Breaking the Cycle of Poverty

Here's the long awaited article on Grocery Gap Project, which will be published in The Link, a Cheraw newspaper. It is like a follow up to my previous Grocery Gap post. Thank you to everyone in CCCC for this great summer experience! Enjoy the article!

Breaking the Cycle of Poverty
By Rui Jiang

“Well, you know what I see around here? People on food stamps buy the most expensive products,” a grocery store employee told me as she guided me to find food prices for my shopping list for a family on food stamps. She turned around only to see my disbelieving face, “What? You don’t believe me? I suppose they just don’t know how to budget.” Thinking to myself, “Yeah, there are a lot of us who don’t know how to budget. But that lack of budgeting skills must affect the food-stamp recipients more.” She went on, “At the beginning of the month, our registers never rest, but by the end, we hardly have any food-stamps customers.” She paused, thinking back for a second, “I have been in the grocery business for years, and this is what I have observed.”

I certainly did not expect to hear this comment while shopping for the Grocery Gap Project. Did she mean that food-stamp recipients buy expensive foods for half of the month until their food stamps run out and live on barely anything for the other half? It sounded extreme to me, but it is true that many food stamp recipients live in near starvation at the end of the month due to a lack of food stamps. Even the News and Observer wrote an article about how people are pinched by the high food prices and the stagnant food stamp allotments. Most people run out of food stamps by mid-month according to the article. As a Duke intern at the Chesterfield County Coordinating Council, one of my responsibilities was to help the Health Subcommittee investigate how one can eat healthily on a tight budget. The Grocery Gap Project idea came from Marlboro County where Mrs. Karen Butler and her staff conducted a similar study. The Chesterfield County Coordinating Council wanted to know if people in Chesterfield County could eat healthily too, especially since food prices have skyrocketed.

During my first meeting with Mrs. Butler to set up this project, I distinctly remember her asking me, “So, if the circumstances around a family are preventing them from getting a job, an education, and a healthy life, what should we do? A better question, where do we start? How can we change the situations?”

I stared at her, expecting some kind of an answer, but it did not come. All too often, the circumstances that keep a family in poverty form a hard-to-break cycle. If someone is not healthy, then he or she cannot work to earn money, especially if he or she does not have a high school diploma. Without much money, an individual cannot afford to pay bills or medical expenses, much less buy more expensive healthy foods. Without nutritious foods or good medical treatment, their health will not improve, and they are back to where they started. For Karen and the Health Subcommittee, they have decided to attack the cycle by improving the health of the people.

They say that you are what you eat. In order to promote health, we have to look at our diets. My job was to determine whether a typical family on food stamps in Chesterfield County- single mom with two kids under 8, earning a gross of $800 a month- could afford a healthy diet. We developed a meal plan based on the government’s Thrift Food Plan with a few southern touches such as having tea rather than some other beverage. By the time I went into grocery stores to catalogue prices, I had read my fair share of literature on food stamps and previous Grocery Gap Projects, and I expected everything except the employee’s comment.

For example, I was not shocked to find that the healthy diet costs 50%-60% over the food stamp budget, which allots $2 to $3 worth of food a day per person. Granted, the food stamps program does not expect a family to rely solely on this money for food. However, since families cannot use food stamps to buy non-food items, such as paper towels, they have to use their income to buy those essentials. In turn, food stamps are the only money left for food.

I was prepared to hear one single mother’s tale about how she cannot afford fresh fruits and vegetables for her kids. As she puts it, “When you are comparing a bag of 10 cakes for a dollar versus a bag of 8 to 9 apples and oranges for four or five dollars, what’s a mother on a budget going to do?” I was not surprised to find that mothers on food stamps sacrifice eating healthy foods so that their kids can have the best food. Two separate studies on obesity trends in food-stamp recipients actually reported that mothers on food stamps are vulnerable to obesity due to this practice. As the community, we should make sure that these mothers do not have to sacrifice their health for their children’s health due to monetary reasons. I understood that transportation and high gas prices limit people from going to the cheapest grocery store, or in some cases, the only grocery store that is 17 miles away. I even agree that the food-stamp program should incorporate car payments as a permanent part of the calculation for the net income qualification, so that more hard-working people can receive the support that they desperately need. What caught me off guard was the comment by the grocery store employee. Could one of the factors contributing to running out of food stamps be a lack of budgeting skills?

Our initial goal of targeting health as a way to change the circumstances around a family has expanded to the question of poverty and a lack of healthy foods, which circles back to ill health. People need whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, all of which has become a luxury when someone on food stamps lives on only $2 to $3 a day. While the insufficient funds and high prices of produce are to blame for the inability of shoppers to buy them, people can take steps like budgeting to make their provisions last longer. Often, we expect people on food stamps to budget better than ourselves, but it is not always the case as the grocery store employee pointed out. Thus, the community should provide some budgeting tips, especially for those who need them the most.

What can be said about these results and the observations? My short study over the last eight weeks has shown that although the food stamps program comes short when providing a healthy diet for a needy-family, there are budgeting steps that the recipients can take to bridge that gap. This does not mean that simple budgeting would solve the problem, because with groceries that cost 50% over the allowed budget, even the thriftiest people have trouble making ends meet. What I am suggesting is for us to take steps to empower our fellow citizens so that we can break the ugly cycle of poverty and bad health and make our community a better place.

The Grocery Gap is Growing Bigger

My internship has definitely picked up pace since two weeks ago. My official supervisor, Ms. Mitchell, has finally come back from being with her mother. She is a super energetic lady who is enthusiastic about everything she does. While talking to her about my projects, she just thought up several more projects that I could work on. I definitely do not have the problem of having nothing to do.

One of the projects that have captured my interest and enthusiasm is the project on the grocery gap. When I first talked to Mrs. Butler on the topic, she was very vague about what this project involved. She just gave me the instructions to go out and find food prices to see if someone in Chesterfield County could eat healthily on food stamps. But she mentioned that this project was performed in Marlboro County, and her co-worker was able to fit the Thrifty Food Plan on the maximum food stamp allotment. However, she says that she seriously doubted that a family could survive on that budget. Don’t even mention eating healthy. Personally, I do too.

Last Friday, I was able to sit down with her and talk about the specifics of this project. Mrs. Butler is the head of the PlaceMatters project in Marlboro County. PlaceMatters is a program sponsored by the Joint Centers to investigate how the environment and the community situations affect the health of the residents.

I remember sitting in the lounge, facing Mrs. Butler as she asked me the question, “So if the circumstances around a family are preventing them from getting a job, an education, and a healthy life, what should we do? Where do we start? How can we change the situations?”

I stared her, expecting some kind of an answer, but it didn’t come. Then, I realized that it was the question that I am helping to answer. She did tell me that they have identified two major factors that they are receiving grants to change; one is health, and the other is youth development. For my small part of the big picture, I am in charge of seeing if people receiving food stamps in Chesterfield could eat healthy.

For me, that was too vague of a topic. I wanted to know why we needed to know this information. So I geared up all of my skills from writing various research papers at Duke and began my search. As weird as it is, I am excited about using my academic skills (learned at Duke) in a real-life situation. First, I went on Academic Premiere and downloaded several articles on the current food stamp program. Minda, the director of my scholarship, sent me an article from “News and Observer” that talked about how a family on food stamps was going hungry. With the high food prices, these mothers can only buy enough food until mid-month.

From my research, the main issue is that people are not healthy. This is a prevalent problem especially in the South. Diet is a major part of a healthy lifestyle, and the government is trying to promote how to eat healthy. The questions that many critics ask is, how do you expect people on food stamps to eat healthy when they don’t even have enough to eat? Is the food stamp supplement enough for a family to eat healthy?

The government seems to say yes. From their Thrifty Food Plan 2006, they gave a market basket that a family should be able to purchase on a budget (the Thrifty Food Plan is the basis for the maximum food stamps allotment). However, we have to keep in mind that the majority of people do not receive the maximum allotment because they have a small income. The government requires that they use 30% of their net budget on food. However, that 30% usually goes to buy toilet paper and other essentials not covered by the food stamps, so the food stamps is usually their entire budget for food. Also not to mention, the accessibility will also affect whether these people can eat healthy. If the nearest grocery store were 17 miles away (like in the case in Jefferson, SC), the gas fees would overwhelm a family with a gross income of $800 a month. Since they are limited to the nearby convenient stores, which do not carry groceries, they will be forced to buy unhealthy food.

An even worse situation would be that the family could not afford food in general, like the situation in the article. However, obesity still occurs in situations when people cannot afford food. An article by Denour et al. suggests that the phenomenon is called “Food Insecurity-Obesity Paradox.” Food insecurity is not the same as food insufficiency. They don’t even have to be hungry, but they have the psychological stress of worrying about not having enough to eat. Thus, in order to not go hungry, they chose to buy high-energy low-cost foods that contribute to obesity. The government even agrees that being on food stamps is associated with obesity in women between the age of 20 and 50. Denour et al. explains that obesity may not be found with children because mothers would starve, or eat unhealthily so that their children can eat well. Thus, we see obesity in women who are on food stamps.

After all of that, I have decided that in my time at the coordinating council, I cannot possible solve all of these situations. But what I can do is do a preliminary study with a small sample area too see if people can eat healthy with the factors mentioned above (like accessibility, and transportation costs). I can calculate an average food stamp allotment that would be the base of my budget. Maybe in the future, universities or policy makers could expand this study to the entire area so that there’s credibility to make real changes.

What I really hope for this project is that universities like Duke that has a focus on the rural Carolinas would be able to send funding and people power to help improve the communities in need. Right now, Mrs. Butler is understaffed and probably under-funded. What they are doing is great, but they need help from Ph.D.s and people who has the power to change policy to make any tangible changes.

How likely is this going to happen? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I am just blowing air on these issues. Now I understand the frustration of non-profits who try so hard to change something. It requires dogged determination and enthusiasm.