CONGRESS PUSHES POTATOES

Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Mark Udall (D-CO) recently asserted that Congress should override the USDA’s science-based process for deciding which foods the WIC program provides by requiring WIC to add white potatoes. Forcing WIC to include white potatoes would set a dangerous precedent as Congress has never, in WIC’s 40-year history, required it to include any particular food, leaving that to experts in nutrition science and child and maternal health. As WIC’s formal name — the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children — makes clear, WIC was never intended to provide a full range of foods.  Instead, it provides the key nutrients that nutrition experts say are missing from the diets of low-income pregnant and nursing women, infants, and young children.  And studies indicate that WIC participants already consume enough starchy vegetables, the most popular of which is the white potato.

 

Source: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 5/13/14, Potatoes