Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program

What strategies do countries use to provide food assistance to people in need? In Why SNAP Works, political scientist Christopher Bosso offers a compelling and readable history of one of the United States’ main strategies to provide agricultural support and large-scale food assistance for almost a hundred years: the food stamp program. While contributing to the literature on food studies and food assistance, Bosso excavates the efforts by leaders and policymakers to address a central tension in American agriculture—the need to ensure farmers and food producers receive fair prices for their products while preventing dramatically rising prices, and to do both of those things while providing food to those who can't afford to buy it. Bosso argues that the food assistance effort now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a distinctly American initiative to resolve this multivalent challenge.As Bosso explains, SNAP is a vital income support and anti-poverty program, but these are not the program's aims. Rather, SNAP emerged from political discussions linking government support for agricultural production with nutrition assistance to large segments of the American population. SNAP is not the only form of nutrition assistance offered by the federal government, which also sponsors more targeted programs, including the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; school breakfast and lunch programs; food assistance for Americans aged sixty and over; and the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations program. Yet both by the number of people served and its annual budget, SNAP is the largest program to support Americans who meet the USDA's definition of food insecurity (about 10.5 percent of American households before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic). Today, SNAP provides direct assistance in the form of an amount deposited on an electronic debit card that can be used to purchase food at not only participating retail outlets, including convenience stores, grocery stores, and large retailers, but also at farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture programs. Benefit levels vary based on individual and household circumstances. The total size of the program is not limited but is designed to respond to changes in income and employment.In Why SNAP Works, Bosso explores the history of SNAP through a series of chronological vignettes. Following an introductory chapter that lays out the book's origins and aims, the second chapter considers the original food stamp plan developed in the 1930s to support farmers, reduce surplus foods, shore up food retailers, and feed hungry Americans during the Great Depression. The chapter describes initial strategies to raise farm prices by killing animals and destroying surplus crops, which angered hungry Americans, while policies giving away food undercut food producers and retailers and threatened to deepen the economic crisis. After the food stamp program was implemented, Americans could buy orange stamps for domestic food at a dollar-for-dollar rate, and for every dollar of orange stamps purchased, they received fifty cents of blue stamps, which could be used to buy food declared as surplus. The program worked well and existed from 1939 until it was phased out in 1943 in response to economic recovery and wartime food conservation efforts.The book's third chapter examines postwar efforts to restore some form of nutrition assistance program for needy Americans, which resulted in Congress authorizing the USDA in 1959 to run food stamp pilot programs. However, President Eisenhower declined to start the programs. In chapter 4, Bosso relates how the 1959 authority provided President Kennedy with a pretext for addressing the want and hunger he discovered on this campaign travels during the 1960 presidential campaign and goes on to explore the coalition of farm-state Republicans and urban Democrats that emerged in the 1960s to support a farm bill linking farm and food assistance in a new USDA-run food stamp program. Chapter 5 describes the 1977 expansion of the welfare role of food stamps, which set up repeated conservative attempts in the following decades to eliminate or reduce food stamp benefits (renamed SNAP in 2008).The book's final chapter evaluates SNAP's effectiveness and addresses recent proposals to improve SNAP through calls to limit purchases to designated healthy foods or shift to direct income support. Bosso is skeptical of both proposals, arguing that SNAP has been effective because it links supporting farmers and food producers to assisting food-insecure Americans. Bosso asserts that it is this connection—and the political consensus it requires—that has allowed SNAP to withstand multiple efforts at reduction or elimination.