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Economy

26 Lawmakers Live Off Food Stamps To Protest Republican Cuts

By Rebecca Leber on Jun 13, 2013 at 11:15 am

Twenty-six members of Congress will live off of a food stamp budget this week to draw attention to House Republicans cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The program’s eligibility requirements already leave out 50 million food insecure households, but another 2 million Americans would lose access to food stamps in the proposed changes for the Farm Bill.

The SNAP challenge means that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and 25 participating members must try to live off of under $4.50 per day for food and drink.

Lee detailed the tough decisions she made grocery shopping — butter and milk were outside her budget and a McDonalds value menu item will count as her midweek break — in a blog post. “What I’m thinking about most during this trip is that I’m shopping only for myself,” she wrote, comparing the difficult decisions now to when she needed public assistance as a single mother. “When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind.” Many Americans receiving SNAP benefits are under 18 years old and live in working households.

On Wednesday, the participating Democrats chronicled their trips to the grocery store, where they poured over coupons and attempted to buy a week’s worth of food for about $30:

Other officials have attempted to live off of food stamps for short periods of time. Newark Mayor Cory Booker took the challenge earlier this year. When Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton participated in the challenge, he found he was “tired” and it was “hard to focus” by day four. “If I were doing this with no end in sight, I probably wouldn’t be so pleasant,” he wrote. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who recently participated in the SNAP challenge, found “I’m hungry for five days…I lost six pounds in four days.”

Compare these reactions to the arguments made by conservatives, who pan food stamps as government dependency. “Unfortunately, the rapid growth of this program has only increased dependency on government and added to our federal deficit,” 25 Republican members wrote in a letter Tuesday. Last Thanksgiving, a Fox News host joked she would look “fabulous” on a food stamp diet.

Economy

REPORT: Child Hunger Is Concentrated In Rural America

By Alan Pyke on Jun 10, 2013 at 5:00 pm

Over one in five American children lack steady access to sufficient food, and over 50 million total Americans are food insecure. Those figures come from Map the Meal Gap, an annual report from the anti-hunger charity Feeding America that tracks food security down to the county level.

Feeding America’s interactive map is based on national data from 2011 and focuses on the rates of food insecurity rather than the raw numbers. The country’s largest cities have the largest raw numbers of food-insecure children, but children in rural communities are most likely to be food insecure. Forty-three percent of America’s counties are rural, but they make up almost two-thirds of counties with high rates of child food insecurity.

Three in ten children in New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. face food insecurity, as do a quarter or more of children in Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Nevada, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Zavala County, Texas has the highest rate of child food insecurity: 46 percent. Click the map to access the interactive graphic on FeedingAmerica.org:

While redistricting prevented Feeding America from calculating the figures by congressional district as they have in past reports, the county-level results should still be helpful as Congress debates billions of dollars in cuts to food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP). The entirety of the Senate-proposed cuts come from restricting states’ use of simplified eligibility criteria for SNAP. The House bill goes even further, eliminating two common eligibility expansion programs that allow states to provide SNAP benefits to those earning more than 130 percent of the poverty line, which is the normal cutoff for SNAP.

But Map the Meal Gap offers some evidence that the expanded SNAP eligibility some states provide is needed. Forty-five percent of food-insecure Americans earn more than the SNAP threshold, and 29 percent earn more than 185 percent of the poverty line.

Economy

50 Million Americans Are Going Hungry As Congress Considers Gutting Food Stamps

By Aviva Shen on May 29, 2013 at 4:00 pm

(Credit: National Archives)

As Congress debates exactly how many billions of dollars to cut from the government’s main food assistance program for low-income Americans, a new report finds that the existing safety net has failed millions of people who must constantly worry about how to feed themselves and their families.

According to the International Human Rights Clinic of NYU Law School, the four biggest food assistance programs fall short for as many as 50 million food insecure households. Eligibility requirements are already so strict that one in four households classified as food insecure were still considered too high-income to receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Even families considered poor enough for food aid only get a pittance that runs out quickly; for instance, the maximum benefit for a family of four is $668 a month, or a little under $2 per meal for each family member.

To demonstrate the impossibility of surviving on food stamps, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently spent a week eating on $4.80 a day, mainly consuming ramen noodles, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a banana. “I’m hungry for five days…I lost six pounds in four days,” Murphy said upon concluding the experiment. He also realized that nutritious food and produce was far, far out of reach for people living on SNAP benefits. Indeed, obesity and related diseases are common among SNAP recipients who simply can’t afford nutritious food.

As a result, many families can no longer rely on these benefits. Instead, they increasingly have no choice but to turn to emergency food pantries run by charities. In the wake of the financial crisis, 37 million people relied on these emergency food providers — a 46 percent increase from 2005. These charities, many of which took devastating funding hits in the recession, are struggling to accommodate the influx of needy people who are supposed to be covered by government programs. As for the recipients themselves, the stigma against hungry people has made many people feel humiliated to turn to these programs.

Republicans looking to cut SNAP and other safety net programs have painted recipients as perpetually unemployed people who have become “dependent” on the government because it’s easier than getting a job. In fact, more than 80 percent of families receiving SNAP include a working adult. Despite the stigma, the reality is that the many low-income or part-time jobs available to these Americans simply do not pay enough to sustain a family’s survival. Most of the remainder of SNAP recipients are disabled or elderly and cannot work.

One woman interviewed for the report is struggling to feed her daughters because her medical treatment has left her unable to work:

My food stamps are depleted after maybe two and a half weeks. That’s when our cupboards become bare and there isn’t anything left in the deep freezer. I start to worry about where our next meal is coming from. The first thing my daughters do when they come home from school is look in the refrigerator and say, ‘Well, Mom, we don’t have this, we don’t have that.’ I hear those words and I feel like I’m not providing for my children. Where I live, we are only allowed to go to the food pantries every three months. I get vegetables and bread there, but not meat. Not having meat is difficult for my girls. I make sure they always have something to eat—many times it’s canned goods.

Though the recession spiked SNAP enrollment by 76 percent, the program is still facing even steeper budget cuts that would take food aid away from more than 12 million people. Automatic sequestration cuts have devastated other nutrition programs, like Meals on Wheels for disabled seniors and the Women, Infants, and Children aid program (WIC) to provide pregnant women and their children with essential nutrients for proper development.

Economy

Local Charities Speak Out On GOP’s Effort To Slash Food Stamps

By Alan Pyke on May 28, 2013 at 12:00 pm

One of New Jersey’s largest food banks is eyeing congressional efforts to cut two million Americans from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) with concern. While proponents of the cuts often argue that food banks and other charitable food distribution operations will step into the breach as government shrinks its aid to hungry Americans, officials at the Community FoodBank of New Jersey say that’s not how the safety net works.

“You need food pantries, and you need SNAP, and you need school lunch programs. When you cut one, you’re cutting the whole net,” Community FoodBank’s Diane Riley told NJ.com. The interconnectedness of anti-hunger programs means that SNAP cuts will knock over 200,000 low-income schoolchildren off of the free lunch program. And charities like Community FoodBank, which already serves over 900,000 New Jersey residents per year through a network of partner organizations around the state, are “already struggling to keep up with the demand” even with SNAP funding at its current level.

Local food charities in Ohio and Colorado echoed Riley’s point. Amy Pezzani, Executive Director of Colorado’s Food Bank for Larimer County, said the House bill “would add 4 million meals to the table of each of the 200 or so local food banks in the Feeding America network every year,” leaving individual county food banks to scrounge up a further $1 million each. That money isn’t there, according to charity leaders. Writing at TheGrio.com last week, Feeding America CEO Bob Aiken explained that the same recession that spiked demand at food banks also took a bite out of the charitable giving on which they depend: “34 percent of Americans admit cutting back on donations” between 2006-2010.

Yet House Republicans intend to forge ahead with over $20 billion in cuts to the program, on top of a significant benefits cut already scheduled for November.

The cuts, contained in the House’s draft of the Farm Bill, would only be the latest example of this congress balancing the budget on the backs of the neediest. From Meals on Wheels programs to disadvantaged schools reliant on federal funds to public defenders for accused criminals unable to afford attorneys, the ongoing cuts due to sequestration are falling hardest on the poor.

Climate Progress

Syria Today Is A Preview Of Memorial Day, 2030

By Joe Romm on May 27, 2013 at 11:17 am

Climate Wars by Gwynne DyerThe worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy — over the next few decades — will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and extreme weather and food insecurity: Hell and High Water.

But all of the impacts occurring at once will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“). This means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time. Heck, the deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past three years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

In November 2011, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

Last week, Tom Friedman described how warming-worsened drought has exacerbated political instability even now in Syria. His must-read piece “Without Water, Revolution” explains:

THIS Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers — Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies — all at a time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary of getting involved.

I came here to write my column and work on a film for the Showtime series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” about the “Jafaf,” or drought, one of the key drivers of the Syrian war. In an age of climate change, we’re likely to see many more such conflicts.

Warming-worsened drought is causing problems all around the Mediterranean:

NOAA concluded in 2011 that “human-caused climate change [is now] a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.” Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971-2010 than the comparison period of 1902-2010.  [Click to enlarge.]

But, obviously, the poorer a country is — and the worse it is governed — the more warming-worsened drought is likely to drive instability:

Read more

Economy

Senator Undertakes $3-Per-Day Food Stamp Challenge As Congress Readies Cuts

By Alan Pyke on May 20, 2013 at 3:45 pm

As the farm bill approved by the Agriculture Committee last week reaches the Senate floor Monday afternoon, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) will be a few hours into an experiment: eating for a week on the meager food budget afford by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Murphy announced on Twitter that he would take the SNAP Challenge, which is the brainchild of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

That means Murphy will be eating on a few dollars per day, as his colleagues debate a measure that would cut $4 billion from the SNAP budget over the next decade. Murphy is using the $3 per day allowance FRAC and allies recommended in 2007 guidelines for lawmakers interested in the challenge, although government data shows the program averaged about $4.40/day nationwide in fiscal year 2012.

But if anything, the SNAP Challenge understates the hardships actual SNAP recipients face, both today and in the near future.

Those Americans must make it a full month on SNAP, and statistics show that about 80 percent of a given recipient’s monthly allotment gets spent in the first two weeks of the month:

Additionally, there is already a major cut scheduled for fall of 2013:

It’s harder to quantify another facet of life on SNAP that Murphy’s attempt to raise awareness of the program won’t require him to face: social stigma. The senator won’t have to worry about a cashier loudly asking him to run his Electronic Benefits Transfer card again while other customers wait behind him. He probably won’t experience the judgment of peers described here by Tiffani Stacy of Columbus, TX.

Murphy’s experience of life on SNAP, however muted, ought to help draw attention to the program’s inability to absorb the further cuts Congress has proposed.

Justice

Seven Outlandish Things The Heritage Foundation’s Remaining Employees Believe

By Ian Millhiser on May 13, 2013 at 9:00 am

(Credit: AP)

Late in the day Friday, the Heritage Foundation announced that Jason Richwine, the co-author of their widely criticized immigration report, was no longer employed by the conservative think tank. Shortly after the immigration report was released, the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews reported that Richwine’s PhD dissertation claimed that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.”

Heritage’s decision to hire Richwine was not a momentary lapse in judgement that was quickly rectified. To the contrary, Richwine was employed by the Heritage foundation for more than three years before reports of his quasi-eugenic views forced him to leave. As it turns out, this is not an isolated incident. Although evidence has not yet emerged suggesting that Richwine’s racist views are common among Heritage employees, here are seven examples of radical, offensive or just downright weird beliefs held by current Heritage staffers:

  • Children of undocumented immigrants should be allowed to starve. When news of Richwine’s racist dissertation broke, Heritage initially attempted to rehabilitate its immigration report by claiming that Richwine’s co-author, Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, took the lead in designing the study’s methodology and Richwine merely “provided quantitative support to lead author Robert Rector.” Rector, however, is hardly a picture of moderation. Among other things, Rector co-authored a 2012 report arguing that we should “prohibit food stamp payments to illegal immigrant families.” Notably, because all nearly all children born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, one impact of Rector’s proposal would be starving American children in order to spite their parents.
  • Gay people and sexually active unmarried women should be banned from teaching. In 2010, Heritage President Jim DeMint told a rally at a South Carolina church that “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.”
  • The Voting Rights Act is a “racial entitlement.” Defending Justice Scalia’s statement that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky endorses Scalia’s view and writes that “the only thing certain about talking honestly about the current benefits and burdens of Section 5 (or voting against its renewal) is the very type of venomous attacks and false claims of racism and Jim Crow to which Scalia has been subjected.” Spakovsky’s disregard for the Voting Rights Act is not surprising, as he is one of the nation’s top proponents of voter suppression laws. Indeed, a panel of Virginia judges recently refused to reappoint Spakovsky to an election board in Fairfax, Virginia in the wake of allegations that he used his seat on the board to crusade against voting rights.
  • Todd Akin can save America from an “economic abyss.” At a time when former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) found himself friendless due to his “legitimate rape” comment, DeMint tried to throw Akin a lifeline in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). In a joint statement with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), DeMint said that they “support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us so we can save our country from fiscal collapse.” As a bonus, Heritage published a column by Akin in 2011 where the former congressman claimed that “the constitutionality of much entitlement spending is debatable.”
  • Poor people aren’t really poor if they own refrigerators. In 2011, Rector and Heritage Policy Analyst Rachel Sheffield published a report arguing that “Congress should reorient the massive welfare state to promote self-sufficient prosperity rather than expanded dependence” in part because most impoverished households own appliances and do not send their kids to bed hungry. Among the report’s claims are that nearly all poor people have “kitchens equipped with an oven, stove, and refrigerator,” that “[n]early three-fourths have a car or truck” and that “70 percent have a VCR.” Of course, as Matt Yglesias points out, many of the common household amenities Rector and Sheffield dismiss as luxuries are actually signs of thrift — “[b]uying food at the grocery store and saving it thanks to the miracles of modern refrigeration is sound household budgeting.” Similarly, poor people in parts of the country without adequate public transportation would find it very difficult to hold a job if they did not have a car or truck. As Melissa Boteach and Donna Cooper explain, a particularly well-equipped poor household could sell all of their household appliances and electronics and still only wind up with two and a half months rent.
  • Accused terrorists shouldn’t have legal representation and their lawyers should be punished. According to at least one former Bush Administration official, the “vast majority” of the 742 original Guantanamo Bay detainees were innocent of terrorism, which only emphasizes the importance of providing these detainees with due process and adequate legal representation. Yet, in a 2007 radio interview, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles “Cully” Stimson made a thinly veiled attempt to punish lawyers who represent Gitmo detainees by encouraging their law firms’ corporate clients to drop them. Stimson listed the names of over a dozen firms with attorneys representing detainees, and then said “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” Within a month, Stimson resigned from the Bush Administration (he also apologized for his comments and claimed they did not reflect his “core beliefs”). Yet, while Stimson’s comments were too disgraceful for him to remain in Bush’s Defense Department, they were not too disgraceful for the Heritage Foundation. Stimson is now a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage.
  • A J.J. Abrams TV show should guide America’s defense policy. The plot of J.J. Abrams’ show “Revolution” focuses around a new weapon technology that disables electronic devices and returns the world to the pre-industrial era. Most TV viewers understand that this show is science fiction. Heritage thinks it is a warning about the future. According to Heritage, the future world depicted in this show, “is not as unlikely as it might appear.” Heritage national security Research Fellow Baker Spring warns that America’s enemies could detonate “a nuclear weapon at a high altitude over the earth” triggering an “electromagnetic pulse” (EMP) that would disable American technology. Another Heritage paper calls for a “National EMP Awareness Day.” In reality, of course, the idea of an EMP attack belongs in science fiction. Among other things, if someone who wished us harm possessed both a nuclear warhead and the technology required to detonate such a weapon in US airspace, there are plenty of other much more destructive things they could do — such as setting off the nuke in the middle of Manhattan.

Economy

Republican Lawmaker Plans Steep Cuts To Food Stamps

By Bryce Covert on Apr 29, 2013 at 3:30 pm

The House is about to begin debating this year’s farm bill, as House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) has scheduled a mark up on May 15. Ahead of the negotiations, Lucas has already indicated that he is planning steep cuts in spending, mostly focused on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, reports Capital Press:

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., told Capital Press on April 26 that he is planning a farm bill that will cut $38 billion in spending over 10 years, with $20 billion coming from the food stamps account and $18 billion from the rest of the bill.

Those cuts would be $3 billion more than those included in a farm bill passed by the committee last year.

In fact, the bill passed last year by the committee included $16.5 billion in cuts to SNAP, which was predicted to end benefits for 2 to 3 million people. Lucas’s proposal would cut SNAP even more severely.

Unlike many other social safety net programs, SNAP easily expands and contracts in response to increased need, and therefore has been very responsive to the economic downturn. It is also a crucial tool in fighting poverty: In 2011, the program kept roughly 4.7 million people out of poverty, including 2.1 million children, and cut the number of children living in extreme poverty in half. Food stamps also lead to better health and economic outcomes for beneficiaries. They can reduce food insecurity among high-risk children by 20 percent and improve their health by 35 percent.

Yet the benefits are already meager. The average recipient receives about $133 a month, or about $1.48 a meal. Rather than looking for cuts in the food stamp program, perhaps lawmakers could instead focus on crop subsidies that fuel the junk food industry.

Health

Why Montana’s Proposal To Legalize Eating Roadkill May Not Be As Crazy As You Think

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 21, 2013 at 4:50 pm

On Wednesday, Montana’s state Senate advanced legislation that “would allow people to salvage roadkill for food,” arguing that preventing the practice would mean throwing away a perfectly acceptable nutritional source. As bill supporter Sen. Larry Jent (D) put it, “It really is a sin to waste good meat.” But setting aside the inevitable jokes over the proposed “finders, eaters” law, the debate surrounding the measure’s public health implications provides a lens into America’s food safety regulatory scheme — and it’s more complicated than you might think.

Montana is hardly the first state to propose something like this. In fact, there are already roadkill-salvaging laws on the books in at least seven states — including Alaska, Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky, and West Virginia — with varying degrees of regulatory requirements. Most of these laws either require the would-be roadkill consumer to carry a permit that allows them to salvage the kill, or report the salvaging to law enforcement and state wildlife departments. While there are guidelines for how to safely consume the “smooshed meat” — for instance, almost all such laws are limited to run-over game such as elk and deer, which should be “bled, gutted, and quartered” as quickly as possible to cool off the carcass and prevent infections — there isn’t really an enforcement mechanism for them, so the consumer takes on some individual risk.

However, whether or not that risk is greater than the risk of eating mass-produced meats is an open question. Animal protection groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have actually advocated for loosening roadkill standards, claiming that “[e]ating roadkill is healthier for the consumer than meat laden with antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants, as most meat is today.” The historical data — and recent events — shows that there is something to that argument. American-produced meat tends to exceed acceptable levels of contamination by most countries’ standards, and the consolidation of meat resources by mammoth corporate distributors like Cargill Beef makes it so that just one contaminated batch necessitates nationwide recalls of tens of thousands of pounds of product. Many public health advocates also argue that food regulators are woefully impotent to hold the meat industry accountable for its shortcomings in the face of lax regulatory enforcement and “ag gag laws” that silence whistleblowers who expose facilities violating food safety standards.

And the argument that roadkill-salvaging laws help prevent the waste of good meat actually could be an important point for low-income communities. Some of this type of legislation is intended to address food insecurity in secluded communities. For instance, Alaska’s caribou- and bear-salvaging provisions are meant to help churches and soup kitchens distribute food to the homeless and the poor in a state where access to roads and super markets isn’t always easy to come by. Montana’s proposed law has similar intentions.

Some Montana legislators have raised concerns over law enforcement’s capacity to evaluate whether or not roadkill is safe for consumption, and the ambiguous liability laws governing shelters and food banks that might distribute such meats. “Despite its good intention, it doesn’t pass the smell test for me,” said state Sen. Kendall Van Dyk (D). But considering America’s lackluster record on meat safety and the widespread — and relatively safe — U.S. culture of hunting big game for personal consumption, those concerns might very well be overstated.

Health

What South Africa’s Successful Push To Incentivize Healthy Eating Could Teach The U.S.

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 21, 2013 at 11:50 am

On Tuesday, the RAND Corporation published the results of a preliminary study on South Africa’s HealthyFood initiative, a benefit program sponsored through the nation’s largest private insurance company. The program provides some 260,000 South African households with up to a 25 percent rebate on healthy food purchases — “cash for carrots,” if you will — and the encouraging numbers suggest that similar initiatives could work right here in America.

While the study does suffer from some methodological snags — the biggest being that households’ eating habits were self-reported rather than observed — its authors conclude that the right level of rebates can be a strong catalyst for healthier eating habits. For instance, the survey of 350,000 HealthyFood participants and nonparticipants found that “a 10% and 25% discount on healthy food purchases is associated with an increase in daily fruits and vegetables consumption by 0.38 (95% CI: 0.37 – 0.39) and 0.64 (95% CI: 0.62 – 0.65) servings, respectively,” and that rebate participants were more likely to eat three or more servings of wholegrain foods daily while being less likely to eat foods high in sugar, salt, fried foods, processed meats, and fast food.

Admittedly, the report does not find that the healthier eating habits significantly reduced overweight rates or participants’ average BMIs. However, it does see a statistically significant correlation between higher discount rates and lower obesity, suggesting that the right amount of financial motivation can spur enough eating habit changes to make a dent in obesity rates on the macro level.

So could a similar program work in the U.S. — particularly for low-income Americans who struggle with food insecurity, and often have to resort to high-fat and high-calorie diets to get more nutritional “bang-for-the-buck”? There’s not a whole lot of data on the matter yet. But that will soon change, as a 2011 pilot program under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the “Healthy Incentives Pilot” — mimics the HealthyFood initiative, offering inflated discounts of up to 30 percent cash back on healthy food purchases, and its results will be published later this year. If the findings track South Africa’s, then it could be a game changer for low-income communities often beset by unhealthy food habits and high obesity rates. And incentivizing healthy eating with rebates could be a more effective policy than more blunt and restrictive initiatives, like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s (R) controversial push to limit food stamp purchases to healthy items.

Still, the funding element is key, as the study found that higher rebate levels were required to change the eating habits of people who were entrenched in subpar diets. The South African program offers monthly discounts of up to $500 for a family and $250 for individuals — significantly higher than the average monthly SNAP allotment, which is supposed to be a supplemental benefit (although it doesn’t actually work that way in reality). But South Africa’s example suggests that, given sufficient financial backing, cash for carrots could be a worthwhile undertaking throughout America.

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