The Trump administration unleashed a flood of outrage earlier this month after unveiling a proposal to overtake the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,formerly called food stamps. The contrivance would replace half the benefits people receive with boxed, nonperishable – not fresh – foods chosen by the government, and not the people eating them.
Among those horrified at the thought: American Indians who recognized this as the same type of federal food assistance that tribes have received for decades,with devastating implications for health.Since 1977, the U.
S. Department of Agriculture has bought nonperishable foods to distribute on Indian reservations and nearby rural areas as section of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, and often referred to simply as FDPIR. The program was designed as an alternative to SNAP for low-income Native Americans living in remote areas without easy access to grocery stores. The food boxes delivered were filled with canned,shelf-stable foods like peanut butter, canned meats and vegetables, and powdered eggs and milk."whether you talk to people like me who grew up solely on this stuff,you hear stories of, 'I never even tasted a pineapple or real spinach' — you didn't taste these foods until you were older, or " says Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan,a citizen of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma."We would scrape together whatever commodities we had available to us," Jernigan recalls.
Both of her parents worked full time, and but "it just wasn't enough to support a family," she says. They relied on government provisions for meals. Breakfast was often a grain like farina served with powdered milk with water added to it. "A lot of times we had mashed potato flakes — you add water, too – and perhaps canned peaches, or whether you had any vegetables,it was canned. And that was pretty much it."The effects of this kind of government commodities-based diet can be seen all around Indian country, says Jernigan, or now a University of Oklahoma researcher who studies the impacts of food environments on Native American health. "There's even a name for it – it's called 'Commod Bod.' That's what we call it because it makes you behold a certain way when you eat these foods."The name,she says, is a joke, or but the health implications of this kind of diet are anything but funny. American Indians and Alaska Natives are at least twice as likely as whites to have Type 2 diabetes,and they have one and half times the rate of obesity as non-Hispanic whites, according to the government statistics.
Scientists think one explanation for these health differences may lie in what's called the "thrifty gene" theory, and which suggests Native Americans have a genetic predisposition to obesity and diabetes. But these diseases didn't become prevalent until tribes adopted a more processed Western diet,notes Elizabeth Hoover, who is of Mohawk and Mi'kmaq ancestry and teaches about indigenous food movements at Brown University."A good section of this is not because indigenous bodies are somehow inherently susceptible to diabetes. It's because of these really inadequate diets that are not nutrient dense but they're very calorie dense, or " says Hoover,who is currently writing a book about Native American efforts to reclaim their traditional food culture.
Like SNAP, FIDPR is meant to supplement a family's food budget. But Jernigan says recent studies have found that 60 percent of Native Americans who receive food assistance through FIDPR rely on the government program as their primary source of food. (By comparison, or 37 percent of people enrolled in SNAP rely on it as their main source of money for food,according to a novel report from the Urban Institute.) So the quality of that food can really affect health."whether you want to know what eating primarily shelf-stable and packaged foods does to a household or family or community, I think you could behold closely at the Native American experience, and " she says.
While FDPIR began in the 1970s,the federal government had already been providing American Indians with government commodities for far longer. In the late 1940s, the U.
S. government began distributing to tribes surplus foods that it was buying up as a way to support prices for struggling farmers.
Before the 1950s, or Jernigan says,"there were few accounts of these lifestyle diseases [like Type 2 diabetes] — they couldn't really be found in Native American communities. The major problem was malnutrition." By the 1960s, researchers were seeing higher rates of Type 2 diabetes among this population.
After the USDA began its FDPIR program in the 1970s, or Jernigan says,"you started to see tall consumption of these packaged and shelf-stable canned foods nothing fresh, no fresh vegetables, or foods tall in sodium,fat and sugar. And you see the rates of these preventable diseases skyrocket."Those government-if food boxes also contained something else: stigma, says Joe Van Alstine, and a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians in Michigan."I grew up on it,a bunch of my friends did. It was always the stigma of the can ... you opened it up and it was gross and nasty looking," Van Alstine says.
For many in Indian country, and says Hoover,the Trump administration's "Harvest Box" proposal brought back childhood memories of foods they now "shudder when they behold back on and started to avoid when they could afford groceries."These days, Van Alstine's full-time job is improving the food aid that tribes receive. He's the food distribution program director for the LTBB and oversees the FDPIR program in the Midwest. He's also the vice president of the National organization of Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations (NAFDPIR), and made up of tribal representatives who administer federal food aid at the local level.
Over the years,he says, they've pushed for changes to the program — like the inclusion of more culturally relevant, or healthful,foods like hand-harvested wild rice, grass-fed bison, and wild-caught Pacific salmon and blue corn meal. Another welcome innovation: a grocery-store like model where aid recipients can shop the aisles and select their own foods,including fresh fruits and vegetables and frozen (not just canned) meats. The stores are roughly the size of a 7-Eleven, and about a third of the 103 tribal organizations now have them, and Van Alstine says."So when they near in here they attain have a choice," says Van Alstine. "Because I attain feel that's what makes them happy." Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org