The reality of life on food stamps

[gollygee]

It isn't as simple as just giving people rice and beans instead.

http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2013/11/18/why-i-wont-do-the-food-stamp-challenge/

When politicians and bloggers do these challenges, they start with a kitchen full of spices and seasonings to make food palatable. They don’t start with a week or two of hunger, depression and misery behind them in which there wasn’t food, so they don’t understand why poor people who finally can eat what they want might consume bad choices. They have a bathroom full of supplies, so they don’t need to use their food stamps to get things like soap.

They also have a kitchen. Many of my foster kids come after living in shelters or motels with a microwave only – no cooking facilities at all. Or after living in rental apartments where gas and electric are regularly turned off for non-payment. Or after squatting in buildings with no services whatsoever. They may have technical kitchen access, but only under limited circumstances – for example, adults only are allowed to cook, so during the long hours when my kids are home alone after school in their motel room, there is no way to heat up a can of soup. Or perhaps like with two of my children, a 6 year old cares for her 18 month old brother after school alone every day and all day on weekends while her mother works – her food options are limited to what her mother feels she can safely prepare – microwave popcorn, microwave hot dogs, cereal, canned soup.

I can buy enough brown rice, cabbage and dried beans to live cheaply and on food stamps – but what I can’t do is mimic the circumstances and realities that accompany life on food stamps. What I’d like to see as so many contemplate cutting food stamp subsidies is a realistic food stamp diet. I think that experience would be truly salutary for governors, mayors, leaders, writers and chefs.

How well will you do in school or at work with a week of living on two slices of bread a day with peanut butter – all that is left of the food stamp budget? Or the days when it is bread with ketchup packets lifted from McDonalds on it? How will you do lying in your bed smelling food from other people’s use of the communal kitchen and crying because there’s nothing to eat? How will you feel when after three hours in the cold in line at the food pantry you come away with nothing, because there was only food for the first 200 people, and you were number 239? How will you feel when you have to choose between letting your kids go dirty to school and letting them go hungry?

[djean111]

1. from the http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/using-food-stamps website:

SNAP benefits can only be used for food and for plants and seeds to grow food for your household to eat. SNAP benefits cannot be used to buy:

Any nonfood item, such as pet foods; soaps, paper products, and household supplies; grooming items, toothpaste, and cosmetics

Alcoholic beverages and tobacco

Vitamins and medicines

Any food that will be eaten in the store

Hot foods

So - usually the person making a "live on food stamps for a week" effort already has the things someone on food stamps needs to somehow find a way to purchase. More realistic if Cory Booker did his thing while living in a motel room with minimall supplies or in a cheap apartment with utilities only on half the time, and no soaps, etc.
Getting transportation to stores or places to somehow get medicine not always simple either.

[gollygee]

2. When you hear about "food stamp fraud"

it's usually something like a convenience store owner who will charge the EBT card as if someone is buying food, but the person will really be buying something like soap. But they have to use extra more EBT $ than the soap actually costs.

[SheilaT]

3. Already having a kitchen with sufficient pots and pans, not to mention

various staples, which doesn't only include seasonings and spices, but oil for cooking, makes a huge difference.

I have been relatively poor at times, and making do on a very limited food budget. But I have always had a home and a kitchen with pretty much all of the necessary things in it. I do sometimes have to plan ahead about buying spices, but nonetheless I'm able to get them.

I also have a freezer compartment to my refrigerator. Last week I made lasagna and froze five individual portions which I'll be consuming at the rate of about one a week. So the total cost for each portion, including what I ate, works out to about two bucks per. I can eat quite cheaply when I put my mind to it, but it all depends on a lot of stuff that homeless people definitely don't have, and extremely poor people may not have either.

[CrispyQ]

4. It's so easy to judge others from the context of one's own comfortable life.

So many things in this article that the heartless never consider. This line here just makes me want to cry:

They don’t start with a week or two of hunger, depression and misery behind them in which there wasn’t food...

[riderinthestorm]

5. Back to the top of the page. Sad but important article K&R nt

[ladyVet]

6. My family is lucky.

We had basic spices and kitchen equipment. We have a home with a functioning kitchen. In fact, we do the same with food stamps as we were doing before, when I had money to buy food.

Even with the cuts, we'll get by, until food prices go up too much. Of course, we don't get steaks and lobster and caviar, like most people think. Shame, too. I miss a good steak. I'm just grateful I'll be able to get a turkey, I've been skimping for that.

I can't imagine living in a situation where you can't just go to the kitchen and make dinner. Where you don't have the basic equipment to cook. This is just so wrong. I've been in pretty dire straits over the years, but never down that far.