Let's Talk About SNAP
Also come see me next week in TX, PA, VA!
Dear Friends,
Welcome back to The Crunchwrap, the internet’s most thoughtful source for high-calorie takes and obliquely left-leaning policy analysis.
It’s getting dark a little too early over here in Crunchland. I’m writing you from my weird rental in Montreal after spending the last two weeks in Arizona and Quebec City. And later today, I’m headed back to America for three book events – in my ancestral Houston (11/3), in Cherry Hill, NJ (11/5) and in Northern Virginia (11/9).
If any of these events are remotely in your vicinity, I’m begging you to come out. I’ve already spent a lot of time alone in transit this month and I’m starting to lose my grip on the social contract. I signed up a free two-week trial on ClassPass and never went. I invested A LOT of emotional energy reading about the bad parking situation at the brand new Lidl near my house back in New York. I also spent 40 minutes trying to making an event flyer using ChatGPT, but all it did was garble all the data and turn my face into an extra from Der Golem. So please, consider this an invitation/desperate plea to hang out.
Anyway, in this Crunchwrap, I’m endeavoring to outdiscourse the SNAP discourse with the help of a friend.
BUT FIRST…If you’re a new subscriber (hey), here’s a little bit about me and this newsletter:
I’m Adam Chandler, a journalist (usually) based in New York. I write for a bunch of places about history, culture, work/labor, fast food, business, regular-speed food, Americana, and more. I’m also the author of two books, Drive-Thru Dreams and 99% Perspiration which, in spite of some really bad Ben Franklin jokes, came out earlier this year to wide acclaim. (I also do some unwieldy hand-talking on The History Channel’s The Food That Built America and other programs.)
In this newsletter, I cover Critical National Issues like waning social cohesion in America, Taco Bell’s collaborations with Cheez-It and Milk Bar, and the vital cultural endurance of Billy Joel. I welcome your responses and gripes. If you’d like to support me, please check out my new book.
First Crunch
Friend of the Crunch Marisa Kabas has an excellent newsletter, The Handbasket, which is constantly breaking news, getting scoops, and covering a lot of the ongoing American fresh hell without the requisite both-sidesing of indefensible things. Even just writing about her newsletter gets me fired up.
Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to collab on this week’s insane saga around the pausing of SNAP. Marisa kindly let me rabble about what we get wrong about SNAP, its beneficiaries, and the discourse around it. From the piece:
First off, there is a good reason that the terms of the debate around SNAP and public assistance are so broken in American life. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have long sought to score cheap political points by casting those who rely on public assistance programs—with SNAP being one of the best known examples—as lazy, unambitious people who don’t want to work for a living. Until pretty recently, it was a bipartisan political winner.
President Ronald Reagan infamously castigated “welfare queens,” followed by President Bill Clinton and then-Senator Joe Biden bemoaning the “culture of dependency” supposedly wrought by government assistance. Today, no shortage of rank-and-file GOP members still decry SNAP as detrimental to the American spirit without a hint of irony. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, took racist delight in branding President Obama as “the food stamps president.” And on Thursday, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) suggested that Americans who couldn’t go one month without a SNAP allotment should “stop smoking crack.”
In spite of the rhetoric, the myth that SNAP is a socialist plot designed to give freebies to couch potatoes with no work ethic is as pernicious as it is easy to debunk. To start, in 2023, 39% of SNAP users were Americans under the age of 18. (Obviously, shirkers.) In 2023, 19% of SNAP users were 60 or older. (Classic malingers.) All told, 60% of SNAP benefits go to families with children. (Wastrels!) Worse yet, owing in part to the stigma around public assistance programs and its complex certification requirements, the USDA reports only about 55% of adults above the age of 60 who qualify for SNAP actually use the benefit.
Should we call this collab The Handwrap or The Crunchbasket? I don’t know, but check out the whole piece here and subscribe to The Handbasket if you haven’t!
That’s it for this edition of The Crunchwrap! I’m hitting the road for the next ten days, so unless I drown in a pool of queso, I should be back soon enough.
Thank you as always for reading.
Love,
Adam