, 19.3 percent of residents got food stamps.

$1 MEALS AREN'T NUTRITIOUS

In almost all cases, a family of three can get food stamps if its wage earners’ monthly take-home pay is below $1,385. Go above that (by getting a job, for example) and you lose your stamps. And you can’t have more than $2,000 to $3,000 in household savings if you want to get food stamps, excluding the value of your home.

Total food stamp benefits in Maine last year amounted to a whopping $169 million. That money helped drive the state’s economy by making its way into the coffers of grocery stores, supermarkets and farmers’ markets across the state.

Yet that huge amount of money doesn’t reflect the reality of food stamp benefits when seen from the individual level. The average food stamp benefit per meal is $1, or $21 a week. The average food-stamp-benefit per person per month in Maine was $88 in 2006. It doesn’t take much analysis to appreciate that such a paltry amount of money can’t possibly pay for a nutritious diet.

“If the legislators had to live on what we have to live on, they’d never be able to do it,” says Sandy Kalloch.

The federal food stamp program is part of a large and important piece of legislation, the Farm Bill, that is up for reauthorization this year. The Farm Bill is really misnamed; it should be the Food and Farm Bill because it contains all the federal food assistance programs. Right now, a lot of attention is being paid to the food stamp part of the bill, as a number of legislators and public figures have tried to demonstrate the inadequacy of benefits by attempting to live, themselves, on $21 a week in food money.

The legislation’s effect on food stamp recipients is significant beyond the food assistance given to them: the crops that are heavily subsidized through the farm bill become the ingredients of cheap food while the crops that do not receive such subsidies are more expensive.

Thus, corn and soybeans get major price supports from the Farm Bill, rather than, say, carrots or fresh vegetables. High-fructose syrup made from corn is a major ingredient in snack foods, cereals and soda, as is soy. Federal farm subsidies mean snack food is cheap food, vegetables and fruits and protein like meat or fish or cheese aren’t. So, poor people on food stamps get the biggest number of calories for their buck by buying snack food and items with lots of sugar and other cheap ingredients.

Consequently poor people get fat more easily, get diabetes more easily and are prone to a host of other health problems related to inadequate and bad nutrition.

“Healthier diets are more expensive,” says Dr. Adam Drewnowski, a nutritionist at the University of Washington. In a recent study, Drewnowski found that foods that are nutritious and lower in calories are also among the most expensive foods; unhealthy foods filled with empty calories are among the cheapest foods.

INCREASE FOOD STAMP BENEFIT

Critics — and there are a lot of them — say that there are three things very wrong with the country’s food stamp program.

The first is that the benefit levels are too low. We agree.

According to respected nutritionist Marion Nestle at New York University, it’s “impossible” to eat a healthy diet on $21 a week.

In an interview with National Public Radio Nestle said, “families who are poor and are dependent on food stamps must find other sources, like food pantries and places where foods are given away. And that sort of thing – it’s a full-time job just to try to round up enough food to keep your family fed.”

One proposal before Congress would increase the $33 billion food stamp program by $4 billion, which translates into an average increase of $48 in food stamps per family of four every month.

That’s not a lot, but it’s a good place to begin the conversation.

Next, the method used to calculate household income and thus benefit levels is unfair and unrealistic. Prior to 1996, to qualify for food stamps, the standard deduction you would use to lower your gross income to reflect the costs of basic living expenses (other than food) was indexed to inflation. That made sense, because the basic expenses of living go up as inflation goes up.

But as part of the landmark budget cutting 1996 federal welfare law, that deduction was frozen at $134 for all families, although the standard deduction was un-frozen for families of four or more in 2002. The problem is that three-quarters of families receiving food stamps are smaller than four members. For them, the deduction has not increased for the last decade.

Had the deduction actually risen with inflation, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget Priorities, it would be $184 this fiscal year. The center calculates that the benefits received by a single parent with two children are $24 a month lower in fiscal year 2008 than they would have been if the standard deduction had kept pace with inflation.

Congress should restore the standard deduction to its pre-1996 level, which would set it at $188, and adjust it annually for inflation. Benefits would increase by approximately $24 a month to an average household of fewer than four members. That’s hardly a generous amount, but there are two very good things about it: First, it’s more than food stamp recipients are getting now. Second, with careful purchasing, it could go a long way.

Finally, the cutoff level for food stamp eligibility is far too low and must be raised.

Right now, a family of three with a monthly net income above $1,385 earns too much money to get food stamps; that’s a net hourly wage of $7.98, or gross wage of $10.38 an hour.

Consider the predicament of the single parent who’s earning that income and trying to run a household with two children. Let’s say the family’s monthly rent is $800; the annual heating bill takes $200 out of monthly income; electricity and phone cost $100 every month; then there’s gas for the car at $3 a gallon, which adds up to $200 a month at least. That leaves $85 a month for medicines, insurance, clothes and, oh, right, whatever is left from that for food. No emergencies, birthday presents or car repairs allowed.

SOMETIMES, FOOD COMES LAST

And when you’re scraping bottom, what’s the most flexible portion of a household budget?

“The food line item in every person’s budget is one item that is not fixed,” says Terry Howell of the Midcoast Hunger Prevention Network in Brunswick.

“The problem comes in that at $11 an hour, you can’t make it ... We don’t have jobs that pay a liveable wage, we don’t have enough affordable housing and we have an assistance program that punishes you for trying to move ahead and get to a liveable wage.”

Thus, as people gain more skills and get better-paying jobs, they risk losing their food stamps. The Maine Center for Economic Policy has set $19.35 as the hourly wage a single parent of two would need to make ends meet. We’re nowhere near providing jobs that pay those kinds of wages to average workers in Maine. Yet if we cut food stamp recipients in a family of three off from benefits when their wage earners bring in a little less than $7.98 an hour, we’re creating not only a lot of hungry people, we’re creating a disincentive to get back to work. Why try for a better wage or job if it means losing your food stamps?

Until Maine has attracted or developed enough high-paying jobs that pay workers wages that allow them to feed their families, food stamp benefits need to be available to those who are working their way out of being hungry — but are not there yet. Tomorrow: A moral and social imperative.

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