Can food stamps bring food freedom?

Food production and processing needs to be in the hands of Americans in their communities

Welcome to Raw Milk Mama, a newsletter about food freedom, our food systems, and how to create local food security in our communities. Sign up here for weekly posts, or keep reading...

---

Photo credit Quaritsch Photography

Congress has temporarily stalled progress on the 2023 Farm Bill.

Rather than working to resolve and pass a new farm bill before the end of the year, they added it to the continuing resolution to keep it funded—for maybe a full year.

But we still need to keep an eye on it.

There are many things that Congress needs to fund.

But at the top of that list is Food Security.

They will tackle this through the new Farm Bill.

For the uninitiated, the Farm Bill is a monolithic piece of legislation (supposedly) passed every 5 years that, essentially, determines how billions of taxpayer dollars will be allocated to our agriculture system and food industry.

There are two main focal points for the farm bill:

1. Food Stamps

2. Farm subsidies (aka crop insurance)

Both of these provisions are things Americans love to hate.

But they are the systems we use right now.

Conservatives love to rail against food stamps as government handouts and welfare programs.

While liberal-leaning folks tend to protest crop subsidies to GMO-producing farms, and the constant influx of money to corporate agriculture.

(We won’t even discuss today the fact that most food stamp money GOES to corporate and industrial agriculture. That’s a topic for another day.)

Here’s the thing– if we had functioning community food systems (in other words, true food security), there would be virtually no need for food stamps OR government subsidized corporate agriculture.

*Gasp* we might not even need a farm bill.

In fact, we didn’t have a farm bill before 1933.

As part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt sought to help farmers by boosting crop prices. The first farm bill, passed in 1933, launched a program to raise agricultural prices by paying farmers to limit production. In 1938, Congress established the program on a permanent basis, to be renewed every five years.

The 1977 Food and Agriculture Act was the first to include the entire food stamp program within the farm bill. Since then, food stamps and farm aid have almost always been discussed in tandem. (Source) 

“Emergency food access” via food stamps is only a necessity today because people are deliberately separated from their own food production and food processing.

In the farm bill, free food does not equate to food security.

As a culture, we are divorced from knowing where our food comes from. 

Laws and regulations further thwart us from being interdependent communities feeding each other.

Economic disruption and uncertainty–both on the personal level and on the national level–causes food insecurity. This is true. We’ve seen the tide rise and fall with various “economic crises” over the years.

But increased dependence on food stamps or government subsidies is not the answer. It will never solve this problem systemically. It will only create further dependence on the system level. Food insecurity.

Increased access to hyper local food production and processing is the ONLY antidote to bloated spending on food stamps and subsidies while empowering those who are the least food secure.

Food security is a fundamental American principle of our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The only way to preserve food security for our future generations is to return the knowledge and power of food production and processing back to our own American communities – to empower communities to grow and process their own food, freely.

Community interdependence for food production has to be the new “free food.”

Not dependence on industrialized food via government subsidies.

Free food is what we produce ourselves. Growing our own food independently and within our immediate communities at any level helps to free us.

It liberates us!

Inherent in this is the ability to participate in our food processing, therefore cultivating the abundance of food around us while not relying on the vagaries of income and the economy to dictate whether we can eat for a day. It helps to liberate the less fortunate, especially those barely making ends meet, from shouldering the financial burden. 

It is us teaching each other how to fish. In contrast to the government denying us the right to fish, or learn, and forcing us to eat their fish.

A great example on creating food security in our country is seen through representatives Massie, Pingree and 52 other sponsors–with an additional 9 co-sponsors in the Senate–to date, who all at some level support this vision of food security in America through the language in the PRIME Act (Prime).

This bill returns the power of meat processing and sales to the communities where the animals are raised. It returns the responsibility – not the expense – of food security back to the states and the communities where people need it.

This language has a chance to be included in the Farm Bill when it eventually happens.

Here is food for thought… There would be nothing more American, more liberty-minded than if the provisions of Prime were included in the new Farm Bill.

Thankfully, we have members of Congress–bipartisan and bicameral–with the vision to return food security where it belongs – into the hands of capable American farmers, ranchers, and processors who know better than anyone else how to feed their neighbors.

Indeed, the only way to repair our catastrophically broken food systems in America is for farmers to do what they do best: feed their neighbors.

A return to community-based food systems means that we Americans have a chance to forge new food pathways not dependent on government handouts on any level, but based on the inspiration, hard work, and conviviality of what it means to be a proud American.

If you believe in an America that knows how to feed itself, ask your Rep and Senators to support the language of the PRIME Act. Better yet, ask them to include Prime in the new Farm Bill. Let’s reclaim our food systems. Let’s turn not-so-free government food into Food Freedom. Let’s reclaim food security–for US!

---

About Raw Milk Mama: I believe in the freedom to feed our families how we see fit. I also see the direction that our country is going--no one wants to live in a world where food scarcity is a constant reality. It's time to take back our food systems so they serve us, not monopolistic corporations.