I would subdivide welfare from “food relief”, because they are extremely different in purpose and practice.
Welfare is easy to understand: payment to individuals. As such, reform is also *technically* easy.
However, “food relief” is counter-intuitive, bizarre and surreal. I’ll try to describe some of its oddities:
1) More than half the programs are not about getting food to the poor, but are part of an agricultural balancing act to stabilize prices to keep farms working. Farming is just an insane line of work, where a modest year can be far more profitable than a bumper crop year, which can wipe farms out by crashing prices.
Farmers get paid a LOT of money when they deliver crops, but most of it is immediately paid for their seed, fertilizer, pesticide, rental machines, leases, and workers. So a farmer might have a gross of $1.5m and a net of only $30k. Everything they do is on credit.
2) Food aid needs to be mostly unprocessed foods, because it could then be used to dump crop overages and seasonal surges. Ironically, giving all this unprocessed food away does not effect the market for unprocessed food at all. This is because those who buy their food much prefer processed food.
3) America has a hyperabundance of food. Mountains of it rot every year, purchased by the government and expensively warehoused, because to leave it on the market would crash food prices, put farmers out of business, then drive prices sky high.
Even during the Dust Bowl of the 1920s, that wiped out tens of thousands of farms from Texas to Canada, there was still way too much food from the farmers outside the region, which made an economic deflation a catastrophe.
4) Welfare money is a good motivator. Food is not. If a person does not have food, their only priority is getting their next meal, not in improving their life.
So the bottom line to all of this is at the state level. That is, block grants from the feds to feed the poor should be augmented with local crop surpluses. This would help farmers in the state as well as the poor.
Food aid needs to be mostly unprocessed foods, because it could then be used to dump crop overages and seasonal surges. Ironically, giving all this unprocessed food away does not effect the market for unprocessed food at all. This is because those who buy their food much prefer processed food.
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I think everyone in Maine over the age of 30 remembers the government trucks that came through with government cheese, pasta, and other sundry items. That cheese fed many a kid and many a pig.