Wicked WIC

~ Laura

Matt Yglesias writes about the stupid food restrictions for WIC recipients. As the only political blogger who has actually been on WIC, let me tell you how it works. From an old post of mine:

… The vouchers are made out for very specific items. You can’t blow it
all on Twinkies. There were vouchers for cheese (Monteray Jack or
cheddar), whole milk, frozen juice (orange, apple, or grape), and
formula. Formula was the real prize. Baby guzzles about $100 of formula
a month.

The vouchers have very specific dates on them.  They have to be used up by a certain week or they become void.

Now for the weird part. You can’t redeem your voucher for formula
and walk out of the supermarket. You had to buy everything, the cheese
and the juice and the milk, whether you wanted it or not. Most
annoyingly, they required you to purchase vast quantities of milk. Like
two or three gallons per week. Far more than an average person could
consume. We had to give away some of the milk to neighbors so it
wouldn’t go bad.

Now for the annoying part. You had to cart all that milk home. Not
every supermarket accepts WIC vouchers. We had to walk to a far off
supermarket over on Broadway. All that milk doesn’t fit in the back of
babystroller, so you had to have someone help you get it all home. I
suppose if you had car it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But I’ll let you
in on a secret. A lot of poor people don’t have cars.

Surely, there was some deal with the milk farmers over this one.
Some Vermont Senator got a little pork back home in exchange for my
backache.

That was the abbreviated story of us on WIC. I could tell you how
humiliating it was to get the voucher signed by the store manager. Or
long waits at the WIC office to get recertified. Or the required
parenting classes.

Megan is talking about it, too.

UPDATE: In defense of WIC.

Published by Laura

16 thoughts on “Wicked WIC”

  1. You can make a very tasty spreadable white cheese in your bathroom with that kind of milk supply. My Polish in-laws used to make cheese that way, and in our graduate student days, my husband did it once during my tenure. We only had one bathroom, though, so the project was not continued.

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  2. The best part is when some grocery stores have all the big cans of juice and blocks of cheese in a special section with a large “WIC APPROVED” sign on every shelf. Just in case no one knows what you’re buying and why and that you aren’t stocking up on caviar with your govt check.

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  3. Amy,
    Just out of curiosity, is there any reason you had to make the cheese in the bathroom rather than the kitchen?

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  6. It was a microscopic studio apartment kitchen and a multiple-day process, so it was just slightly less convenient to use the bathroom. As I mentioned, the experiment was not continued.

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  7. “slightly more convenient”
    Speaking of multiple-use bathrooms, the traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner is a carp bought live and kept fresh swimming in your bathtub until the last possible moment.

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  11. “That last post was not a right-wing talking point.”
    Does that mean it *doesn’t* come from some right-wing blog, where they’re talking about cheese and fish in the bathroom? And, that I’m not going to encounter a bunch of people talking about bathroom cheese & fish at different sites (that can be traced to a common interconnected information nodes)? 🙂
    bj

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  12. Speaking of mistreating carp, when I was in college, I watched a guy plug them with arrows. He had a reel on the bow and a arrow-heads that would hold the fishing line and that had a little springy thing to hold the fish. Carp were all we could find floating near enough the surface to hit. We’d never heard of anyone eating carp, so we gave them away to some guy who asked for them. Maybe he was Polish.

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  13. Bathtub carp are a standard Polish practice, but I’ve never met anyone besides my in-laws who have tried to cure spreadable cheese over their bathtubs.
    Question: Purely theoretically, would regulations allow you to buy live chickens with food stamps? I keep hearing that there is a lot of backyard poultry raising done by Latin Americans in big American cities, and when I googled Los Angeles raising chickens, I came across a 2007 NYT story on urban chicken farmers.

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  15. We always considered carp too bony for anything but sport. Of course, now I know “bones = flavor” if you cook correctly.

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