USDA focuses on cost of healthy meals amid food stamp benefits revamp
The US Department of Agriculture is highlighting the difficulty food stamp recipients have in affording healthy meals as it seeks to revise the program's funding formula.
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Nearly 9 in 10 participants face barriers to providing themselves and their families with nutritious food, the agency said Wednesday. The most common hurdle, reported by 61% of enrollees, is cost. Smaller shares said they lack time to prepare food from scratch (30%), need transportation to the grocery store (19%) or don't have storage for fresh or cooked food (14%).
As families ran out of benefits in the last 10 days of the month, they chose less nutritious food, which is less costly, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit on Wednesday.
"That's a wake-up call," he said, noting that many families will see their benefits drop after the pandemic enhancement Congress passed expires at the end of September.
As directed by Congress in the 2018 Farm Bill, the agency is reevaluating the Thrifty Food Plan, which is used to set benefit amounts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the formal name for food stamps. The value of the plan has been adjusted only for inflation since it was introduced in 1975, while there have been major changes to nutrition science, the food supply, consumption patterns and participants' circumstances since then, the agency said.
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Consumer advocates have long pushed for a review of the plan, which is supposed to reflect the cost of a basic healthy diet, saying it makes unrealistic assumptions about food affordability and availability today, as well as about the time families have to shop and prepare meals.
The USDA is aiming to complete its review of the Thrifty Food Plan by the end of the summer. The farm bill requires the agency to publish an updated plan by 2022 and every five years thereafter, but President Joe Biden asked the agency to look into it in an executive order in January.
Nearly 42 million Americans rely on food stamps -- a figure that has grown amid the coronavirus pandemic, which sparked an increase in hunger nationwide. In response, Congress has boosted the value of the benefit by 15% through September and created or bolstered other federal nutrition assistance programs.
This story has been updated with comments from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
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