Apparently frozen and canned are still allowable under WIC.
I found a link that specifies what’s allowed for WIC in my state, and for the neighboring state of Illinois (they look pretty similar but I haven’t analyzed them in detail).
California has a 19 page booklet for their WIC eligible people: Link to PDF
Unlike an EBT card, which is usable in all US states and not just the state the issued it, WIC benefits do not cross state lines. This comes up occasionally where I work because we are near a state line and people sometimes forget which side of that line they are on at the moment.
When a WIC purchase is made at my store a receipt is generated that shows which WIC items are in the purchase as well as what the person’s remaining benefits for the month are. WIC transactions can still take a bit longer than non-WIC as some people do scrutinize that receipt and may want to make adjustments before final approval of the purchase, but it’s still less of a headache than the old paper vouchers (Indiana is strictly card these days, thank Og)
I don’t know if this has been mentioned explicitly yet, but WIC benefits vary from person to person and/or family to family (since multiple kids may be covered at the same time). I’m assuming there’s some sort of complex formula involved with this.
In contrast, SNAP benefits are granted as a dollar amount and have much more general guidelines for what can be bought, as seen here.
Indeed. Every once in awhile we’ll get someone who’s approved for soy milk and soy cheese, either because of lactose intolerance or because they keep kosher, and less often we’ll get people approved for canned fish, which I don’t know WHAT you have to be in order to be eligible for it.
Milk is an interesting one - in general, people are only approved for 1% or skim milk, but under certain circumstances you can get approved for whole milk. 2% used to be an option for everyone who was approved for milk, but they took that option away a few years ago and there was MUCH lamentation and gnashing of teeth and trying to argue with clerks and managers who had absolutely no say over federal policy.
And then there’s the people who get approved for baby formula, which is a surprisingly huge boon to the industry - ISTR seeing awhile back that some huge percentage of all baby formula purchased in America, easily over 50%, was going to WIC users. During the shortage last year, our chain had to put quantity limits on the sale of formula, but those with WIC got an exemption from the limit.
Here in Olympia we have an organization called “the Other Bank” which specializes in providing food bank users with non-food essentials - toothpaste, TP, dish/laundry soap, feminine hygeine products, and the like. I don’t know if that concept has caught on in other places, but it’s definitely been useful to some people that I know over the years.
Part of the reason I became interested in this topic is after reading about public health in the book Metabolical by Dr. Lustig.
He contends that a lot of dietary changes could make people healthier. Although America has long had an ethos of individualism, he says most recent arguments for “personal responsibility and choice” largely stem from legal arguments made by tobacco companies in the 1950 who knew their products caused harm. He argues personal responsibility requires four conditions: full knowledge, accessibility, acknowledgement of externalities (how others are affected) and affordability.
Without getting into his arguments, he mentions an enormous percentage of SNAP money goes towards things of little nutrition, like products containing much sugar. However, this is true of many people and I doubt those using SNAP are much different in terms of their preferences from those who are not. (But if you are aware of research done in this point, I would be interested).
Surprisingly few excellent nutritional studies exist, for many reasons. But there is some evidence the benefits of reducing fat are quite modest and definitely have been overemphasized. This is not really the thread for discussing nutritional biochemistry. But with that in mind, when some consider whole milk to be healthier than skim milk…
How did this limitation on type of milk under SNAP come to exist? What arguments were used to justify it?
If this is a “healthy nudge”, are there limitations on sugar sweetened beverages or other things?
What is the role of “personal responsibility” in your opinion?
It’s my understanding that right now much of the fraud related to EBT is from cloning cards and stealing benefits. In these cases EBT recipients are the victims, not the perpetrators.
You are probably right, but the same questions apply. In fact if WIC stands for nutrition for women, infants and children (not a Canadian acronym), than it may be even more important.
As someone who rings up groceries for a living (well, about half my living - I do other things around the store, too) my nu-scientific observation is that the main difference between SNAP recipients and everyone else is the color of the plastic card(s) they swipe.
I’m sure Dr. Lustig means well, but there is an enormous range of people who utilize SNAP and they do not all have the same nutritional needs. We’re talking about a program that serves more than 40 million people a month. That is more than the entire population of Canada. The programs serves people from infants eating their first foods to elderly folks measuring their age in triple digits, men, women, people who are pregnant or breast-feeding, people with desk jobs or people who do manual labor, highly active people and couch potatoes, healthy people and people who are disabled.
I covered some of the issues in the thread I linked to regarding my own experiences.
I also have a problem with using a program like SNAP, some of whose recipients are struggling with a crisis or multiple problems, as a bludgeon for problems all of our society is experiencing. It feels like, yet again, the poor are being held to higher requirements than anyone else simply because they are poor.
That said - absolutely there are serious, serious problems with processed foods. The diet of the average American contains too much sugar (meaning not just the white powdery stuff but sweeteners in all their forms), too much fat, and too much salt. Yay, almost no one starves to death due to lack of calories any more in this country, that’s a good thing, but we could be doing so very much better.
First, the limitation on types of dairy is a WIC thing, not a SNAP thing. You can buy any sort of dairy you want with SNAP benefits.
I’m guessing it came during the whole “fat is evil” promotion of a generation ago, when Big Food started finding ways to take the fat out of everything (and, usually, replaced it with sugar or whipped foamy stuff or both).
Except that infants old enough to drink milk, toddlers, and otherwise young children SHOULD be drinking full fat milk because young humans have a greater need for fats than adults do. Sufficient fat intake is vital to proper nervous system development. Getting sufficient fats is a major issue with vegan diets for small children - it’s possible, but it really brings home that the nutritional needs of small children differ significantly from those of adults.
(And yes, it stands for Women, Infants, and Children)
Full fat dairy is not the problem - eating too much of it is the problem (regardless the age of a person) but that gets into all sorts of things like advertising and ballooning portion sizes that is outside the scope of this thread.
I think it also plays into the notion that all poor people are ignorant and too stupid to know how to feed themselves. I’ve got poor customers who eat an incredibly healthy diet, lots of cooking from scratch, whole grains, vegetables, fruits, moderate meat and dairy consumption, etc. I’ve got wealthy customers who eat nothing but processed crap that comes in cardboard boxes kept in the big freezers. I’ve got the reverse of those two. I have everything in between. Not all poor people have access to the sort of well equipped kitchen you need to cook healthy food from scratch. Not all rich people bother to cook.
No, SNAP does not limit sweeteners (natural or otherwise) in food or beverages.
For awhile in 2017 Cook County, Illinois imposed a tax on sweetened beverages. This was, as you might imagine, wildly unpopular. Also, for those stores just over the state line, enormously profitable.. It would have been a bad idea in any case, but given that the east border of Chicago is the actual state line, and even those who didn’t leave Illinois could still find bargains by simply going to the next county it was a stupid idea.
I think for the most part people know their situation better than a government bureaucrat and we shouldn’t make rules for the majority based on the exceptions.
I like the current “nudge” my employer is using - a 10% discount on fresh fruits and vegetables for anyone swiping a SNAP card. That’s across the board - it includes organic and exotic fruits and vegetables, too. You don’t have to buy that stuff, but if you do, your benefits will go further.
My employer has also arranged for people paying with SNAP to utilize order pick-up and on-line order and delivery. This helps folks who can’t - for whatever reason - get to the store, or get to a store frequently, to purchase fresh foods weekly instead of doing one mammoth shopping trip a month and having to buy mostly what will keep as opposed to what is healthiest.
WIC (which does stand for Women, Infants and Children) provides specific items for those eligible - here is information for New York . It may differ by state, but the limitation of 1% or skim milk is only for those over two - under two gets whole milk. Only unsweetened fruit juice is permitted. For WIC, it’s not a matter of limitations - only specific items are allowed. This is what the WIC checks look like in New York
While “personal responsibility” has a role, attempting to control this factor by limiting what SNAP benefits can be spent on is a very bad idea for multiple reasons:
The healthiest diet varies widely from individual to individual. People have different activity levels, different medical conditions, different allergies and insensitivites, different texture and other difficulties with particular foods.
Any given food needs to be considered in combination with the rest of the things that person is eating. An entirely healthy diet may well, and most of the time does, include some foods that would be unhealthy if they took up too much of the diet; and some things function differently eaten in combination than if eaten separately. Forbidding people from buying something to eat once a week or in small quantities once a day on the grounds that it would be bad for them if they ate it every day or at every meal may actually push them into a less healthy diet, in addition to being an entirely unreasonable restriction.
There is a hell of a lot that we’re still learning about nutrition. The restriction on full-fat milk, for instance, may well be based on what looked like sound scientific grounds years ago, but doesn’t look that way now, because we’ve learned more.
Different people have different access to various cooking techniques, due both to time available and to kitchen equipment available.
Any attempt to deal properly with all of those factors, in addition to the problem of putting restrictions on people just because they’re poor, would require that each person have an individual list of approved and unapproved foods, with many of them specifying quantities; and with all of them checked with some frequency against the results of new nutritional studies. That is so utterly impractical that it works much better to just allot a reasonable amount of funds and let the individual decide how to spend them. Yes, some people will screw up. So will some people who have lots of money. And most of those people, whether in need of SNAP or not, will screw up anyway.
I think there is room for some helpful nudges and the 10% bonus for vegetables sounds very reasonable. I am not in favour of sticks or preachy moralism, and agree people should be free to buy most things. But I think this also applies to dairy.
FWIW, Lustig claims both those on SNAP and those who are not spend 9% of their money on sugared soda. Though not ideal, it is often wrong to pick on the marginalized.
Human nutrition is both surprisingly complex and surprisingly simple.
We know that eating a variety of foods prepared from basic ingredients and/or minimally processed is usually sufficient to maintain adequate nutrition.
We also know that evolution has programmed us to seek sugar and fat, but did not evolve any ceiling to those cravings. That, combined with our current industrial agriculture and knowledge means that there is an abundance of highly processed food that hits our reward centers hard.
On top of that, there can be obstacles to preparing food from scratch I think are all too frequently dismissed out of hand, as well as times and places pre-prepared food is entirely appropriate.
While I am a proponent of SNAP, it’s my opinion that the rules should be the opposite of what that are now, i.e. all food items are ineligible with the exception of a few staples, such as fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, milk, poultry, rice, beans, potatoes, bread, eggs, etc. I think this would cut down on fraud and improve nutrition.
It would ENORMOUSLY increase the costs of the program. As others have pointed out, fraud with SNAP is proportionally very low for a government program (Note that is not a proposal to ignore fraud, just that it’s not as big a problem as some believe). WIC is a program that does exactly what you propose and it is much more costly per participant, much more time-consuming (which costs money) at point of sale, and there are problems these days with supply chain issues. The increased length of time it takes to process transactions will also impact the businesses participating in the program.
There’s a point at which it costs more to go after fraud than you gain in the money saved from fraud.
There is also a point where too much oversight/administrative burden likewise erodes the benefits actually going to the needy.
SNAP serves two purposes: helping to maintain prices on food products which helps keep food producers in business and feeding needy people, both of which are to the benefit of our nation and society. The purpose is not to employ government bureaucrats to administer a needlessly complex program (except to the extent necessary to make it function at all).
I’m personally much more in favor of incentives such as the 10% discount of fresh fruit and vegetables. Perhaps we could extend that to a 10% discount for staples/raw ingredients across the board. The benefit could be two-fold: better nutrition for SNAP recipients as their benefits extend further and they are incentivized to make better choices, and an increased amount of such basic ingredients/foods on the shelves might lead to non-SNAP recipients also purchasing them more frequently as they will be more common and available. A win-win.
WIC food packages are specified by federal regulations and vary by age of infants or children and pregnancy/breastfeeding status of women. There’s a summary table of the packages for women and children here. As people have said, there’s some flexibility to make certain substitutions, such as cheese, yogurt, soy-based beverage, or tofu instead of milk.
While SNAP dollars can be spent on pretty much any food intended for home consumption, the WIC food package is intended to provide specific dietary components that are often lacking in the general population of women, infants, and children. USDA uses the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to design the food packages. This is where the decision about skim/lowfat milk comes from.
So I should be able to buy white bread, but not sardines or frozen/canned vegetables? That would make my nutrition much worse, not better.
What about the people with no kitchens? They get to eat raw rice? – raw dry beans are not only indigestible, they’re toxic.
It won’t cut down on fraud, it’ll increase fraud, because people will be trying to trade off their benefits for something they can actually eat. While trying to explain to their six-year-old why they can never, ever have a birthday cake.
On that note, in California you can spend SNAP (Or “Cal Fresh” – that’s what California calls their SNAP program) benefits at the farmers market. You swipe your benefit card at the information booth and receive some paper vouchers which you can use to buy food from the vendors at the market. Although with more and more vendors accepting cards, I’m not sure if they can accept SNAP benefits directly that way, or if they still have to use the vouchers. And I’m not sure if this is just a California thing or if other states do that, too.
New York has something similar; but the problem, for our market, is that “information booth.” We don’t have one. We don’t have a hired manager whose job it is to deal with such things. We have, currently, three co-managers (I’m one of them) all of whom have their own vendor booths to run, two of whom run those booths alone and the third of whom comes when she’s well enough and when her daughter (who also runs a separate booth, but it’s right next to her) is able to come with her to help.
None of us is willing to add dealing with the SNAP coupon setup while at market – and it would have to be all three of us, because the reason there’s three of us is because none of us can guarantee to be at every market; but the chances that none of the three of us will be at a given market are quite small. (In case of a disagreement among managers who are both/all there at once, there’s an order set up for who makes the decision pending appeal process if somebody appeals; but that’s a fairly unlikely thing to happen, hasn’t occured so far in the three years of this setup.)
Some of our vendors are Old-Order Mennonite and don’t deal with cards at all. Some of us just don’t want to pay the fees to be able to accept cards, when in practice at this market almost nobody tries to use them (and there’s an ATM adjacent to the market); and//or are unwilling to deal with the assorted hassles of being individually signed up for SNAP (as I said, if they decide you did something wrong, even by accident – and that would be easy to do, the rules are set up for supermarkets, not for vendors at a market who may have customers while they’re trying to finish setting up and who probably don’t have checkout lines set up at all the way supermarkets do) – the program can yank money out of your bank account without notice. I don’t suppose that will make Tops bounce checks, but it could certainly cause that to happen to me.
We do have a couple of vendors who do take credit cards; mostly crafts people who have nothing eligible for SNAP, but we have a new meat vendor who said they’re trying to get set up to take SNAP at their home store and I think would then also be able to take it at market. I strongly encouraged this.
I really wish they’d put more money into the FMNP program. That’s much easier for farmers to deal with, and I can generally get everybody to sign up for that.