The New York Times misreported a USDA study in a piece critical of the food stamp program over the weekend. (photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr)
The
New York Times' Food Stamp Fables
By Joe Soss, Jacobin
17 January 17
The New York Times’ front-page attack on food stamps over the
weekend peddled harmful myths and outright lies.
The
political mean season has
returned, with all the usual slanders of social programs that protect Americans
from the worst kinds of hardship and deprivation. The poors! They’re behaving
badly! And government handouts paid for with your tax dollars are to blame. In
the end, we are told, the well-intentioned policies of meddling do-gooders do
nothing but encourage bad behaviors and self-defeating choices.
The
latest target in this campaign is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP, more commonly called food stamps).
In a New
York Times story over the
weekend, Anahad O’Connor massages and misreports a USDA study to reinforce some
of the worst stereotypes about food stamps. For his trouble, the editors placed
it on the front page. Readers of the newspaper of record learn that the end
result of tax dollars spent on food assistance is a grocery cart full of soda.
No exaggeration. The inside headline for the story is “What’s in the Shopping
Cart of a Food Stamp Household? Lots of Sugary Soda,” and the front-page
illustration shows a shopping cart containing almost nothing but two-liter pop
bottles.
O’Connor
tells us that “the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which
account for about 10 percent of the dollars they spend on food.” Milk is number
one among non-SNAP households, we are told, not soft drinks.
And
O’Connor does not hold back in building his indictment of the program. He
begins by framing these and other alleged facts with a quote that
informs readers, “SNAP is a multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy of the
soda industry.” The story doubles down on this misleading image by ending with
a discussion of how the big soda companies lobby to keep the SNAP funds flowing
— and with a quote asserting, “This is the first time we’ve had confirmation
that this massive taxpayer program is promoting all the wrong kinds of foods.”
Let’s
be clear here: this is nonsense. It’s a political hack job against a program
that helps millions of Americans feed themselves, and we should all be outraged
that the New York Times has disguised it as a piece of factual
news reporting on its front page.
There
are two major problems here. First, O’Connor misrepresents the findings of the
USDA report. Second, O’Connor’s article is a case study in the dark arts of
making biased reporting appear even-handed. Let’s start with the facts.
Even
if we relied solely on O’Connor’s massaged numbers, we’d have to conclude that
90 percent of what people buy with SNAP is not soda (which
O’Connor says makes up 10 percent of purchases). But what does the USDA report
actually say? Strangely, neither the author nor the New York Times saw
fit to link to the report in the story, online or in print. I had to look
through agency reports to find it.
Spoiler
alert: the report does not
state that SNAP changes what people buy at the grocery store; it does not
suggest any effect on buying soda; and its findings differ considerably from
the picture O’Connor paints.
O’Connor
did not simply miss details buried in obscure tables. He misreported basic
statistics, selectively chose to ignore the report’s major findings, and
cherry-picked a few facts to build a misleading case. Here are the top three
items in the report’s summary of its major findings:
1. There
were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP
households, no matter how the data were categorized.
2. The
top 10 summary categories and the top 7 commodities by expenditure were the
same for SNAP and non-SNAP households, although ranked in slightly different
orders.
3. Less
healthy food items were common purchases for both SNAP and non-SNAP households.
Sweetened beverages, prepared desserts and salty snacks were among the top 10
summary categories for both groups. Expenditures were greater for sweetened
beverages compared to all milk for both groups, as well.
Later,
the report adds these bullet points to its summary:
1. Overall,
there were few differences between SNAP and non-SNAP household expenditures by
USDA Food Pattern categories. Expenditure shares for each of the USDA Food
Pattern categories… varied by no more than 3 cents per dollar when comparing
SNAP and non-SNAP households.
2. Protein
foods represented the largest expenditure share for both household types, while
proportionally more was spent on fruits and vegetables than on solid fats and
added sugars, grains or dairy.
No
fair reading of this report can support the Times’ portrayal. Even
the central fact O’Connor builds the article around — the claim that soda makes
up 10 percent of SNAP household purchases — seems to have been ginned up.
Exhibit
6 of the report states that soft drinks comprised 5.44 percent of SNAP
household expenditures. To get the 10 percent figure, my guess is that O’Connor
looked to Exhibit 5, which incorporates soft drinks into the broader summary
category of all sweetened beverages. That category makes up 9.25 percent of
SNAP household purchases, a percentage well below the “proteins” category of
meat, poultry, and seafood (19.19 percent).
So, it
appears O’Connor inflated the soft drink estimate of 5.44 percent to 9.25
percent by equating soda with the broader summary category of sweetened
beverages, and then rounded 9.25 up to 10 percent for good measure. (O’Connor
later updated the story to note the discrepancy between sweetened beverages and
soft drinks, albeit without a correction.)
And
that claim about milk, not soda, being number one among non-SNAP households?
Here, O’Connor is just scoring a political point based on the slimmest of
rank-order differences: for non-SNAP households, Exhibit 6 reports that fluid
milk products make up 4.03 percent of purchases while soft drinks make up 4.01
percent. Two one-hundredths of a percentage point. That’s what O’Connor uses to
paint non-SNAP households as the normal milk people, and offer them up as the
foil to the bad soda people on SNAP.
Here’s
what the report actually finds.
First,
out of each dollar paid to the grocery store, non-SNAP households spent 4 cents
on milk and 4 cents on soft drinks. Households receiving SNAP spent 4 cents on
milk and 5 cents on soft drinks. Consider those numbers and look again at the
shopping cart full of soda that graced the New York Times’ front
page.
Second,
the life conditions and characteristics of SNAP recipients differ considerably
from the huge category of “all other households,” but the data analyzed for the
study made it impossible for the researchers to distinguish program effects
from these group differences in any way. As the study makes clear, no
conclusions can be drawn about whether the program is responsible for even the
tiny gap observed for soda purchases.
Third,
because SNAP benefits are too low to cover the full food costs of households,
people who receive SNAP spend a mix of program benefits and other income on
food. This is critical to understand because, as the authors of the study note,
the data provide no indication of whether soda purchases were made with SNAP
dollars, work earnings, or some other source of income. If someone spent all
their SNAP benefits on meats and vegetables and then used their own money to
buy a six-pack of soda, they were classified as a SNAP household purchasing
soda. As a result, the study tells us nothing about what people actually
used SNAP benefits for, only what they bought in general.
The
study’s authors are admirably clear about all these facts and limitations, and
O’Connor clearly knew about them. Indeed, he provides himself with some
political cover by quickly mentioning a few of these points deep in the
article. What O’Connor does not do is fulfill the journalist’s obligation to
explain how the facts fit together, or avoid using a factual news article to
leave a misleading impression.
The
article quotes well-established food stamp critics whose views were on the
record long before the recent USDA study, but, in a research field where their
views are widely opposed, does not provide space for a single researcher with a
contrasting viewpoint.
O’Connor
also singles out soda-company lobbying as the reason why USDA officials have
been resistant to commodity-specific limitations on what households can buy with
SNAP benefits. Nothing is said about the many legitimate reasons why lots of
people who work in the field hold this commitment — from the belief recipients
should have dignity as equal citizens to the implementation burdens having an
extensive list of verboten items would introduce.
To be
fair, O’Connor does eventually acknowledge that “sweetened beverages are a
common purchase in all households across America.” But this is really just one
of the oldest tricks used in news stories that disparage stigmatized social
groups based on behaviors that are common in the population as a whole.
Headline and lede: “What’s in the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household? Lots
of Sugary Soda.” Somewhere below: All Americans are drinking lots of sugary
soda. (It’s an easy game to play: Headline and lede: “Children from Low-Income
Families See No Point to Homework.” Somewhere below: Rightly or wrongly, kids
in general don’t like homework and tend to see it as pointless.)
What
also makes O’Connor’s article so troubling is that he wraps the usual
scurrilous myths about SNAP in a veneer of health promotion — a framing that’s
sure to win over some left-leaning readers who’d otherwise recoil at the usual trumped-up claims about
food stamps. Yet in the end, O’Connor’s health paternalism doesn’t just run
aground morally, but empirically: the study provides no evidence that SNAP
encourages soda purchasing, and no evidence that SNAP funds (as opposed to
personal funds) were used to buy soft drinks.
O’Connor
writes a lot about sugar, and not much about social policy. So perhaps his main
target here is the sugar industry. If so, he has thrown millions of
food-insecure Americans — most of whom work or have significant disabilities —
under the bus to advance his agenda.
Just
as political attacks on social protections are on the rise, the
article panders to the worst stereotypes of “welfare,” ignoring the SNAP program’s many successes. In the
process, it tells people who imagine the worst about food stamps that they’ve
been right all along. Facts be damned.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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