I didn't mean soup kitchens, I shouldn't have mentioned Red Cross. The WIC program needs to be tailored to create the requisite demand to have the market support the biscuits and rice (rice is already a food item though).
What I envision is having a government issued rice cooker, and only allow WIC money to be for the purchase of long grain rice at $.40/lb as your grain.
The prison biscuits would just be allowing Iams,Pedigree,Beneful to make food for human consumption with the proper ingredients and nutritional profile. WIC money for the protein / fat / vitamins can only be used on the various types of biscuits being produced.
Distribution would be the same as how ez-mac gets on the shelves. Not soup kitchen style.
Cuba is handing out free or heavily subsidized rice cookers and pressure cookers. I think we can aim to do a little better for our poor than does Cuba, no? I mean, not much point in claiming we have a better system otherwise, just different in how we select the fat cats.
WIC represents a pretty sound theory in my judgment. If you need charity to feed your children, you also need guidance as to proper foods and preparation. Private charities are the same - if a church is paying your light bill, the church has a vested interest in seeing that you are seeking work and not blowing what money you have. I'd like to see food stamps made more like WIC, but WIC seems to me to be a reasonable compromise between accepting restrictions to get charity and taxpayers being unreasonably demanding. I'd like to see some shame returned in accepting welfare, but to the point that it encourages them to get off welfare, not to the point that it dominates someone's life. If one is limited to rice and Purina Po'folk Chow, that's incredibly demeaning. It's also something that intrudes on the children. Kids in welfare or WIC need to have as normal lives as possible. WIC helps ensure that their nutritional needs are met. Restricting them to a few monotonous foods is simply punishing them. The goal of programs such as WIC or food stamps should be to help people get out of that situation or to sustain them if they are unable to do so for whatever reason, NOT to punish them.
Two other brief points. First, children need stimulation and hope as well as basic nutrition, and a monotonous diet does not yield that. Second, nutritional needs are complex, and rice and engineered biscuits are unlikely to provide complete nutrition.
Even though we need to work to eliminate fraud I think we're also in danger of becoming too obsessed with fraud. If I hand a twenty to a panhandler I face the possibility that he or she is actually a grifter who begs for a living and takes regular gambling vacations. Yet I am out the same twenty either way, and while I'd like to think I'm helping someone truly in need rather than someone just bone idle, there's no point in obsessing over it. Same thing with government programs - fight the fraud, but don't punish everyone on the program simply because they need charity. That defeats the whole point of charity.