Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Funding Issues Cause an Organic Response at WIC

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 12-11-07

The Montana Women Infants and Children (WIC) program has decided to allow participants to continue buying organic food after all. Due to a flat-lined budget in recent years, Montana WIC was planning to remove organics from its approved list of foods on December 1st in order to continue serving 20,000 Montana families each month. But after a wealth of public outcry, Montana’s WIC administrators are rethinking the ban.

Established in 1974 to provide nutritional foods to the group of people often most at risk of malnutrition, WIC provides participants with information on healthy eating, referrals for health care and supplemental food such as milk, cereal and peanut butter. Unlike the food stamp program, participants are given a “package of food” made up of specific items they can purchase with WIC coupons .

Unlike all other WIC programs around the country, Montana’s is the only one that allows participants to buy organic food. However, the 2007-2008 list of allowed foods only includes organic milk and some locally produced organic milk. Of note, the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program allows participants to purchase locally grown, unprocessed food at farmers markets. But funding issues strap this program even more. Over the last few years, Montana has only gotten $57,000 for the Farmers Market program, which provides $30 per person for the entire year.

While Montana’s WIC no longer has plans to remove organic milk from the list, participants will have to buy the least expensive food option starting on March 1.  Because organic milk is more expensive than the conventionally produced counterpart, WIC will essentially have a de facto exclusion in place for organic food. While this will allow the program to serve more people, it may actually have deleterious affects on the nutrition WIC prides itself on providing.

According to a report in the 1993 Journal of Applied Nutrition, organically grown food had more minerals, including 60 percent more calcium, than conventionally grown food and had 30 percent less mercury. Another four year study revealed that organic food has 40 percent more antioxidants.

These nutritional benefits may be of even more importance for low-income eaters who cannot afford to purchase food like fruits and vegetables, which are more expensive than fatty foods. According to the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, calorie for calorie, junk foods actually cost less than fruits and vegetables, which may partially explain why the incidence of obesity is so high among low-income eaters.

Even with more extensive and definitive research on organics, the WIC program guidelines are slow to change. It was only in 2006 that WIC guidelines increased the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables that participants could buy. The delay was in part due to the intense lobbying pressure of the dairy industry, which had long argued against the increase because overall funding would not increase, leaving less money to spend on milk products. According to Michele Simon, author of “Appetite for Profit, “Over the years WIC has been quite a boon to the dairy industry and they’ve done a good job of keeping it that way.”

But as the general public understood the importance of fruit and vegetables, the agency was unable to bow to the industry pressure and the change was made. While similar awareness and public outcry have technically kept organics on the list for Montana’s WIC participants, additional funding is needed to keep them there. As WIC’s Director, Joan Bowsher, has said, the budget dilemma “goes far beyond organic foods.” For Bowsher and Montana’s WIC users, organics is just a harbinger of the budget crises to come as food prices rise and WIC funding stagnates.

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