Liberals, lost on a highway paved with good intentions

As a card-carrying liberal I probably shouldn’t be pushing this, but over at Slate you can see Heather Tirado Gilligan struggling to obey the dictates of both political correctness and common sense with regard to the Women, Infants, and Children Program, devised by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (and the U.S. Congress) to improve the health of low-income expectant and nursing mothers and young children, providing the mothers with cash assistance (in the form of electronic vouchers) to buy healthy foods, along with education regarding nutrition, breast-feeding, immunization, et al.

As Gilligan, who herself has used WIC, explains it, the “healthy foods” part is the rub: “WIC has strict requirements for purchases, with a goal of providing nutritious foods specifically for pregnant and nursing women and children under 5. I could use my WIC vouchers for formula, milk, cheese, juice, grains, fruit, veggies, or beans. The brands and sizes I could buy were spelled out in a WIC buying guide, right down to the kind of eggs allowed: only white, no brown, no eggs from cage-free chickens.” Which means that shopping with a WIC card can be a hassle, because unless you’re careful, your purchase might not be covered by the program.

A program that hassles poor people? That’s pretty awful. But wait, there’s more. There are stores that sell only WIC-approved products, but they tend to be expensive, almost as if they were charging their customers extra for convenience, and almost as if they couldn’t negotiate the same low wholesale prices as, you know, WalMart.

So why can’t WIC be like SNAP, aka “Food Stamps”, which let you buy anything you can eat? Okay, SNAP has been accused of exacerbating the obesity “crisis” (by letting people buy, and eat, anything they like), but, well, one capitalist conspiracy at a time, right? And, anyway, Gilligan’s daughter doesn’t like half the stuff that’s WIC-approved, and does like a lot of stuff that isn’t WIC-approved, and who told the government they know what’s good for moms and kids in the first place? And as for breast-feeding, don’t get me (Gilligan, that is) started! Don’t even get me started!

Afterwords
There are, naturally, efforts afoot to prevent people from using SNAP to buy both Big Gulps and crab legs [Insert frog legs joke here].¹ Did Ronald Reagan ever complain about “strapping young bucks” buying steaks with Food Stamps? Show me the video and I’ll believe it, but until then, not.²

If you really want to know the full nine yards on WIC, including the devilish question of culturally relevant foods, Wikipedia can get you started.

I can imagine that, once upon a time, WIC was a simple program, allowing expectant mothers and mothers of infants to buy healthy staples like milk and bread at reduced prices. But inevitably, the questions would start. Is chocolate milk milk? Is a doughnut bread? If milk is healthy, what about butter? And if butter is okay, what about margarine? And what about cheese? And what about imports? More recently, a very wide range of “concerns” (aka “neurotic obsessions”) have developed over food—and over child rearing in general—pushing the program this way and that, on top of pressures both from commercial interests wanting to expand the market for their products and censors wanting either to prevent loafers from gorging themselves on cuisses de grenouille à la Provençale on the public’s dime or to prevent innocent poor folk from poisoning themselves with dilute carbonated corn syrup.