America’s “Thrifty Food Plan”: Hunger, Mathematics, and the Valuation of Nutrition Assistance

The Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) determines maximum entitlements (i.e., food stamp allotments) for participants of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); it was last modified in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP). The TFP is a low-cost diet generated from a geometric program that incorporates data on current consumption patterns, federal nutritional and dietary guidelines, nutrient profiles of food groups, food prices, and predetermined budgets for seventeen age–sex groups. Scholars have previously critiqued the TFP for excluding labor time, underestimating household food waste, and ignoring geographical variation in food prices. In this article, I apply literatures from critical food studies and political economy of food to further deconstruct the TFP data and geometric program. I argue that the TFP reifies an industrial neoliberal capitalist valuation of food via federal dietary guidelines and relative price data. Moreover, the CNPP’s use of current consumption data as a proxy for palatability works to naturalize and depoliticize the structural and social inequalities of national and global food systems. Finally, a critical evaluation of the TFP mathematics reveals an unstable geometric program that requires multiple subjective manipulations to solve. This analysis shows that the TFP calculation reproduces a food budget insufficient for SNAP households to procure nutritious, culturally appropriate diets, essentially doing work to perpetuate hunger and poverty in the United States. I offer recommendations for changing this national valuation of food and nutrition assistance. Key Words: EBT, food justice, food security, food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.