Or, in other words… The U.S. government is subsidizing healthy food.
The $20 million program is being tested in Hampden County, Mass. and is designed to encourage healthy eating among low income families.
Specifically, The Healthy Incentives Pilot will enroll 7,500 randomly selected SNAP (aka Food Stamps) households to receive the HIP incentives.
For every dollar that participants spend on fruits and vegetables using their SNAP Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, 30 cents will be added to their benefit balance – thus cutting the cost of fruits and vegetables by almost one-third.
And if this Dutch research is correct, this cost cutting measure will result in the higher consumption of fruits & vegetables.
And to make things even better, this program will operate in tandem with the Food Bank Farm program already being sponsored by the Food bank of Western Mass. (The FB Farm program promotes local food consumption)
Conclusion
This program seems pretty great to me.
It reduces the cost of fruits & vegetables
It increases the consumption of fruits & vegetables
It increases the consumption of local fruits & vegetables
The only drawback seems to be the $20 million.
Maybe the USDA should raise the cash by slashing some of the current USDA junk food subsidies.
It wasn’t so long ago that America was fed by an army of family farmers.
Local food produced by local farmers.
And every once in a while, something would go wrong and somebody would get sick from eating contaminated food.
And sometimes, maybe more than one somebody would get sick.
But, today…when a couple of America’s largest egg producers make a mistake and ships out a whole mess o’ eggs contaminated with Salmonella, over 1300 Americans nationwide get sick.(as of Aug. 19/2010)
And when confronted with this news….the food safety branch of the egg producers association responds by informing America’s egg eaters that the “voluntary” egg recall affects less than 1% of the 80 billion eggs produced in the United States each year.
As if that’s supposed to be comforting news to the over 1300 people who became infected with salmonella enteritidis.
So….who’s to blame?
Because, you know that the lawsuits are already being prepared.
Someone is going to get the blame.
Who’s the bad guy?
Is it the DeCoster family who owns the tainted egg producing companies, or
The FDA – responsible for inspecting shell eggs. or
The USDA – responsible for inspecting other egg products, or
The politicians who pass the laws that ignore the quality of our food supply in favor of the quantity of our food supply, or
Is it the consumer who demands that a dozen chicken eggs cost less than $2.00.
Or, is it all of the above?
We all know that factory farms are good at producing large quantities of food at the cheapest possible price.
And sure, factory farmed food may taste like crap, and….
it may come loaded with foodborne pathogens, and….
it may be deficient in a whole range of micronutrients which may lead to….
malnutrition, and….
increased hunger, and…..
obesity
.
But, at least it’s cheap…..except when your child gets sick and ends up in the hospital dehydrated with bloody diarrhea.
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