In an excellent two-part series on food stamps and the need for food assistance in Iowa, Mike Wiser caught Iowa Department of Public Health Director Mariannette Miller-Meeks in an embarrassing lie:

“The No. 1 food item bought with food stamps in Iowa is Mountain Dew,” said Miller-Meeks, director of the Iowa Department of Public Health [in a speech to the World Food Prize Hunger Week symposium in October].

Several in the audience of a few hundred — an international crowd of academics, journalists and nonprofit types — shook their heads or smiled with bemusement. Phones came out, tweets were sent.

But what Miller-Meeks said wasn’t true.

At least not in any verifiable way. The Iowa Department of Human Services — the state agency that oversees the food stamp program, correctly called Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, in Iowa — doesn’t track food purchases down to the brand of soft drink. Asked where she came up with the statistic, Miller-Meeks later said through a spokesperson she “found it online” but couldn’t remember where.

Bleeding Heartland has long argued against cutting food assistance for many reasons. The SNAP program addresses real need efficiently and is rarely abused. In addition, government spending on food assistance has tremendous “bang for the buck” compared to most other policies designed to stimulate the economy. I recommend reading the full text of Wiser’s latest reports on the rhetoric and reality of the food stamp debate and on reasons private aid agencies are struggling to help all the hungry Iowans.

Today I want to speculate on how a fake “fact” about food stamp purchases landed on Miller-Meeks’ radar.

It would be interesting to review the prepared text of Miller-Meeks’ speech from October. (I am seeking comment from the Iowa Department of Public Health and will update this post if I hear back.) The World Food Prize Hunger Week symposium is a high-profile event, drawing more media coverage than a state agency head’s typical public appearance. Government officials should get the facts right in every speech, but information presented in a forum like the hunger symposium should have been checked and double-checked. Did Miller-Meeks or a speechwriting assistant plan to drop that attention-getting statistic, or was she ad-libbing?

Either way, someone speaking from a position of authority should not present false information. Dozens of people re-tweeted Wiser’s original “tweet” on the factoid about Mountain Dew, reaching (and by extension misinforming) thousands of Iowans.

Searching online, I couldn’t find any reports about Iowans on food assistance buying Mountain Dew. Urban Legends and Snopes have both reported on a viral image of a grocery store receipt from 2011, which showed that someone on food stamps in Michigan purchased “$141.78 worth of lobster, porterhouse steak, and Diet Mountain Dew.” However, that person was prosecuted for fraud after re-selling the luxury items for cash.

In late September 2013, a conservative columnist for the Iowa State Daily, Danny Schnathorst, published a column supporting food stamp cuts. He cited that lobster and Diet Mountain Dew purchase in Michigan as an example of how taxpayer funds are misused. Schnathorst is presumably not aware that despite Republican claims about food stamp fraud, there is very little evidence that SNAP benefits are wasted or abused on a large scale. Rather, “payment error rates are at an all-time low.  In 2010, only 3 percent of all SNAP benefits represented overpayments.” I don’t know whether Miller-Meeks regularly reads the Iowa State Daily or Schnathorst’s columns. She does not appear to be following him on twitter.

A National Public Radio story by Eliza Barclay in mid-September drew attention to the “Mountain Dew mouth” problem in poor areas of Appalachia.

Public health advocates say soft drinks are driving the region’s alarmingly high incidence of eroded brown teeth – a phenomenon dubbed “Mountain Dew mouth,” after the region’s favorite drink. They want to tackle the problem with policies, including restricting soda purchases with food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and currently under debate in Congress).

“We are using taxpayer dollars to buy soda for the SNAP program, and we are using taxpayer dollars to rip teeth out of people’s heads who can’t afford dental care and are on Medicaid,” says Dana Singer, a research analyst at the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department in Parkersburg, W.Va., who wants to see stricter regulations on sales of all sugary beverages in the region. “It makes no sense to be paying for these things twice.”

Iowa Public Radio was among the many NPR affiliates that republished Barclay’s report on September 20. Perhaps that’s where an association between food stamp recipients and Mountain Dew formed in Miller-Meeks’ mind.

The saddest thing about this episode is that cheap talk about food stamps allegedly being misused obscures a “food insecurity” problem too big to be solved with private donations alone, especially in a time of government cuts.

The second-saddest thing about this episode is that bashing the food stamp program will probably help Miller-Meeks politically if she enters the Republican primary to represent the second Congressional district, as I expect her to do in the next couple of months. Responding to Wiser,

“Dr. Miller-Meeks says the point she was trying to make was more about nutritional standards than food benefit abuses,” spokeswoman Polly Carver-Kimm said in an email. “She regrets that she miscommunicated the information and as a result, deflected attention away from her message about the importance of making healthy eating and good nutrition a personal and governmental priority.”

Count on Miller-Meeks to downplay any role for the government in promoting healthy eating if she runs for Congress a third time. Rather, we’ll hear all about “personal responsibility,” ignoring the fact that most SNAP beneficiaries lack the funds for a well-balanced diet, and many live in so-called “food deserts.”

UPDATE: On January 9, Governor Terry Branstad announced that Miller-Meeks had resigned from her state government position, effective January 17. I doubt her resignation had anything to do with this flap; I think she is getting ready to announce a campaign in IA-02.

On January 8, Miller-Meeks spoke to the Des Moines Register about the controversy.

“It was not political at all,” Dr. Mariannette Miller-Meeks said in an interview at the Iowa Department of Public Health. […]

She said her “Mountain Dew” comment came as members of a World Food Prize panel discussed ways to improve people’s diets.

“We were talking about how to increase fruit and vegetable consumption and nutritional awareness education and create healthier people,” she said.

She noted that another federal program, Women, Infants and Children, has strict limits on the types of food participants may purchase with their benefits.

“What I was trying to – perhaps not deftly – argue or state was: Should we have nutritional education for SNAP, like we do for WIC, and some prohibition for certain items?” She declined to say if she backs such measures.

The Des Moines Register’s editorial board commented on January 7,

We’re not sure what websites Miller-Meeks has been visiting, but Iowa does not track food stamp purchases in a way that could verify the brand of soda Iowans are buying. The spokeswoman later said the director had been trying to emphasis the importance of healthy eating and “regrets that she miscommunicated the information.”

Well, the road to damaging stereotypes and government policies that hurt the poor has been paved with just such “miscommunicating.” Sometimes officials go out of their way to spread unsubstantiated suppositions about supposed drug abuse among participants in a welfare program. Sometimes inaccurate allegations are one sentence in a 30-minute presentation about hunger at the World Food Prize.

Both demonize and perpetuate stereotypes about impoverished Americans.