USDA Tries to Serve Up Food Stamps to the Hungry : Poverty: Millions have been spent to make the program accessible. Critics say it encourages welfare.

Bucking the anti-welfare movement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is bankrolling a crusade to attract people to food stamps--the most broadly used federal anti-hunger effort, already serving one in nine Americans.

The effort is a striking turnaround for the USDA, which has issued grants totaling more than $2.5 million to 27 groups since last year in an attempt to make food stamps, the largest of 14 federal hunger programs, more accessible. Such federal outreach funding was banned throughout much of the 1980s, as government shunned the notion that taxpayers should pay to promote welfare programs.

The new policy means taxpayers are now underwriting the efforts of anti-hunger advocates such as Cynthia Lottie. Twice a week, Lottie and others from the nonprofit Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition scour welfare offices, hoping to ease the way for many among the millions who are eligible for food stamps but not receiving them.

On a recent morning, Lottie passes throngs of security guards and a metal detector as she enters the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services office Downtown. Every chair inside is taken, and people line the walls. The air reeks of sweat. Social workers in 12 plexiglass booths address people through microphones. Lottie announces: “Anyone have a problem with their case?”

“Yes! Right here!” exclaims Milton Oppenheimer, madly waving his arms in the air. Oppenheimer, 35, is beleaguered. This is his second trip to the office to apply for food stamps in the past week. On this day, he arrived at 7 a.m. After he repeatedly asked why he hasn’t been put on food stamps, the homeless man says, his social worker shut off her two-way microphone and shoved his application aside, asking him to move along. A security guard who has been out of work for two months, Oppenheimer says he is despondent. “I’m in limbo. I think they put my papers in the circular file.”

Lottie offers to help the Marine Corps veteran. Oppenheimer cheers her on. “Sure! Go in there! Kick some tail!” He adds: “Once you get hungry you get desperate. Then, you take care of No. 1. . . . This is America. C’mon. I’m a veteran, for God’s sake.”

Lottie files a complaint, then prods the social worker to put Oppenheimer on food stamps, arguing that he is clearly eligible. An hour later, Oppenheimer’s name blares over the loudspeaker as he is called to be fingerprinted and issued a food stamp identification card. Oppenheimer says he can now spend his time looking for another job as a security guard or in a factory rather than standing in soup kitchen lines.

As a homeless man, Oppenheimer is part of one group the federal government is trying to reach through its new efforts to promote hunger assistance programs. Others are the elderly and the working poor--people who often don’t know about food stamps, falsely believe they are not eligible, are stymied by the bureaucracy or avoid applying out of shame, sometimes going hungry instead, USDA officials say. The policy shift--which probably will be reviewed by the new Republican majority in Congress--also reflects a recognition of research that shows the ranks of hungry Americans have burgeoned to up to 30 million, many of them children.

In Los Angeles, $200,000 in federal money now funds seven public service television ads--airing in English and Spanish since August--that urge people to look into food stamps. “Food stamps can help you in tough times,” the announcer intones, flashing the Interfaith Hunger Coalition hot line number. A San Francisco grant helps five city outreach workers promote food stamps in senior citizen centers and subsidized child-care centers. And in New York City, the Community Food Resource Center Inc. scours unemployment, utility and telephone offices to sign people up.

Soon, the USDA will announce a $5-million, two-year national nutrition education blitz by the agency. The aim is not only to inform children about the benefits of good eating, but to use the agency’s first coast-to-coast billboard, television, radio and print ad campaign to highlight the nation’s anti-hunger programs.

Some oppose the agency’s new outreach attempts. “The government should be discouraging people from getting on welfare. We used to tell people we wanted them to be self-sufficient,” says Robert Rector, senior welfare policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The federal government will spend $40.2 billion in fiscal 1995 for 14 anti-hunger programs, including food stamps and school lunches, roughly 60% of the Agriculture Department’s budget. “What we are doing is generating a huge population of dependent people who work less, marry less and rely on the government more,” Rector said.

Many in Congress are moving in the opposite direction of the Agriculture Department, determined to cap spending on food stamps and other welfare entitlement programs whose budgets until now have expanded to meet the burgeoning numbers of eligible applicants. Almost 69% of those eligible received food stamps in 1992, the most recent figure available--up from nearly 56% in 1989. One welfare reform bill--which estimates that the total welfare tab will swell from $328 billion to $500 billion by 1998--requires that the growth rate in these programs be held to 3.5% each year.

But USDA officials and many food policy experts point out that two-thirds of the elderly who are eligible for food stamps and more than half of the working poor go without. Some opt instead for church-sponsored food pantries, but these, facing more clients and fewer food donations, are overwhelmed, forcing them to limit their assistance and turn away many requests for help. “There are many needy people who aren’t participating,” said James Ohls, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research Inc., which conducts government studies on food stamps.

Contrary to widespread perceptions of dependency, most food stamp recipients use the program for less than seven months. More than a third, however, again sign up for food stamps within a year of leaving the program. “A lot of this is people moving in and out of jobs,” said University of Wisconsin professor and welfare expert Maurice MacDonald, who contends that food stamps therefore are doing exactly what society wants: preventing hunger. Recent studies, MacDonald said, have measured the disincentive to work generated by food stamps and found the effect is minor.

“These programs exist to serve all who are eligible and hungry. If we aren’t reaching them, we should,” said USDA Undersecretary Ellen Haas, who intends to continue outreach funding.

The government’s new efforts are unlikely to curb what many see as the main factor driving hunger: the growing number of people falling into poverty. Although outreach, increased government assistance and an expanding economy drastically reduced the ranks of the hungry in the 1970s, their numbers soared by 50% between 1985 and 1991, according to Tufts University reports, as global economic shifts brought a loss of manufacturing jobs and erosion of income.

“The problem is more with our poverty policy than our hunger policy. It is our continuing failure to address poverty,” said Peter Eisinger, director of the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, Public Policy and Administration Program at the University of Wisconsin. Contrary to earlier spurts of economic growth, expansion of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s pulled more people--now almost one in six--into poverty, as a growing number were left to compete for low-paying service jobs. Earnings for the average man without a high school degree plummeted to an inflation-adjusted $14,439 in 1989 from $22,858 in 1967.

Mounting divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births have left more parents to raise and feed children on one salary. Spending on public housing declined, forcing nearly half of low-income families to spend 70% of their earnings on housing, and less on food. Those who seek out government assistance such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children have seen benefits for a family of three plummet 47% since 1970, when adjusted for inflation. “The government must create incentives to keep jobs in the U.S.” and discourage their flight to lower-wage countries, said Marc Cohen, senior research associate with the nonprofit advocacy group Bread for the World. “The problem isn’t really with the (anti-hunger) programs. It is with the lack of high priority for a full employment economy.”

Still, in California, only half of those eligible for food stamps receive them. Focus groups conducted this summer by the nonprofit California Food Policy Advocates found that many falsely believe a person must be homeless or unemployed to qualify for food stamps; many elderly say that despite hunger, they cannot ask for a government handout. Others say that because food stamp benefits are adjusted according to a person’s income, small benefits for some are outweighed by application waits that can last days in dangerous and dirty welfare offices.

Welfare offices often close their doors early--2 p.m. in Los Angeles. Anyone with a car valued at more than $4,550 is disqualified. Food stamp recipients must file monthly reports and reapply every six months, even if their incomes do not change. Those who want to apply for various federal anti-hunger programs must deal with up to four separate agencies that manage the programs in California, according to the Government Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm. “We need to simplify procedures,” Haas said. “Today, many people sit in food stamp offices all day.”

Participation problems affect other USDA anti-hunger programs, where nearly two-thirds of recipients, according to the GAO, are children. Most children who are eligible for a free or reduced-price breakfast at school don’t get it because their districts don’t participate in the program. Fewer than 17% of children getting free or reduced-price lunches at school last year received summer meals because of the lack of sponsors, according to the Food Research and Action Center.

Ohls, the government’s food stamp researcher at Mathematica, noted that those receiving food stamps typically get enough coupons to last three weeks, leaving them hungry the last week of the month. The average benefit, 74 cents per meal, is only about half of what the USDA calculates is needed for a nutritionally balanced diet. Benefits are low because the Agriculture Department’s formula unrealistically assumes that even applicants with very low incomes can set aside 30% for food, Ohls said. Another assumption--that people who often lack cars can shop at low-priced supermarkets absent from many inner cities--is equally unrealistic, said David Super, general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group. “Clearly,” Ohls said, “people who are on food stamps are hungry. It is not satisfying all their food needs.”

Among the USDA’s highest priorities now is to substitute a plastic credit card for traditional paper food stamp coupons. The recipient’s benefit amount becomes a kind of credit limit; purchases are deducted at the cash register. The process, which operates in six areas of the country, is meant to be less vulnerable to fraud and also reduce the stigma for food stamp users. California’s program is scheduled to begin in San Bernardino and San Diego counties in 1995, followed by Los Angeles the next year.

While the government moves to modernize its food stamp program, people like Sondra Trudeau are at the front lines in welfare offices, helping the public sign up.

Trudeau, an Interfaith Hunger Coalition trainee, encounters people struggling with the 10-page food stamp application--shorter than those in other states, which run up to 40 pages long. Sometimes tempers flare. “If I see you on the street, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you,” one woman says, gesturing angrily in a social worker’s direction as security guards guide her toward the door of the South-Central office.

A 58-year-old woman with bad eyesight who can’t read or write approaches Trudeau, who has helped three others get food stamps today. Her food stamps stopped eight months ago--she’s not sure why, but she wants to get them again. This is her seventh trip to the office, says the former garment worker, who is looking for work as a nanny or cleaning lady because she can no longer see well enough to sew. “No one will help me,” she laments, explaining that she has spent five hours in the office today alone.

Nearly two hours later, Trudeau has worked with the woman’s social worker to gain her $115 in food stamps and $212 in general relief. Deeply moved, the woman, explaining that she is very hungry, quietly says to Trudeau, “Thank God. Thank you.”

About This Series

In this series, The Times examines four battlegrounds in the war on hunger in Southern California.

* Sunday: Hungry children, caught in the battles over school breakfast.

* Monday: The growing salvage food industry--spawned by hard times--takes a bite out of charitable food banks.

* Today: U.S. Department of Agriculture changes course and launches a crusade to attract more people to food stamps.

* Wednesday: A one-woman crusade to ease neighborhood hunger, one family at a time.

Fighting Hunger With Food Stamps

The food stamp program is the government’s single largest effort to fight hunger, providing people whose net income is at or below the poverty level with coupons that can be used to purchase food in grocery stores. About one in nine Americans--and nearly half a million households in Los Angeles County--receive food stamps. The program, which has bipartisan support, was first developed during the Depression. Food stamps can be used to buy most food, but not alcohol or cigarettes.

HOW IT WORKS

* Applications: In Los Angeles County, the Department of Public Social Services--the local welfare agency--handles applications (although applicants do not have to be receiving welfare).

* The coupons: In denominations of $1, $5 and $10. Recipients pick up their booklets of coupons on or after an assigned date.

* Outlets: Coupons can be used at any store certified by the USDA, which includes most grocery stores in Los Angeles.

Can purchase

* Meat and vegetables

* Bread and cereal

* Soft drinks and candy

Can’t purchase

* Alcohol

* Cigarettes

* Detergents, toilet paper, soap, cleaning supplies

RECIPIENTS IN THE U.S.

* 62% of households include children; of those, more than two-thirds are single-parent homes

* 52% of the recipients are under age 18

By race White: 44.6% Black: 35.4% Latino: 12.3% Asian, Native American, and other: 7.7% The numbers

In L.A. County: 1.1 million

In California: 3.1 million

How long

* Two-thirds of all recipients are in the program less than a year

* However, more than a third of those return to the program within 12 months

The benefits

$67.96-the average received per person per month

74 cents-the average received per person per meal

ELIGIBILITY

Anyone whose net income is at or below the poverty level, including the elderly, the childless and the working poor. Disallowed are people with countable assets of more than $2,000 or a car valued at more than $4,550. Nationwide, the gross income cutoff is:

* $1,604--monthly income for family of four

* $798--monthly income for individual

Nationwide participation Total federal cost In the program in millions in billions 1973 12.2 $2.2 1975 17.1 $4.6 1977 17.1 $5.5 1979 21.1 $6.9 1981 21.7 $11.2 1983 21.6 $11.8 1985 19.9 $11.7 1987 19.1 $11.6 1989 18.8 $12.9 1991 22.6 $18.7 1993 27.0 $23.6

Source: USDA

How to Help

If you would like to give money or volunteer help, here are some suggestions:

THE REGION

* Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition: (213) 913-7333 ext. 10

LOS ANGELES COUNTY

* The Los Angeles Regional Foodbank: (213) 234-3030

* The Foodbank of Southern California: (310) 435-3577

* Love Is Feeding Everyone: (213) 936-0895

RIVERSIDE, SAN BERNARDINO COUNTIES

* Survive Food Bank: (909) 359-4757

VENTURA COUNTY

* Food Share Inc.: (805) 647-3944

ORANGE COUNTY

* Food Distribution Center: (714) 771-1343

* Orange County Community Development Council: (714) 897-6670

IN NEED OF HELP

* If you are a hungry person in need of help, call the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition’s hot line at (800) 328-6476.

Hunger Series Reprints

* Reprints of the Times’ four-part series, “The Hunger Wars,” will be available by mail after the conclusion of the series. Call Times on Demand, 808-8463, press *8630, select option 3 and order item 5510. $4.50

Details on Times electronic services and instructions for ordering by mail, B4.