An Urban's Rural View

Note to Congressman Phil Roe: Your bill to ban the use of food stamps to buy "junk food" would ban a lot of healthful food as well. It's too sweeping to be practical and would impose needless hardship on food-stamp recipients.

Note to Congressman Roe's critics: He may be off on the details but his underlying point is a good one. It merits serious discussion, not knee-jerk derision.

Congressman Roe, a conservative Republican from Tennessee, says his Healthy Food Choices Act would give food-stamp recipients "more nutritious choices." The legislation would bring food-stamp purchasing standards in line with those for the Women, Infants and Children program.

Using WIC as the model comes naturally to a Congressman who spent 31 years practicing medicine before his election and delivered nearly 5,000 babies. "As a physician," he says, "I realize the importance of healthy eating, and as an obstetrician, I've seen how the WIC program helps empower families receiving assistance to use taxpayer dollars to purchase healthy, wholesome foods."

Fair enough, but then Roe goes on to make a more questionable assertion: "If these guidelines are good and healthy enough for women and children, then SNAP [food stamp] recipients should also benefit from adhering to the same standards."

Really? The WIC standards reflect the WIC program's aim: getting children's lives off to a healthy start by providing for the nutritional needs of low-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women and children under the age of five. So, for example, baby-food meat is on USDA's approved list for WIC (http://tiny.cc/…), but not meat for adults.

That may make sense for babies and toddlers, but what nutritional justification is there for denying meat to adults on food stamps? Do we really want to ban food stamp purchases of catsup, pickled vegetables and soups, all of which are on WIC's forbidden list? Why follow WIC in ruling out peanuts but allowing peanut butter?

Yet as open to questions like these as Congressman Roe's bill is, much of the critical response he has received is over the top. Exhibit A: A Washington Monthly blog headlined "Conservatives Go All Nanny-State-y on Food Stamps."

Please, everyone (and that includes the critics of USDA's new school-lunch nutrition standards), let's stop misusing the term nanny state. When the government tells you how to spend your money, you can argue it's going "all nanny-state-y" but not when it tells you how you may spend the taxpayers' money. You may be right in considering some of the conditions on government subsidies ill-advised, but it isn't Orwellian to impose conditions.

Other Roe critics complained that the food he'd limit food stamps to is unavailable or unaffordable. That seems, at the least, an overstatement. Somehow a lot of low-income mothers find a way to spend their WIC benefits.

A fairer criticism would be that Roe takes a good thought too far. The Congressman is on to something when he suggests food stamps should live up to their euphemistic name, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But that doesn't require SNAP to mimic WIC.

Roe's bill is, to be sure, a side skirmish to the main battle over food stamps, which will center on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's much-awaited plan to cut $40 billion in spending over ten years. Cantor would accomplish this by tightening eligibility requirements. How those who've met the requirements should be allowed to spend food stamps may not even get a vote this time around.

If and when it does, Congress should send Roe back to the drawing board to come up with something less drastic. The following are two ways he could make his plan more palatable.

Suggestion one: Rather than get down in the weeds analyzing each possible purchase's nutritional value, as WIC does, pick a simpler, easier target. Forbid food-stamp purchases of sodas and other empty-calorie sugary drinks. That would both improve the nutritional profile of the program and cut, by one estimate, a billion bucks a year out of it.

Suggestion two: Try the carrot, not the stick. Expand the experimental programs that enhance the value of food stamps when used to buy fruits and vegetables at farmers' markets.

Passionate food-stamp supporters will likely oppose any limitations and passionate food-stamp opponents will find these underwhelming. But if we're going to have a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -- and we should -- what's wrong with reasonable steps to make it more nutritious?

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