A Look Into New York Times-Think On "Food Relief"

Several years ago I would make a practice about once every few weeks of ridiculing some New York Times article or other. More recently, as Pravda has increasingly abandoned any pretense of being a news organization in favor of pure political advocacy, I haven’t bothered. But every once in a while, it is worth looking at one of their pieces to get some insights into how the progressive brain works.

For today’s lesson, I select the article that appeared at the top right on the front page of the print edition on Monday April 5. (Top right of the front page would be the article that they designated as the most important “news” piece of the day.) The headline of this one is “Many Need Food, Energizing Push To Expand Relief.” The byline is Jason DeParle.

Have you heard of DeParle? He has been writing for the Times for several decades, since at least the late 1980s. His bio says that he “has written extensively” about “poverty and immigration.” Surely, if there is anybody who knows the basics about these subjects, it would be this guy. The bio also says that he has been “a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.” OK, it must be eating away at him that all his colleagues win the Pulitzers and he still doesn’t have his; but then too, they don’t nominate just anybody.

The subject of this article fits under the “poverty” category of DeParle’s beat, rather than immigration. It is a given that this article will be an exercise in political advocacy. That is not why we are looking at it. We are looking at it to try to understand this fundamental issue: Is DeParle, after covering “poverty” for the Times “extensively” for over 30 years, still completely ignorant about the subject? Or, alternatively, is he intentionally misrepresenting the facts in order to deceive the readership for his noble cause? I think it has to be the second, but honestly, I don’t fully know the answer. So I’ll have to let you be the judge.

Let’s start with the first sentence of the article:

With more than one in 10 households reporting that they lack enough to eat, the Biden administration is accelerating a vast campaign of hunger relief that will temporarily increase assistance by tens of billions of dollars and set the stage for what officials envision as lasting expansions of aid.

More than one in ten U.S. households report that they “lack enough to eat”? Really??? I follow the data on this subject very closely, and I have never seen such a thing, certainly nothing relating to the current time period. Have you? What could this guy possibly be talking about?

As is typical in these Pravda advocacy pieces, DeParle cites no source and gives no clue what he is talking about. Could he be referring to the Department of Agriculture’s (DOA) notoriously fraudulent “food insecurity” surveys? A quick check indicates that this has to be his authority. From the website of the DOA’s Economic Research Service:

In 2019, 89.5 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the year. The remaining 10.5 percent of households were food insecure at least some time during the year. . . .

That certainly fits with DeParle’s “more than one in ten.” Looking even a little deeper, we find that the DOA’s “food insecurity” statistic comes from the answer to this question on a survey: “We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

So here is the progression: The DOA asks people if they ever “worried,” even once in 12 months, about whether their food would run out before they got more money to buy more. The DOA then reports anybody who says they ever “worried” about that subject even once in a year as being “food insecure.” And DeParle takes that and transforms it into they “lacked enough to eat,” without ever mentioning the source, or that nobody ever said they “lacked enough to eat” or anything close to that.

The background here is that the DOA has a profusion, indeed a cornucopia, of food distribution programs; but almost all of them work by passing out a monthly benefit card where the beneficiary needs to manage the budget to last until the end of the month. Some people just aren’t very good at managing a monthly budget. The result is that literally no amount of distribution of these cards can make it so that nobody ever blows through the budget before the end of the month, or at least worries that they might once during a year.

If you don’t believe me that there is already a cornucopia of food distribution programs, then you may not know much about this subject. That’s OK for you, but not for DeParle, who as we have seen has been covering this subject “extensively” for decades. Check out this web page of the DOA’s Food and Nutrition Service. Food stamps, nowadays known as SNAP, is the main program that you have probably heard of. But that’s just one of four big categories of DOA food assistance programs, the other three categories being the “Women, Infants and Children’s” Programs, the “Child Nutrition” Programs, and the “Food Distribution” Programs. Within those additional categories we have the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), the Summer Food Service Program, the National School Lunch Program, the Special Milk Program, the School Breakfast Program, the Team Nutrition Program, the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, the Community Food Systems Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, and the USDA [DOA] Foods in Schools Program.

That’s just what we’ve had up to now. By my count there are seventeen of these things. And yes, according to DeParle (and apparently the Biden administration), that incredible profusion of programs has been leaving some 10+% of Americans “lacking enough to eat.” If that’s true, it would seem to be one of the most incredible bureaucratic disasters in human history. Shouldn’t all the people involved get fired for rank incompetence? How is it even possible to fail so completely with so many resources at hand?

In any rational organization, the next step would be to hold the current people accountable, and restructure the existing services to use the resources at hand to actually accomplish the mission. But then, this is the government, and that’s not how it’s done. Abject failure is the basis to go back and double down with massive new spending given to the same incompetent bureaucrats so that they can continue to fail. So now, DeParle reports, the Biden administration will embark on a vast new “effort to rush more food assistance to more people” that is “notable both for the scale of its ambition and the variety of its legislative and administrative actions.” Among the new and expanded initiatives will be “increas[ing] food stamps by more than $1 billion a month, provid[ing] needy children a dollar a day for snacks, expand[ing] a produce allowance for pregnant women and children, and authoriz[ing] the largest children’s summer feeding program in history.”

Let’s get a comment from some left-wing advocate of these things:

“We haven’t seen an expansion of food assistance of this magnitude since the founding of the modern food stamp program in 1977,” said James P. Ziliak, an economist at the University of Kentucky who studies nutrition programs. “It’s a profound change.”

Surely, then, by a year from now the addition of all these new programs and all this new spending will have finally solved the problem of hunger in America.

Of course not. A year from now, they will take another “food insecurity” survey. The result will be that the same 10 or 12% of respondents will report that they felt “food insecure” at least once during the year. The benefits may have expanded, but the beneficiaries didn’t get any better at managing the budget to last through each month.

And the bureaucrats at the DOA will be back again seeking yet further increases in their budget and staffing for yet another round of new “nutrition” programs, none of which will ever change the results of the “food insecurity” surveys. Indeed, as I wrote in this post back in 2014, the whole point of the “food insecurity” metric was to create something that would be completely impervious to going down no matter how many programs were created and how much food was distributed. The American people are good-hearted and generous, and when told that people “lack enough to eat,” they will not seek to deny those people enough food. They can’t be expected to know the already-existing list of seventeen food distribution programs that somehow have been unable to solve — or even reduce — this “food insecurity” thing. And once again they will get duped.

And DeParle? Could he really not know that the “food insecurity” metric is not a measure of people who “lack food” or are “hungry”? I think he has to know that, and he is intentionally deceiving his readers. Then again, we have every reason to believe that he is not very bright. Perhaps he has himself been duped? You will have to be the judge.

Meanwhile, it’s just another one of the Biden administration spending programs of tens of billions of dollars, maybe every year forever, none of which will ever be allowed to solve or even reduce the supposed problem at hand. But the bureaucracies and the dependent classes will mushroom.