From seeds to SNAP, from the Food Pyramid to crop subsidies; the United States Department of Agriculture is one of the most complex collections of responsibilities our government has ever seen. Taking us through the labyrinth are Professor Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, and Professor Jennifer Ifft, Agricultural Policy at Kansas State University.
Transcript
USDA final.mp3
Nick Capodice: Hannah, there's a game people play who have worked at the United States Department of Agriculture and it's called, Does the USDA do it?
Hannah McCarthy: How do you play?
Nick Capodice: I read about it in the Fifth Risk, a book by Michael Lewis. It's not dissimilar from two truths and a lie. One person says a thing, right? A far out strange thing. And the other person has to guess whether or not it's something the USDA does.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. Hit me.
Nick Capodice: Fire [00:00:30] a hundred and six millimeter recoilless rifle to control avalanches at Mammoth Mountain. Give you a loan to buy a house, maintain a fleet of aircraft, inspect every single piece of meat and poultry in the United States and dispose of mule deer corpses infected with chronic wasting disease, provide hot lunch for over 30 million schoolchildren, shoot fireworks at geese near airport runways, research improving algorithms in the wind erosion protection system model for temporal changes in the state of surface conditions.
Hannah McCarthy: They do it all, don't they?
Nick Capodice: They do it all Hannah. I [00:01:00] wouldn't be surprised if they hosted this podcast. You're listening to civics one on one. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we're breaking down a massive combination Instant Pot air fryer department, the USDA, how it began, what it does, what it spends, and how it affects the lives of everyone in this country.
Hannah McCarthy: I guess I now know better than to ask what the USDA does. So can we start with its purpose instead?
Marion Nestle: Well, I would say that [00:01:30] from its inception, the USDA's function was to make sure that Americans have enough to eat.
Nick Capodice: This is Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University Emerita and author of many wonderful books about food and politics, such as Food Politics.
Marion Nestle: And so the big question is, how do you go about doing that? And over the years that the USDA [00:02:00] was main food function was to promote industrial agriculture because industrial agriculture produces vast quantities of food and to make sure that that food was was available at a very low cost.
Nick Capodice: Specifically, a cost low enough that people in all levels of income could afford it.
Hannah McCarthy: So it was created to keep Americans fed, all Americans. And it did this through supporting farmers.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, [00:02:30] though its genesis didn't start with farmers, it started with the patent office and seeds.
Hannah McCarthy: Sees.
Nick Capodice: Seeds.
Hannah McCarthy: Seeds!
Nick Capodice: Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, the commissioner of patents in the Department of State in the 1830s. He started to collect all these promising kinds of seeds, and he gave them to members of Congress to distribute to farmers in their states. And he's called the father of the Department of Agriculture, though he wouldn't live to see the creation of the USDA in 1862. [00:03:00] Abraham Lincoln, a former farmhand himself who had run for president on a pro agriculture campaign, created the Department of Agriculture in the midst of the Civil War. This is a time when over half of Americans were involved with farming. Grover Cleveland incorporated it into the cabinet in 1889, and its purpose was to study seeds, animals, soil, anything to promote the production and support of the American farmer.
Hannah McCarthy: So how did we get from seeds [00:03:30] and soil to that exhaustive list that you had me earlier? When did the USDA start to do other things?
Marion Nestle: It started in the Great Depression when two things were happening. People didn't have enough food and were on long lines to get food handouts, and farmers had no market for their food because people didn't have any money. And so instead of giving it away, they destroyed [00:04:00] it,
Hannah McCarthy: Destroyed it? Why would you destroy food in a time of hunger?
Nick Capodice: This was not out of pure avarice. Politicians in the Roosevelt administration believed that the reason prices were so low for commodities like livestock and cotton was that farmers were just producing way too much. So to prevent further decline of prices, the government just bought 10 million acres of cotton crops in the south and plowed right under them.
The Triple A, [00:04:30] the Agriculture Adjustment Act, seeks to bolster farm income by ordering crops plowed under and millions of acres of wheat, cotton, corn left unplanted. And yet men are hungry.
Marion Nestle: And there were several shocking incidents during the depression of farmers destroying piglets and animals and just, you know, slaughtering them and throwing them in a big heap when there were people who were starving for lack of food.
Nick Capodice: Millions upon millions of pigs and [00:05:00] cows were bought by the government, killed, and just buried in the ground, and there was a huge scandal about it, naturally, farmers were horrified at how the livestock they'd raised was slaughtered and buried, and Americans were shocked that at a time of immense hunger, we buried food. And then if you or any of our listeners are horrified to hear this, you're not going to like the fact that in 2020, due to supply chain issues during the pandemic. Vegetables rotted on the fields. Millions [00:05:30] of pigs and chickens were culled and millions of gallons of fresh milk were dumped down the drain every day. But back to when this happened in the nineteen thirties, the government stepped in and said it would buy food from farmers and distribute it to people who needed it. And this was the genesis of the food stamp program. And before we talk about the food stamp program and its modern day iteration of Snap, that's [00:06:00] Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, I want to talk quickly about the modern day budget of the USDA. Their total twenty twenty one budget was about one hundred and fifty billion dollars. That's the fourth largest budget of an executive department. And you know what percentage of that budget is devoted to nutrition and nutritional assistance?
Hannah McCarthy: What percentage?
Nick Capodice: Seventy five percent. And that's not just Snap, it's school lunch programs, which we're going to get to later. It's WIC women, infants and children. Fifteen programs [00:06:30] in all
Hannah McCarthy: They hearing about how it started, I would have expected the USDA to spend the majority of its budget on farming. So this is surprising. And by the way, how to snap benefits actually work, who is eligible to use them?
Nick Capodice: Sure. We are scheduling a separate deep dive episode on governmental assistance programs, including the complex history of government cheese and what you can and can't get under these myriad programs. But briefly, families who make a certain income are entitled to snap benefits and [00:07:00] currently a family of three with a combined income of twenty nine thousand dollars a year or less is eligible. And as an interesting aside, you know, there's all these programs that give rewards for using an EB or SNAP card at your local farmer's market.
Hannah McCarthy: I've seen at farmers markets around the country you get an extra ten dollars worth of groceries or something when you use your EB card there.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, that is how food stamps initially worked in the nineteen thirties.
Marion Nestle: If you want a certain number of food stamps, you've got extra stamps for [00:07:30] buying commodities that farmers produced and that worked for a while and went on up to the Second World War when everybody was employed, and so poverty levels went right down. And after the Second World War poverty returned, there were proposals for a food stamp program where the stamps would be used at retail stores. The [00:08:00] farmers got dropped out of the picture, and the the program ended up as a retail program where you had stamps that you could take to the store and use for pretty much anything that was in any retail grocery store.
Nick Capodice: And they changed it from stamps to the debit card, partly to reduce stigma. They came in little books of multicolored stamps, and our producer Jacqui, who was once in the program, told me when you went to the store to use [00:08:30] them, it was embarrassing because everybody knew you were using them and they would judge your purchases.
Hannah McCarthy: Can we also talk about the criticism of the program?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. The majority of criticism from lawmakers regarding Snap is related to fraud.
Archival: Dozens more have warrants out for their arrest. The sheriff's office is going after those fraudulently using their EBT cards...
Marion Nestle: Yeah. Well, as with any federal program, there are always the potentiality for fraud, and the [00:09:00] investigations of fraud in Snap usually show that there's not much, but there is some. It would be irresponsible to argue that there isn't any. You can trade food stamps, you can sell food stamps, you can do all kinds or the benefit cards. You can do the same with the benefit cards.
Nick Capodice: A study from 2017 found that 60 percent of Americans believe that people misrepresent their financial situation to get food benefits, and that is [00:09:30] patently untrue. You and your family's Social Security numbers are run through numerous databases. It's next to impossible to lie to get SNAP benefits. And while there are some instances of fraud, it is far more frequently people selling their food stamps to, say, restaurants who use them to get the food that they will sell. In twenty fourteen there were about 40 million Americans using Snap and forty five thousand individuals disqualified for fraud. That's 0.1 percent.
Marion Nestle: What always [00:10:00] amazes me about it is the tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent every year on fraud prevention. Because fraud prevention is a big issue, particularly for people who are against the government having a role in poverty reduction. And so there's a big focus on trying to prevent fraud. And I'm always astounded by the tens to hundreds of [00:10:30] millions of dollars that's spent on fraud prevention every year. But the Department of Agriculture takes it very seriously because it has to take it very seriously for political reasons. And so, you know, for me, the political question is how much money do you want to spend on reducing a very tiny amount of fraud? And apparently you want to spend a lot.
Hannah McCarthy: If one [00:11:00] last question tied to nutrition and assistance, it's about something on the wall of my classroom in fourth grade,
Archival: Good nutrition and physical activity Are fuel for your child's mind and body,and the food pyramid will help you find the right balance. Just remember every color, every day...
Nick Capodice: Ok, yes, the USDA food pyramid. We're going to get into that and school lunches and the rest of the things the USDA does right after the break.
Hannah McCarthy: But first, [00:11:30] we always try to let our listeners know about our free newsletter. Extra credit. It is short. It's goofy, it shows up in your inbox every two weeks. Nick assures me that the next one will explain why milk and only milk is allowed as a non water beverage on the Senate floor. Sign up at civics101podcast.org.
Nick Capodice: Civics 101 is supported in part by [00:12:00] You You, right there, you listening? Donate to our show at civics101podcast.org or we'll cause an avalanche with the giant cannon.
Hannah McCarthy: Ok, tell me about the food pyramid.
Nick Capodice: So the USDA tells us what we should be eating. Here's Marion Nestle again.
Marion Nestle: The USDA and Health and Human Services jointly produced dietary guidelines. Those are supposed to be for policy makers, even though [00:12:30] everybody uses them as advice to the public. Then they've issued food guide since the early 1900s. The most recent one was in 2010, and that was the My Plate food guide. The thing with the squares on it, one of which is protein, drives me crazy. There's fruits, vegetables, grains and protein and milk off on the side. And, you know, vegetables and grains have proteins. Anyway, it's very confusing
Archival: With [00:13:00] as much drama as the Department of Agriculture could muster, and with help from the First Lady, America today got a new symbol for Good nutrition. What's more useful than a plate? What's more simple than a plate?
Marion Nestle: The My Plate was designed to replace the 1992 pyramid, which was enormously controversial, I think, because everybody understood it. I thought they should have kept it and tweaked it a little bit, but [00:13:30] they didn't listen to me.
Nick Capodice: The food pyramid controversy was fairly epic, and it was a battle between nutritionists and the meat and dairy lobby. The guideline in 1977 from nutritionists was eat less meat. And now we've got a pyramid that says eat two to three servings of meat every day, and then we had huge scuffles around the graphic design, like the size of the glass of milk on the pyramid. What kind of meat is shown in [00:14:00] the protein section? Is that a steak or a turkey leg? But the food pyramid is indeed gone. Now it is myplate, and while we're still in the mind frame of your fourth grade classroom, Hannah, the USDA funds school lunches across the country. This is one of the very rare ways the federal government gives money to schools through funding free and reduced hot lunch programs.
Marion Nestle: And so the USDA determines the nutritional standards of the school meals, reimburses schools for [00:14:30] the school meals and runs the show. And so once again, you're dealing with nutrition standards in an agency whose main responsibility is industrial agriculture. And so you have the Department of Agriculture. There's a small office that is issuing dietary guidelines to eat less saturated fat, salt and sugars at the same time that it's dealing with sugar production [00:15:00] and sugar beets and cane and all of these other things. I mean, it's a crazy system.
Nick Capodice: Do you remember the ketchup as a vegetable debate?
Hannah McCarthy: Oh I Do. Was it the USDA that redefined things like ketchup and relish as a vegetable so schools could serve them?
Nick Capodice: Yes. This was during the Carter administration and later the Reagan administration. They loosened food restrictions on federally funded school lunches, and it caused a huge backlash. [00:15:30] Those restrictions, by the way, have since changed.
Marion Nestle: But what happened with the Obama administration was that one of the accomplishments of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign was to improve the nutrition standards for school meals. The lobbyists went to work, particularly the lobbyists for pizza, potatoes and tomato paste. I mean, kind of amazing, actually, and they just go straight to Congress and then Congress then passes [00:16:00] regulations or instructs the Department of Agriculture to back off.
Nick Capodice: And I don't know how much big potato and big tomato paste make on supplying schools with lunches every year. But I want to mention that under the old rules, there was a famous loophole where two tablespoons of tomato paste on a piece of pizza counted as eight tablespoons of vegetables because that tomato paste was at one time, a lot more fresh tomatoes.
Hannah McCarthy: Come on! I [00:16:30] wonder if we could get to the A part of the USDA at this point, I mean, you said that back when the USDA was created, more than half of America was involved with farming. But that's definitely not the case now, right? What's the percentage now?
Nick Capodice: It's about one point three percent of the U.S. employed population. But even so, there is a lot of farming going on in the U.S., which I'll get to in a minute. The first off, the USDA decides how it supports farms [00:17:00] in the U.S. via a massive piece of legislation called the Farm Bill.
Marion Nestle: It's the agricultural act of whatever year it is. There's a new one about every five years, and this is a bill that's a thousand pages of small print, a table of contents that usually goes on for 10 or 15 pages of small print. It is so absolutely enormous that it's incomprehensible there may be people [00:17:30] who have an overview of it that is reasonable, but I spent a year trying to deal with it and found it absolutely impossible. I just couldn't do it.
Nick Capodice: Marion told me she came up with what I think is a very cool idea for a course to teach a piece of legislation to teach the farm bill. And she said, with utter humility and generosity that it was a catastrophic failure.
Marion Nestle: I tried to make [00:18:00] a list of all the programs that it covers, and I couldn't. I gave up after a hundred or so. Each of those programs has detailed requirements, its own set of lobbyists, its own set of constituents, its own target audience. I mean, each of them is a story in its own. And in discussing people on the Agriculture [00:18:30] Committee of Congress, staff people and I had one of them come and talk to my class because I thought she was really remarkable in her understanding of the farm bill. My question for her was how did you learn it? And she said it took her about eight years and she learned it because lobbyists would come to the Department of Agriculture and she would sit in on the lobbying meetings and listen to the lobbyists, talk about the details [00:19:00] of those programs, and that's how she learned the programs one by one.
Nick Capodice: In twenty twenty one, agriculture related corporations spent $108 million on lobbyists. These are people they paid to speak with members of the House and the Senate to get things passed in the farm bill. That helped those companies immensely, and the benefit to the politicians is also staggering. For example, in Twenty Nineteen Representative Mike Conaway, he headed the House Committee on Agriculture, received [00:19:30] $850000 in contributions from agribusinesses. And thus ends this episode's short aside on lobbying, which should never be far from any topic we discuss.
Hannah McCarthy: So it sounds like the farm bill is Byzantine and deeply influenced by lobbyists, just like most legislation in the United States. Regardless, the outcome is a piece of legislation that helps American farms and farmers right? And how many farms do we have [00:20:00] in the U.S., by the way?
Jennifer Ifft: So today we have two million farms about, and it's been pretty stable for a couple of decades.
Nick Capodice: This is Jennifer Ifft. She's a professor of agricultural policy at Kansas State University.
Jennifer Ifft: The whole thing of what is a farm and we talk a lot about this a lot. What is a farm? You could do a whole episode on that. And I start off with my students. I say, Who cares what a farm is? If you want to call yourself a farmer, it doesn't matter, but it matters a lot for taxes, and it matters a lot for policy. So the USDA says a farm is [00:20:30] if you have the capacity to produce a thousand dollars of sales within a year. Doesn't take much to get to a thousand. So you have two million farms, a half of them are very small and half of them lose money farming every year. They're not farming as a business. The majority of farms in the U.S. are not operated as a business because you can't run a business and lose money every year. They're reliant on other sources of income.
Nick Capodice: And the USDA supports those small farms [00:21:00] by giving them a vast array of grants and loans. The big farms they support via subsidies, government money paid to farms for growing things, and the most common subsidy is something called crop insurance.
Jennifer Ifft: Crop insurance protects you against unexpected changes in revenue. So in the spring, let's say I'm going to plant a plant, some corn. I know how much I've produced in the past, so I have a a yield that I could expect in a normal year. I can buy a policy that [00:21:30] says, OK if my revenue in the fall. Is less than 80 percent of what I expected, I'll get a payout to make up that difference, but crop insurance does not guarantee a profit for a farm operation. It has nothing to do with expenses. It has nothing to do with how efficient your operation is. It has nothing to do with non weather or sort of price related losses. If you're very inefficient, You high costs, if there's [00:22:00] human failure, you could still lose money.
Hannah McCarthy: So in other words, just because a farm gets support from the government, that doesn't mean that they're guaranteed to succeed.
Nick Capodice: Absolutely not. And you'd be hard pressed to find an op ed from anyone claiming that farming is an easy and secure occupation, subsidized or not. But when it comes to those subsidies, Jennifer said there are three crops that dominate
Jennifer Ifft: Corn, soybeans, wheat. Efforts to sort of broaden that are ongoing, but still dollar wise. Corn, [00:22:30] soybeans and wheat.
Nick Capodice: And there's a reason Jennifer started with corn. It is our biggest crop in the U.S. by far. In twenty nineteen two point seven billion dollars were paid in corn subsidies
Marion Nestle: So much that it's not needed for food or even feed for animals, so that 40 percent of the amount that's grown again, that's not an exact percentage, but it's a big chunk of corn production is ethanol [00:23:00] for automobiles and goes up in smoke. Most of what the USDA does is to support the production of food for animals and fuel for automobiles.
Nick Capodice: Ethanol is mixed with gasoline to make a more efficient lower emission fuel. In December 2021, the USDA gave $800 million to ethanol producers who had lost income during the height of the pandemic, when people just weren't driving as much. And I have to add it's not just subsidies that help farmers. The USDA funds an enormous [00:23:30] amount of research into sustainability see genetics, soil fertilizers, anything to help farms make food. So we have fewer farms in America now, but their output is exponentially greater.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, we have done a lot of shows together at this point, but this one feels more than any other like it is all over the place. And I get it. So too is the USDA. But how did that [00:24:00] happen? How did a relatively simple mission involving seeds,
Nick Capodice: Seeds.
Hannah McCarthy: And the patent office turn into this?
Nick Capodice: Remember when I told you about Marion's failed class, where she tried to teach the farm bill? She told me that the first activity she did in that class with her students was to come up with a new one.
Marion Nestle: On the first day of class, I asked the students what they thought are reasonable agricultural policy would be. They laid it out. On the first day of class. I mean, these [00:24:30] were these were masters students. They were in food studies. They knew exactly what a reasonable agricultural policy should do. It should provide enough food for people to eat it, to provide a living for the farmers who produce the food. It should be linked to health so that it's producing healthy food and promotes the health of the American population. It shouldn't be linked to climate change, so it doesn't make climate change worse. [00:25:00] I mean, it should be kind to animals. I mean, it was not very hard to think up things that a a reasonable, thoughtful, integrated food policy ought to do and and then to look at the reality of it was absolutely astounding.
Hannah McCarthy: Ok, why can students lay it out? But we can't make it a reality? What happened to the USDA?
Marion Nestle: Well, it grew. It [00:25:30] just grew. You know, it's these things were incremental.
Nick Capodice: This is how you end up with USDA employees shooting fireworks at geese near airport runways. The USDA runs the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, preventing invasive species from endangering crops and livestock and such. And that department is made up of six other departments, one of which is wildlife services, which manages the relationship between us and wildlife. And they're the ones who have to keep the geese off [00:26:00] the runways. So I'll reiterate what Marion said. It just grew.
Marion Nestle: And so first of all, you have a bill that's so big that nobody can understand it. I mean, you're expecting a member of Congress to read this. No, that's an unreasonable that's an unreasonable expectation. What about the agriculture staff people on their committees? Well, some of them are going to be good and some of them aren't. But I'm arguing that no one person can possibly [00:26:30] have a vision for all of this. So there's no vision in this and the people who are coming in and arguing for one or another policy or people with a vested interest in that policy and they're paid, lobbyists are paid. And if you don't understand why advocates for healthier policies don't get anywhere, you have to look at who's paid to do what. I mean, most food advocates aren't paid to do [00:27:00] lobbying. It's really hard to get a job where you're paid to do that kind of thing because you're not the groups that you're working for aren't making the kind of money that big agricultural producers are.
Nick Capodice: Well, that's the USDA.I could go on, I would go on, I've [00:27:30] barely started, but I got to get working on this episode about executive powers and the price of gasoline. Today's episode was produced by me Nick Capodice with Hannah McCarthy. Our staff includes Christina Philips and Jacqui Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer and definitely played percussion on the song she and all other former band participants call Rodeo. While much of the rest of the world calls it Beef, it's what's for dinner by Aaron Copeland, also featured in this episode. As for the rest of the music in this episode, it was by Kevin McCloud, Chris Zabriskie, Emily [00:28:00] Sprague, Martin Shelekenns, DivKid, Sarah the Illstrumentalist, and this year is ProletR. I kind of like their style. Civics one on one is a production of NPR New Hampshire Public Radio. All right, see you next time.
