The Food Stamp Program

Chapter 8 describes and evaluates the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (food stamps). It demonstrates its serious shortcomings and interprets the program as an expression of mass values. The food stamp program in the United States remains as it always was: convoluted, inadequate, and frequently unfair, even after more than half a century of priority concern from a number of presidents, as well as congressional attention recorded in thousands of pages of panels, investigations, hearings, and reports. For all its wealth, it is not clear that the United States has ensured access for its citizens to “a nutritionally adequate low-cost diet.” Yet its design embodies the assumptions of policy romanticism unreasonably insisting on self-reliance.