In 1972, Congress established the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), to provide nutritional assistance to families below the poverty line. Public health can only go so far when young mothers can’t afford the staple products of a healthy diet, and WIC made it so most women can.
In terms of participation, Oregon’s WIC program is wildly successful since its inception in 1974. Oregon’s Department of Human Services claims that about $70 million annually goes directly to “nutritional” food (as determined by the Food and Drug Administration) for lower-income families.
Seventy million is a relatively small number — in the context of the state and federal budgets that jointly fund WIC — that assists a large number of working families who are below the poverty line. In Oregon, WIC assisted 40 percent of women who gave birth in 2008 statewide, and 50 percent in rural counties, according to a 2008 state report. This assistance translates directly into improved nutrition; for example, 89 percent of women on the program are able to breast feed their infants — above the national average of 74 percent.
Despite the successes of WIC, the bureaucracy is stuck in 1972. A 2005 U.S. Department of Agriculture audit report indicated 28 percent of the Oregon program’s $62 million price tag was, in administrative costs, “a significant and increasing share of total WIC costs.”
It’s not difficult to pinpoint the inefficiencies that contribute to pricey paper shuffling. Unlike other federal food programs, such as food stamps — now offered through “electronic benefit transfer” debit cards instead of literal “stamps”— WIC continues to rely on a paper check system.
To receive the physical vouchers, WIC participants must make appointments at an official clinic. Then, within a month, the woman or her partner must use the stack of checks at a WIC-registered supermarket. Each check is written like a prescription for food, specifying certain brands and quantities of milk, cheese, eggs, cereal, beans, rice, bread, tortillas, juice, canned fish or peanut butter.
“What’s nice is that everything is specified precisely. Though, admittedly, this can be frustrating for both the customer and the cashier,” said a manager I spoke with at the East 18th Avenue Safeway in Eugene. “For example, maybe all we have is the 18-ounce peanut butter, but the check says 16-ounce.”
The human experience of the WIC process is indeed frustrating, as I recall from my after-school job cashiering at a supermarket in my hometown. Whenever a WIC customer got in line, my closed sign went up so that I could check all of the paperwork and roam about the store looking for the WIC-endorsed brand of cheddar cheese or pinto beans. Inevitably the customer would feel guilty for holding me up, and I would feel guilty for holding up the customer. The customer’s baby, on hip, would start screaming because babies don’t care about the bureaucracy between them and their food.
The strict specifications about brands and quantities are not based on nutritional requirements, but on cost; the corporations that offer the lowest-cost food packages to the federal government gain exclusive rights to WIC certification. In cold cereal, for example, the WIC participant can choose between Post or General Mills products, and that’s pretty much it.
By focusing on quantity and price, rather than quality, the nutritional standards of WIC are also stuck in the ’70s, back when everyone was still gung-ho about mono-cropping corn, wheat, and soy “fencerow-to-fencerow” across the Midwest, and only fringe health-nuts were worried about the effect of hormones in milk on the developing body.
My new after-school job, cashiering at one of Eugene’s natural grocers, gives me a close perspective on the consequences of government agencies in bed with America’s factory-food industry. Sundance Natural Foods stocks almost exclusively organic products, which eliminates the shop from WIC eligibility; the Oregon brochure of “WIC-approved foods” stipulates in nearly every category that organic products are “not allowed.” Small businesses like Sundance already struggle to make their product standards accessible to lower-income customers, and it doesn’t help when the federal government actually says “no” to pregnant women who want hormone-free milk or a wider variety of grains. Quinoa, for example, actually has higher protein content than rice.
Though nutrition is as essential to public health as the doctor’s office, if not more so, prescribing certain doses of processed wheat or dairy like medicine misses the mark. Malnutrition is a disease with a diversity of anecdotes that vary based on agricultural region, cultural tradition, and the particular body in question. If the DHS and the federal government need to cut costs, they should do so by upgrading WIC to 21st century paper-shuffling methods, rather than restricting the ability of lower-income women to make autonomous decisions about their families’ health. 
[email protected]