The young checker at the grocery store looked surprised as my food moved down the belt. I doubt he expected an order to start with seven pounds of butter.
You see, a couple of times a year my grocer places Land O Lakes butter on sale. A quirk in the pricing: the Extra Creamy Butter – normally priced a good bit above plebeian Land O Lakes – gets the same sale price. My seven pounds had August 2021 dating, so, I stocked-up.
That’s something I do often, buying extra when something we use is on-sale. Eventually, of course, the bundles of paper towels, jars of pasta sauce and the butter gets used.
Pouncing on bargains actually gets mentioned in the USDA methodology for their Food Plans, expecting even Thrifty Food Plan shoppers to stock-up when they can and utilize seasonal pricing on produce and such.
Except those shoppers can’t.
Remember, in Missouri my rule of 40 still applies…better than 40% of families struggle to get by on less than $40,000 per year. In such a home (especially with a couple of kids) the “extra” money to stock-up just doesn’t exist. As noted in media reports, a whole lot of our neighbors owe their utility companies, their landlords and fell way behind on car payments.
Here’s the good news.
Since the start of the pandemic the federal government increased the typical food stamp benefit. As I noted last week, the average benefit per person per meal this February ran about a dollar ahead of the ‘traditional’ SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] payment. That raised the average food stamp benefit from way, way below the Thrifty Food Plan level into the Low Cost Food Plan realm. In other words, for the first time in decades a family’s food stamp benefits actually provide most of what they need to spend to put healthy meals on the table.
This is not an accident. As noted in the April 5 edition of The New York Times, the Biden administration plans to keep using food stamps and other food assistance to reduce hunger and poverty. Alas, it took a pandemic to get the point across…
This crisis has revealed how fragile many Americans’ economic lives are and also the inequities of who is struggling the most.
Stacy Dean, now an official at USDA after years as an advocate on hunger issues NYT 4/5/21
Still, some insist on throwing flies into the ice cream: Republican group think remains that giving families food for their kids, like other “welfare programs,” causes harm. Yes, giving folks the ability to cook a meatloaf undercuts “work and marriage.”
What does that mean in Missouri?
Well, we need Missouri to do better. It remains too hard to sign-up, the Department of Social Services has too few trained staff to process paperwork, and, for some strange reason the typical Missouri benefit in this federal program always trails the national average. By my reckoning, 250,000 Missourians (think all of Springfield) who aren’t enrolled ought to now be getting SNAP.
And, even with those higher benefits, most every food stamp family still requires assistance from a food pantry. Larger benefits help but they don’t finish the job. Give often, give as much as you can.
Today was the last day for the sale circular at the grocery store. I stopped in for a couple of things – and four more pounds of extra creamy butter.
Glenn Koenen