Food Stamps

Shortly after his 1984 landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan, Walter F. Mondale found himself standing alongside George S. McGovern at a luggage carousel on the bottom level of the old Washington National Airport. Mondale posed a plaintive question to McGovern. "George," he asked the former South Dakota senator, who lost 49 states in his presidential race more than a dozen years earlier, "how long does it take for the hurt to wear off?" "Fritz," Mr. McGovern said to the former vice president, who also lost 49 states, "I'll call you when it does.

DANVILLE, Vt. - Small dairy farmers in the Northeast and Wisconsin say a tough year has been made worse by Congress' failure to pass a new farm bill before the old one expired. While many farm programs have continued through the harvest season even though the farm bill expired Sept. 30, a program that pays dairy farmers when milk prices plummet has ended. Many dairy farms were already struggling with low milk prices and high fuel and feed costs as the worst drought in decades dried up grazing land and pushed up the price of hay and feed.

Does a healthy diet cost more than a junk-food diet in America? That depends on whom you ask, how you measure food and, most important, if you know how to cook. This year the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a new analysis indicating that fruits, vegetables, grains and low-fat milk tend to be less expensive by weight and serving size than fatty, sugary foods and meat, fish, and poultry. The takeaway message, according to its authors: Healthful foods actually cost less than foods we are supposed to restrict.

THE RECENTLY eliminated $149 million state-funded general-assistance public-welfare program helped many recovering addicts pay their rent at recovery homes. Drug-recovery-house operators, experts and city officials expect big changes in the industry and worry that those in recovery may wind up on the street. "Forty percent of people who live in recovery houses receive general assistance. Landlords rely on that income," said Michael Froehlich, staff attorney with Community Legal Services.

By Adele LaTourette It's difficult to fathom that a state as wealthy as New Jersey requires federal aid to help many of its families meet one of life's most basic needs: food. But a combination of low wages, a high cost of living, and nearly 10 percent unemployment - the highest rate in more than three decades - makes social safety nets such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program crucial in the Garden State. Formerly known as food stamps, SNAP continues to be one of the state's and the country's most important means of ensuring that people - many of them children and senior citizens - have access to nutritious food.

The tomato defied reason. Implausibly large and cartoonishly red, it had grown to stunning maturity in Hunting Park, of all places, risen out of hard urban dirt into the car-polluted sunshine. "Beautiful," declared Steveanna Wynn, the woman whose strong will cut this farm into the city where she's been feeding the hungry for decades. In a profession where people easily burn out, Wynn, 65, burns on, steady and bright. She persists even now, the hardest time in her memory.

Democrats say wrong things, too Your editorial Wednesday ("Will comments define GOP?") asked whether Missouri Republican U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin's controversial comments about rape would define the GOP. I don't know, should Joe Biden's comment about putting "y'all back in chains" define the Democatic Party? Should Harry Reid's comment to schoolchildren that "this president [George W. Bush] is a loser" define Democrats? How's that for civil discourse! Maybe we should define Democrats with this gem: Speaking to a NASA official about a satellite being sent to Mars, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee asked if the unmanned rover would pass the spot where American astronauts left the flag.

For decades, hundreds of houses in Philadelphia and its suburbs have sheltered recovering drug users. Entrepreneurs, many themselves formerly addicted, invested in cheap, dilapidated mansions and rowhouses, filling them with addicts struggling to get clean. Linked to Philadelphia's extensive treatment services, the houses were largely financed by the residents' small monthly welfare checks. Until Aug. 1. That's when the state cut off those payments, ending general assistance for some 68,000 people, including several thousand addicts.

When undercover federal agents visited Aunty Florence's West African Market in Darby in 2010, they found the owner willing to illegally exchange food-stamp benefits for cash. Florence Kingsley, 59, of Darby, pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal district court to food-stamp fraud. A Liberian national, Kingsley fled that country in 1992 amid a civil war and was given asylum here. In 2007, she opened a small food store and sold spices, fruits, vegetables and meats. The feds became suspicious of Kingsley after she sought monthly payment for authorized food-stamp sales greater than the annual $80,000 estimate she gave in a 2008 application to participate in the program.

WHEN UNDERCOVER federal agents visited Aunty Florence's West African Market in Darby in 2010, they found the owner willing to illegally exchange food-stamp benefits for cash. Florence Kingsley, 59, of Darby, pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to food-stamp fraud. A Liberian national, Kingsley fled her home country in 1992 amid a civil war and was given asylum here. In 2007, she opened a small food store and sold spices, fruits, vegetables and meats. The feds became suspicious of Kingsley after she sought monthly payment for authorized food-stamp sales greater than the annual $80,000 estimate she gave in a 2008 application to participate in the program.