SNAP benefits max out at $38 a week for adult women. A new bill would change that

The TFP is one of four official USDA food plans, the others being the Low-Cost Plan, the Moderate-Cost Plan, and the Liberal Plan. Adams’s proposal would shift SNAP benefits to the agency’s Low-Cost Food Plan, which budgets $48.40 a week for the same demographic.

But if more than half of people who rely on it can’t make the TFP last a full month, where did that allotment come from in the first place?

According to Angela Babb, a post-doctoral research fellow at Indiana University who wrote her dissertation on the TFP, the calculation dates back to the 1970s. That’s when Miriam Rodway, a woman from Jamaica, New York, sued USDA, arguing that food stamps weren’t worth enough money to purchase a “nutritionally adequate” diet—a directive of the 1964 Food Stamp Act. The court ruled with Rodway et al., and the agency was forced to rethink the system.

Instead of setting a monthly allotment based on the true cost of a healthy diet, however, USDA created a diet that justified the existing allotment. “The USDA resolved to create a computerized, mathematical program that would set the existing budget, and calculate a diet that met that budget in order to prove that the budget was enough,” Babb says.

Thus, the TFP was born. But even in the beginning, it wasn’t built around recipients’ real food and nutritional needs. A closer look at the numbers reveals that the total allotment is based on some surprising (and frankly weird) assumptions about what people might have to eat in order to achieve a “healthy” diet that also costs them less than $40 a week. On the TFP, it’s suggested that an adult woman, for instance, might need to drink three cups of milk per day. It also lumps meats and beans together into one of the five major food groups.

“They’re not calculating a budget by which people can survive or thrive,” Babb says. She also argues that any expectation that SNAP recipients would need to consume that much dairy every day is more than just impractical. “It’s institutional racism against the one in four Americans who are lactose intolerant,” she says.

Babb found other nutritional gaps in the TFP, too. In the most recent USDA analysis of the updated Thrifty “market basket”—a model of suggested food consumption patterns—researchers concluded that most TFP baskets exceeded the Dietary Guidelines for sodium. What’s more, they couldn’t come up with a hypothetical basket that would provide adequate levels of vitamin E and potassium for all age groups.

Babb filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn more about the manual adjustments researchers made to the mathematical equation to force it to fit into the existing allotment. “The most outrageous one is they adjust the constraint for females 14-18 so that they’re allowed up to 40 times the [recommended] meat,” she says.

There’s no telling whether Adams’s bill will get any traction in Congress. As FERN reported, she filed similar proposals in the Republican-controlled House with little success. And it’s unclear that the Low-Cost Food Plan would adequately fund nutritious diets across the board, either. MIT’s Living Wage calculator estimates a Brooklyn-based woman needs $290 a month for food, roughly $85 more than the Low-Cost Food Plan allotment.

In the meantime, looks like it’s milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for most TFP eaters.