[Joan.of.the.Arch]

Actually, I am not even completely opposed to buying junk food with foodstamps! BUt that does not change that I think $280 should be enough for one person being fed on $280. Basically the baby is fed from the WIC supplement, so that just leaves the mother to be fed, unless the mother is nursing, then some or all of the WIC is for her. (If she is nursing without artificial formula bottles in addition, then all the WIC food is for her.) If someone came to this forum telling us they were running out of food on $280 a month, wouldn't we have all kinds of idea for them to sail through the month on less food expense?

The junk food issue is kind of ticky. I mean, where is the cut off? Are those orange-colored, packaged cheese snack crackers junk food? Maybe so. How about white soda crackers? They provide little but calories, too, so are they junk? Well, then, how about tortillas which have pretty much the same ingredients as soda crackers? Oh, well then, white bread?-- That's about the same as tortillas except we substitute some yeast for some fast acting leavening....So the cheese crackers were junk, but tortillas and white bread are not? Hmm, at least the cheese crackers add some protein.

Besides the issue of deciding what is junk or not, I think food is immensely important to the psyche. This is true around the world. Food helps provide not just energy and physical health, but also a skosh of mental well-being. So a little something "extra" does not bother me, I think it is a good thing. But just what is a little something extra does not have to be blown up into a daily or even meal-by-meal expectation. How is any food extra or special if it is the daily expectation? So really, I think it is okay to work in some potato chips, frozen pizza, some juice boxes, moon pies, yes even some shrimp (You can buy small packages of it at Aldi's or Save-a-Lot for under $2). Those things should be rare enough that eyes sparkle and smiles stretch across faces to see them because they are so special. But one cannot make those things the basis of meals. One has to plan first for nutrition and making the food dollars stretch. If you have $280 to spend on one person's groceries and you run out of money half way through the month, then you are not spending the money well. You just aren't.

However....that article is really odd. If you read the few words from the foodstamp recipients themselves, I don't see any of them complaining. It feels to me like an article written by a journalist who wants us to react with judgment against these two people. I mean, even the title here on this thread says something about starving on $280. But I don't see the woman the article opens with making claims to be starving. The article says she has to resort to canned ravioli and peanut butter and jelly by mid-month, but do we see a quote to show the foodstamp recipient actually couched it that way?

I can imagine that the woman was interviewed by the journalist and said something along the lines of, "Well, when I first get my EBT card, I go to the store and load up an as much as I can carry home without a car. I try to get things that will last for two weeks, 'cause I have a hard time getting to the store more often than that. So at the end of two weeks, I have pretty much finished the fresh things and the frozen things that fit in my little freezer---like the ground turkey and ground beef, the fish sticks, even the cheese I put in there. So that is when I will eat more of the canned things like, oh, the canned beans that I mix with some rice, the canned ravioli that I ate yesterday --Boy was that a mistake.I won't be trying that again-- and my old stand-by peanut butter and jelly. But yeah, by mid-month, my kitchen is getting kind of low on food and I have to try and get a neighbor to watch my baby so I can get to the store to stock up for the second two weeks of the month. Then by the end of those last two weeks, yep, my refrigerator is pretty empty, but my EBT card comes just in time and I head to the store again and start it all over."

I could see the interviewee having said things like that, then then journalist twisting it to come out the way it did. The journalist "appears" to be trying to make a sympathetic case for why foodstamps should be increased, yet she says ridiculous things (like implying that it is deplorable that foodstamp recipients might stretch their money by eating pasta and potatoes) to make the case. That makes me think that she is not really trying to make the case that foodstamps should be increased, but that she is being duplicitous, trying to make us react with snide judgment to say that foodstamps do not need to be increased if the problem is simply stuff like not being able to afford crab legs and shrimp, for goodness sakes.

So---Yes, I do think $280 worth of food is enough for one person for a month and it is even enough to provide some special treats. No, I don't think that article was being honest in what it was presenting or advocating for.