Experts discuss SNAP benefits and logistics, ‘Pandemic EBT’ and nutritious diet cost estimates

The year 2020 has focused a great deal more attention on the nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and the logistics of food assistance as well.

On Aug. 31 the Council on Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics hosted a four-expert panel on the matter hosted by board member Sean Cash, the Bergstrom Foundation Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture the authority to ease state requirements for reporting and proving need, and the department suspended the program’s three-month cap on benefits for unemployed adults under 50 without dependents. For households with school-aged children, Families First allowed for so-called “Pandemic EBT” — extra food aid (by electronic benefits transfer) for any child who would otherwise have received free or reduced-price meals at school. 

Fellow Friedman Prof. Parke Wilde (pron. WILL-dee), author of the textbook Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge, 2nd ed, 2018), said Americans should remember that federal nutrition assistance programs are substantially larger than the nation’s collective emergency food assistance system. Food banks and food pantries, while important for filling in the gaps in our nutrition assistance safety net, are just a fraction of the aid laid out in SNAP, school nutrition programs like Head Start, and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program.

“Because of hiccups in the food production supply chain, such as shutdowns for meat production plants and so forth, there’s been a bump in food price inflation which has led to the largest increase in years in total SNAP benefit adjustment for inflation,” Wilde said.

Also, he said, states have been allowed to institute a temporary expansion in the benefit amount. This expansion hasn't raised the maximum. “So it had the effect of not particularly helping the very poorest recipients.” 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture which oversees the program did expand greatly a previously small SNAP online food ordering platform for digital commerce. 

“All of this means that the SNAP program is a bigger part of the entire food economy this year than in any year in recent memory.”

Many aid provisions and allowances have recently ended. For more data on household status, resources and resilience, Wilde directed the audience to the Census Bureau’s Pulse online interactive.

Shewana Hairston McSwain is the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program outreach coordinator at North Carolina A&T State University. She said the grocery chain Food Lion has teamed up with SNAP to offer an additional $40 on electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards for purchases of fruits and vegetables, and she surveyed similar innovations and advancements offices like hers are doing around the country.

The challenge for many low-income Americans is logistical. West Virginia’s Extension staff developed partnerships with several different community organizations to build one big food pickup site where staff can discuss food preparation and offer them a resource referral list. 

At the University of Illinois, Extension staff developed an online community food map: users can search by ZIP code and find food resources, including pantries, farmers markets, and roadside farm stands that accept EBT.

Awareness and education is one resource-limited effort that can have an impact. For instance, North Carolina State University’s Extension has partnered with 64 emergency food sites to include recipe cards to help households eat healthier and stretch their food dollar. Wyoming’s Cent$ible nutrition program has introduced gardening classes and grocery shopping savings tips.

George Davis, professor at Virginia Tech and author of Food and Nutrition Economics: Fundamentals for Health Sciences (2016, Oxford Univ. Press), says education must flow upstream as well as down. Policymakers must know that along with money, limited time is critical to how we gauge SNAP benefit adequacy.

“Just as one can’t have a nutritious diet without some vegetables, one cannot have a nutritious diet without some planning, shopping, preparation and assembly — labor.”

The federal nutritious diet cost estimate does not include the cost of labor (time) and is based not on regional food prices but national averages. 

The estimate of the amount of time it takes per week to prepare a nutritious diet is in the 10-13 hour range.  However, the average SNAP household only spends 4 to 6 hours a week planning, procuring and preparing nutritious meals.

If the goal of SNAP is, as stated, to increase the food purchasing power of low-income households in order to obtain a more nutritious diet, “the bad news,” based on Davis’s work, “is that SNAP benefits are inadequate due to labor and regional price difference omissions.” 

Time is a resource that diminishes the adequacy of SNAP benefits. Estimates are that SNAP recipients are, on average, 65% below the time required for a nutritious diet and 22% below the money required for a nutritious diet, even with the maximum SNAP benefits, according to Davis’s analysis.

“The good news is that, though inadequate, SNAP benefits are still very helpful.”

The adequacy of even the maximum SNAP benefit would more closely approximate resource needs if labor (time) and regional price differences for foods were factored in.

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This free program is made possible with the support of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service and National Agricultural Statistics Service.