I agree that the small towns I'm talking about are very hard to find, but they do still exist. It takes searching through a lot of census data and also getting in the car and driving a lot of backroads.

In my own searching, I started at the county level. There are only about 3,000 counties in the USA so that is a manageable place to start. You can find this information at http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/ and then information on each county on wikipedia or just google searching.

I started by searching for counties that had less than 15,000 people which knocked out about 70% of the counties. Then I narrowed further by looking for a whole host of other attributes I wanted like water, soil types, remoteness from interstates, property tax levels, number of churches, etc. and ended up with about 50 counties spread out all over the US. You can certainly use the EBT card user population as one of your criteria to ferret out the freeloaders. Information on poverty is available on Wikipedia for every county in the US.

Of the 50 counties I liked, I then visited probably 20 of them in person to look at small towns in those counties. This took several years of part time researching to finish. That's the level of research you have to be willing to do to find the right area for you. It's not going to just fall in your lap unless you are incredibly lucky.