For a large chunk of the time when I was growing up my family relied on social security benefits, which, among other things, meant being shrewd about food. We made the limited household budget stretch with careful meal planning, which sometimes involved cheap meat substitutes or low-cost cuts of the real thing. So, when reports emerge in the US, as they’ve done recently, about attempts to restrict what groceries the poorest of the poor can spend their subsistence food stamps on, it hits home.

How can it help a family in the grip of poverty to restrict the limited options they already have at the supermarket? But this is exactly what many on the right of the political spectrum have been advocating for the most impoverished people in America. Absurdly, in some instances, suggested restrictions have included staples such as meat and fish.

There have been attempts recently to introduce ever-harsher conditions by prescribing what those on food stamps can buy. Proponents of these restrictions argue they are necessary to prevent abuse of the system. With echoes of claims about abuses of the benefits system in Britain, they claim (again against the evidence) that there is widespread fraud with people on food stamps living the life of Riley on lobster.

This year Kansas enacted a stunningly regressive policy, placing limits on what people on food stamps (otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme, Snap) can buy. In Wisconsin, legislators proposed banning shops that accept food stamps from selling shellfish to recipients, as well as making it tougher to get basics such as pasta sauce and dried beans. One particularly egregious suggestion to ban “seafood and steak” for food-stamp holders in Missouri (and yes, that would have included cheap cans of nutritious foodstuffs such as tuna) thankfully failed.

How can it help a family in the grip of poverty to restrict the limited options they already have at the supermarket?

In the US, food stamps have been a mainstay of public assistance for the poorest for a long time, but especially since 1996 when, under the Clinton administration, welfare provision was radically reformed and stripped down. Food stamps already have numerous restrictions, including time limits, so introducing even more is just cruel. At last count, according to Rebecca Vallas, a director at the Center for American Progress, more than 6 million people in the country had no other source of income. “It’s basically $1.40 per person per meal, and it can only be used to purchase food,” she says of the paltry amounts people receive.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, demand for food stamps has shot up (much in the same way as food bank use has in the UK). The programme is federally run but administered by states, hence some of the wild disparities in restraining their use. However, because food stamps have a mechanism whereby at times of great economic difficulty more people can qualify, they at least offer an emergency lifeline when it’s most needed.

Gwen Moore, a Democratic congresswoman from Wisconsin, is a longstanding critic of the moves to put additional curbs on food stamps. She says “blaming and shaming” the poor has created a fertile political space to further erode what little protections remain.

She says: “Politicians at the local, state and federal levels have set behavioural standards as a condition to receive public assistance, ranging from ridiculous to outright unconstitutional. Implemented under the guise of fiscal responsibility and self-sufficiency, efforts to regulate the activities of low-income Americans have emerged all over the country.”

Other examples include capping withdrawals from cash machines by recipients of some benefits to $25 a day and making receipt of welfare benefits such as food stamps dependent on mandatory drug testing (something both the Conservatives and Labour in Britain have toyed with when considering how to inject further conditions into the benefits system).

Even for those who manage to claw their way out of abject poverty and into work, the prospects are far from rosy. The attacks on food stamps have been occurring against a backdrop of a rise in job insecurity and significant falls in the take-home pay of America’s lowest-paid workers. It’s hard enough to live or eat well on a low income. To be told you can’t even be trusted to try to manage what little resources you have is as insulting as it is wicked.