The Food Stamp Challenge

Aaron Krager on Faithfully Liberal posted on the 'Food Stamp Challenge' and wrote about the experience of trying to buy a week's worth of food at the same dollar amount as a person on food stamps receives, $21.00 per week.

Technically, I realize, I would ‘win’ the food stamp challenge. I spend between $12–$24 per week on groceries. And I eat healthy and don’t go hungry when doing so. The ‘catch’ is that I only shop at the Hyde Park Produce mart (regularly, though I go about once a month to an Arab grocer’s or to Trader Joe’s), buy only what’s in season, and generally shop vegetarian.

However, I realize also this is only after a decade of practice and having done a lot of research on how to accomplish this (nutrition planning as well as living in other countries as well as figuring out which stores), and that I don’t have a partner or children– ‘advantages’ in winning the food war.

That’s not to say that if only food stamp people got better educated, they could make it work. There’s only one store where I can make this work in my neighborhood, four grocers where it certainly wouldn’t work, and no grocers at all in the distressed neighborhood (Woodlawn) where I work as a student pastor. I also know that some weeks if an emergency comes up, a paycheck doesn’t arrive when it should, or an extra bill comes up, the food budget might get wiped out altogether. Such was the case these past two weeks when a medical bill wiped out the last of my finances for the summer, though similar events have happened during my three years in seminary. On these occasions, I need to rely on events with food at school, or on friends or relatives to host me for a few meals a week–the seminarian’s form of a soup kitchen. Or sometimes I’m too proud or ashamed to admit I couldn’t make the ends meet on my own, and I just don’t eat.

I also know that my appetite isn’t often what it was when I was a growing child, particularly when I was one of five growing children in a family who was dependent on food assistance, and my mother was a very coupon/price conscious working nurse. Even when I was eight I was well aware it cost less to eat low-nutrition and ‘junk’ foods than it was to eat healthy foods when shopping at most stores. I also know that although both my parents worked regular blue-collar jobs, medical bills would push us over the line. Most folks find the same problem. And most folks, to my knowledge, that need food stamps do work.

I think I write all this in response to two silent but often-thought questions: who is really ‘poor’, and who deserves to eat. A person who works regularly or is a full-time student is not seen as being authentically ‘poor’ (I might add that most seminarians seem truly afraid of those who look or talk about being poor); and it’s a faulty assumption that a person who doesn’t have enough to eat is lazy or incompetent to work or manage their affairs or uneducated. Nobody who looked at me would assume I am poor or grew up in poverty. It’s true that I currently choose to remain a full-time student, after realizing I would be in deeper debt if I dropped to part-time and took longer to go to school. That is more choice than most people have. I also hope to choose to work in settings where I never live over the poverty line, in order to be more authentically among the poor. Still, whether living in chosen or unchosen forms of poverty, I know as a seminary student I need to speak up in the presence of my classmates on poverty issues and people, to transform the way we teach and learn how to be ministers, and how we respond in the course of our daily lives.

peace,
Le Anne