No one, and I mean no one, should go hungry in the United States of America.

we ought to be increasing the benefit.

we ought to be moving this discussion at some point toward how we boost the overall SNAP benefit.

The average benefit is about $1.40 per person, per meal, per day.

I have said in the past the most important thing we can do to improve access to nutritious food is to increase the current SNAP benefit.

But if that is where all of this is going, that is bad news for poor people, and it is bad news for the vulnerable populations that our witnesses here today represent.

I think that would be a disaster. I think it would be catastrophic.

these so-called reforms have been put into place. But, no one in Congress is on food stamps, no one is on SNAP.

We can talk about all the different ways to improve SNAP-Ed, and we should, and we ought to.

there would be 60,000 veterans, is the best estimates that we have been able to gather, that would lose their benefits.

I sympathize with the goal of making healthier foods more available to people, and helping people make better choices in terms of what they buy.

We have known for a long time that Speaker Ryan supports block-granting SNAP. We have seen it year after year in his budgets.

there is an obligation on the Social Security Administration to help low-income seniors apply for SNAP at Social Security

Well, Speaker Ryan and Republican presidential candidates gave us the answer last Saturday at their so-called forum on poverty in South Carolina, and I have to say that I am deeply troubled.

I have been to a SNAP-Ed class, and I learned about issues about what constitutes an appropriate portion.

As you know, SNAP has a 3 month time limit for adults not raising minor children.

If we have any function in this Congress, it ought to be to making sure that the least among us are not forgotten.

It is important that we talk about new approaches that could be taken to improve access to food.

What the hell else do we want them to do?

I look forward to continuing our work to make it possible for SNAP recipients to purchase groceries online.

I want to thank Chairwoman Walorski for convening this hearing, and I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here today to share your experiences and findings.

I think we also have to be looking at food security at the domestic level as a national security issue.

This whole topic of how agriculture relates to our national security is important because usually when we talk about national security, we usually only talk about the military relationship to it.

The hard reality is that obesity and hunger are often two sides of the same coin.

I visited a pilot program in Colombia several years ago when Ambassador Patterson was the ambassador.