The Food Stamp Challenge is over.
The purpose of the challenge, a project co-sponsored by the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Nashville and The Second Harvest Food Bank of Nashville and taken on by several high-profile Nashvillians, was to increase public awareness about the depth and breadth of poverty in Nashville and the rest of the country and create awareness of the difficulty of sustaining a healthy and nutritious diet on a food stamp budget. It was also supposed to raise awareness of the Farm Bill currently before Congress which includes an increase in the allotment of Food Stamps and has not yet passed the Senate.
It’s a big change to have to really think at the grocery store. Sure, if you’ve been brought up to never pay retail, you’re always looking for a bargain. But there’s a difference between choosing to buy the least expensive thing in the store and having to. “What do you mean I can’t buy that $4.00 tube of imported Italian anchovy paste?” You start to feel a little bratty and the sense of entitlement – you know, the one you you didn’t think you had? – thankfully withers away.
But it’s more than that. Once you’re into the challenge you start thinking about all the other elements of your daily lifestyle you take for granted. For instance, if you were on food stamps would you really be able to fill up your gas tank whenever you needed to? Or would you even have a car? Would you have a stash of multi-vitamins that you could take to supplement the lack of nutrition in all the frozen vegetables your eating? Would you have cumin in your cupboard to flavor up your beans? And would you work at a job where you would be celebrating birthdays and holidays with access to free meals and cake and candy? Would you have friends who knew what you were doing and would offer to feed you one night for free? And on the flip side, would your friends really hang out with people that might need food stamps to supplement their weekly meals? Would they, in reality, have the chance to help? Would you have a warm house? Well-taken care of pets? A Phone? In a letter to the editors of the Tennessean, Mary Linden Salter asked even more pertinent questions:
What if your neighborhood was so dangerous that no big-name grocery store would go near it, and you had to travel for miles to get to a store that charged reasonable prices? What if you had nothing but a hotplate to cook on? What if you couldn’t buy in bulk and freeze the leftovers?
Since Nashville’s version of the challenge was announced there’s been some criticism. Most of it leveled at the concept of the middle-class “playing” at being poor, some shining light onto shortcomings in the Farm Bill, and a bit from those that can’t manage empathy for the “can’t pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstrappers” among us. We had one commenter on this website quote Richard Dobbs, director of food stamp policy for Tennessee’s Department of Human Services, who said that the $21.00 food stamp allotment is meant to “supplement rather than replace the entire food budget for most recipients, with earned income, school free-lunch programs, and local food banks filling the gaps.” Of course, he left out the rest of Dobbs’ quote,
“Once upon a time, the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour was supposed to be sufficient to keep a person off food stamps” but that is no longer the case.
“Even the $10 an hour ‘living wage’ approved last week by the Shelby County Commission,” reports John Branston and Mary Cashiola in The Memphis Flyer, “would still make some people eligible for food stamp assistance. For a family of three, the food stamp threshold is a monthly gross income of $1,799, which is slightly more than the $1,600 a month a person would earn working 40 hours a week at $10 an hour.”
The 2007 Farm Bill, passed by the House and approved unanimously by the Senate Agriculture Committee, is now headed for some heated floor debate. The House version includes a $4 billion increase in food stamps. Critics say the bill still hands out too many subsidies and not enough money for nutrition programs. As one of our other commentors pointed out, “Wait a sec…is this the same farm bill that subsidizes the overproduction of corn leading to a glut of high fructose corn-syrup based products?” It is, but it’s also the same Farm Bill that will increase education efforts to promote healthy nutrition. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one as it reaches the Senate floor.
