Using SNAP to Address Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Using SNAP to Address Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Author: Mathew Swinburne

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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The United States Department of Agriculture's most recent food insecurity data indicated that 37.2 million Americans were food insecure, meaning they did not have access to enough food to lead happy and healthy lives. Food insecurity is linked to a plethora of health issues including diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, asthma, poor mental health, birth defects, and impaired cognitive development in children. Like many public health challenges, there are severe racial disparities. White Americans experience food insecurity at a rate of 8.1%, while Black Americans and Latinx Americans experience it at rates of 21.2% and 16.2%, respectively. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the U.S. economy with over 44 million Americans filing for unemployment by mid-June 2020. This economic devastation is expected to force an additional 17.1 million Americans into food insecurity. Federal and state governments are adapting key food security programs and implementing new interventions to meet these challenges. This Chapter will examine how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation's largest nutrition program, is being leveraged during the pandemic. While key adaptations are being made to increase the effectiveness of these programs, additional measures are needed to protect vulnerable Americans during the pandemic. This Chapter's recommendations include, but are not limited to: increasing the maximum SNAP allotment; withdrawing or repealing regulations that limit access to SNAP; repealing the national ban that prohibits individuals with drug felonies from accessing SNAP; making online SNAP utilization available in all states; and providing for the delivery of online SNAP orders with no additional cost to the beneficiary.This paper was prepared as part of Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19, a comprehensive report published by Public Health Law Watch in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association.

Does SNAP Decrease Food Insecurity?
Does SNAP Decrease Food Insecurity?

Author: Mark Nord

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 23

ISBN-13: 1437925103

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Self-selection by more food-needy households into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the Food Stamp Program) makes it difficult to observe positive effects of the program in survey data. This study investigates self-selection and ameliorative program effects by examining households¿ food security month by month for several months prior to initial receipt of SNAP benefits and for several months after joining the program. Food security is observed to deteriorate in the 6 months prior to beginning to receive SNAP benefits and to improve shortly after. The results clearly demonstrate the self-selection by households into SNAP at a time when they are more severely food insecure. Charts and tables.

Examining Snap Waivers as the USDA's Response to Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Crisis
Examining Snap Waivers as the USDA's Response to Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Crisis

Author: Brittany Marie Bard

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13:

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This project examined the USDA’s response to food insecurity during the COVID-19 crisis. In the United States each year, 12% of the population faces food insecurity. Due to the pandemic, about 45% of families with children are currently facing hunger. Congress passed The Families First Coronavirus Act (FFCRA), which required that USDA develop waivers to increase access for SNAP and other food relief programs that states have the option to implement. SNAP is the most crucial nutritional relief program, costing 68 billion per year. This project examined these waivers based on website reporting from the USDA, with a focus on a few specific waivers such as Emergency Allotments for Current SNAP Households. It compared variations in uptake by states with reference to poverty rates and current unemployment (as proxies for current food insecurity). The finding was a staggered adoption of the waivers on a state by state basis and not all states adopted all waivers. The results were shown with an infographic map that illustrates the variation in unemployment and food scarcity. During this time of crisis, food insecurity is a vital public health issue because it has affected a disproportionate amount of vulnerable low-income populations. It was essential to see how the government expanded access to food through SNAP.

Feeding the Crisis
Feeding the Crisis

Author: Maggie Dickinson

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0520307674

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The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is one of the most controversial forms of social welfare in the United States. Although it’s commonly believed that such federal programs have been cut back since the 1980s, Maggie Dickinson charts the dramatic expansion and reformulation of the food safety net in the twenty-first century. Today, receiving SNAP benefits is often tied to work requirements, which essentially subsidizes low-wage jobs. Excluded populations—such as the unemployed, informally employed workers, and undocumented immigrants—must rely on charity to survive. Feeding the Crisis tells the story of eight families as they navigate the terrain of an expanding network of food assistance programs in which care and abandonment work hand in hand to regulate people on the social and economic margins. Amid calls at the federal level to expand work requirements for food assistance, Dickinson shows us how such ideas are bad policy that fail to adequately address hunger in America. Feeding the Crisis brings the voices of food-insecure families into national debates about welfare policy, offering fresh insights into how we can establish a right to food in the United States.

Food Insecurity on Campus
Food Insecurity on Campus

Author: Katharine M. Broton

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1421437724

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Crutchfield, James Dubick, Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Jordan Herrera, Nicole Hindes, Russell Lowery-Hart, Jennifer J. Maguire, Michael Rosen, Sabrina Sanders, Rachel Sumekh

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0309263476

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For many Americans who live at or below the poverty threshold, access to healthy foods at a reasonable price is a challenge that often places a strain on already limited resources and may compel them to make food choices that are contrary to current nutritional guidance. To help alleviate this problem, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers a number of nutrition assistance programs designed to improve access to healthy foods for low-income individuals and households. The largest of these programs is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called the Food Stamp Program, which today serves more than 46 million Americans with a program cost in excess of $75 billion annually. The goals of SNAP include raising the level of nutrition among low-income households and maintaining adequate levels of nutrition by increasing the food purchasing power of low-income families. In response to questions about whether there are different ways to define the adequacy of SNAP allotments consistent with the program goals of improving food security and access to a healthy diet, USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to conduct a study to examine the feasibility of defining the adequacy of SNAP allotments, specifically: the feasibility of establishing an objective, evidence-based, science-driven definition of the adequacy of SNAP allotments consistent with the program goals of improving food security and access to a healthy diet, as well as other relevant dimensions of adequacy; and data and analyses needed to support an evidence-based assessment of the adequacy of SNAP allotments. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Examining the Evidence to Define Benefit Adequacy reviews the current evidence, including the peer-reviewed published literature and peer-reviewed government reports. Although not given equal weight with peer-reviewed publications, some non-peer-reviewed publications from nongovernmental organizations and stakeholder groups also were considered because they provided additional insight into the behavioral aspects of participation in nutrition assistance programs. In addition to its evidence review, the committee held a data gathering workshop that tapped a range of expertise relevant to its task.

Big Hunger
Big Hunger

Author: Andrew Fisher

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-04-13

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0262535165

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How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

Food Insecurity and Family Well-Being During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Daily Surveys of Families in Rural Pennsylvania
Food Insecurity and Family Well-Being During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Daily Surveys of Families in Rural Pennsylvania

Author: Samantha Steimle

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13:

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This paper explores patterns of economic and psychological hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic in a predominantly Latinx sample of low-income parents and their elementary school-aged children in rural Pennsylvania (N = 272). These families participated in an evaluation of a local, school-based food assistance program, the Power Packs Project (PPP), wherein parents reported their levels of food insecurity and parent and child well-being from January to May 2020 via daily text-message surveys. Longitudinal, mixed effects models revealed that food insecurity, parent depression and irritability, and child sadness and misbehavior all significantly increased after COVID-19-related school closures, while negative parenting behaviors were unchanged. In the months afterwards, families only experienced decreases in food insecurity and parent depression. Food insecurity decreased most for those who continued participating in the PPP but was also accompanied by greater increases in food insecurity on the day that schools closed. Similarly, SNAP participation was associated with spikes across more food insecurity measures when schools closed compared to those who did not participate in SNAP but also uniquely predicted declines in child food insecurity. Lastly, being food insecure prior to the start of the pandemic predicted greater increases in food insecurity on the day that schools closed but also appeared to facilitate families’ recovery upon the most severe measures of food insecurity.

Food Security Improved Following the 2009 ARRA Increase in SNAP Benefits
Food Security Improved Following the 2009 ARRA Increase in SNAP Benefits

Author: Mark Nord

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2011-08

Total Pages: 2

ISBN-13: 1437985181

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The Amer. Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) increased benefit levels for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) and expanded SNAP eligibility for jobless adults without children. One goal of the program changes was to improve the food security of low-income households. The authors find that food expenditures by low-income households increased by about 5.4% and their food insecurity declined by 2.2% from 2008 to 2009. Food security did not improve for households with incomes somewhat above the SNAP eligibility range. Therefore, ARRA SNAP enhancements contributed substantially to improvements for low-income households. This is a print on demand report.