Back in 1939, Mabel McFiggin of Rochester, an unemployed factory worker, became the first American to get food stamps. She used them to buy surplus butter, eggs and prunes, beneath a sign reading, "We are helping the farmers of America."
The Depression-era food stamp program lasted only a few years, but in 1964 a new food stamp law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Its $375 million three-year cost sounded like a lot of money, but images of malnourished children in Appalachia seemingly quelled the Darwinian impulses that so often seize members of Congress.
Maybe that last phrase is unfair. But if not with the ultimate hope that the weak will helpfully perish, leaving more for we who are strong, why else would you take away what little resources poor people have? But that's getting ahead of the story.
Until now, the food stamp program's survival was helped by the fact that it is a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since its original goal wasn't only to feed people but also to support the American farmers who grow the food. So what's now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (which uses a swipe card, not food stamps anymore) has always been a part of the multi-year farm bill, which helps farmers stay in business through such programs as subsidized crop insurance, marketing help and conservation programs.
And that was political genius: Legislators from urban areas, where a lot of people depend on food aid, voted for the bill to protect their constitutents, and a similar political calculation bought the support of rural legislators whose farm constituents depended on crop aid.
Then a few weeks ago this clever trade-off bit the dust. The House split the bill's farm and nutrition sections, pushing through a farm bill after defeating a plan to cut $20 billion from SNAP — a slice conservative Republicans called too low and Democrats said was too high.
Which led to the action this week, when the Republican-led House narrowly approved a bill to instead cut twice that amount from the nutrition program over the coming decade.
Even with that trim, SNAP is likely to cost $700 billion in that period. That's because of need, fueled by a recession that isn't over for the working poor and the jobless. One in eight Americans now gets food aid. Twice as many people use it now as before the 2008 collapse.
The Democrat-led Senate has passed a bill that maintains the merger of food aid and farm policy, and makes one-tenth the cuts to nutrition programs that the House has demanded.
Legislative compromise is now needed, but the House's Republican leaders — that is, de facto, the 40 deeply-steeped tea party supporters — won't go along with anything of the sort that the Senate has passed. So now the Capitol is stalled, of course, as it always is in this era of post-governing government. Food aid and farm aid are both in peril.
"If they don't move forward with the farm bill," said Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, "they will have to do something in essence to keep the agriculture markets from just being totally turned upside down."
So consider what's going on this weekend at Saratoga Performing Arts Center. It's Farm Aid, the mega-concert that over the past 28 years has raised $43 million to help family farmers. Today 25,000 people will get to hear Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and 13 other acts, all performing free to raise money for farmers.
Farm Aid provides small grants to individual family farms in crisis, but focuses mostly on programs to build local and regional food systems that connect farmers directly to consumers. Most Americans eat food produced by huge factory farms, but it's the part-time farmers on small plots of land, often using organic methods, that make up the fastest-growing segment of U.S. agriculture. Farm Aid mainly looks out for them. On Friday resellers had a few dozen Farm Aid tickets left, with lawn seats starting at $111.
That single ticket price is pretty close to the average monthly food aid benefit the federal government provides: $131. Most beneficiaries are children, elderly or disabled, but military families rely on $100 million in food aid a year, and 170,000 veterans would lose out under the House plan.
Some supporters of the House bill say cutting that money is an essential step toward weaning people off government aid. Charity, they say, is more a job for churches and community-based efforts than for the government.
Many religious leaders don't see it that way. The Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the evangelical left, wrote Thursday in The Huffington Post: "The Bible clearly says that governmental authority includes the protection of the poor in particular, and instructs political rulers to promote their well-being."
It sounds logical to me. Big problems usually require big solutions. Farm Aid is a generous and fun way to support some small farms, but we wouldn't expect it to keep agricultural markets healthy. Is it any more useful to expect our poor and hungry citizens to get by without a full measure of help from a caring government? That's the real link between food and farm aid, and why we need to support both.