Under the Stamp Plan families receiving some form of public assistance may buy, with the funds supplied by public agencies, from $1 to $150 worth of orange stamps in a week for each member. These stamps can be used to purchase any kind of food at any grocery store, and represent the average food purchase made by families on relief without the Plan. Then, for each dollar's worth of orange samp bought, the family receives, free, an additional 50 cents of blue stamps. The blue stamps can also be used to buy food, but only food of which the Secretary of Agriculture decides there is a surplus. The list of surplus foods is inclined to vary with the season. First on it, when the Plan was put into effect last May, were butter, eggs, "wheat and whole wheat flour, corn meal, prunes, oranges and grapefruit, and dry beans. In July, oranges and grapefruit were temporarily dropped, and fresh peaches and pears were added, together with rice and various vegetables; other changes were made in October and December. In this way families on relief are provided with additional food to eat. The apparent complication of orange and blue stamps is necessary to ensure that the consumption of surplus commodities is additional and not merely substituted for previous food consumption. No family can consume "blue stamp" foods until it has spent its usual amount on "Orange Stamp" foods.
The Government's part in the operation of the Plan is, therefore, to see that the food stamps are available to eligible families, to determine what commodities are in surplus and to redeem the stamps with which they are $1 purchased.
(The food bought with the orange stamps is, of course, paid for out of the ordinary relief funds; the blue stamps are redeemed in part from an earmarked proportion of the gross annual Customs receipts and in part from an appropriation made by Congress) In the rest of the medianism the Government does not interfere. The ordinary private channels of the food trades are exclusively relied upon to procure the foods from the producers and distribute them through the retailers; and the latter cash the stamps they receive either with their banks or with their wholesalers, who in turn cash them with the contributing public agencies, or with the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation itself,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.