Welfare diet, food banks & food budgeting

[OakLeaf]

Accessibility is a part of this equation that's only just getting some notice recently - and food deserts are by no means only "urban."

Time is another part of the equation that gets nearly no notice. The chefs in the recent study all remarked on how time-consuming the process was. That's fine when you're a professional chef or a stay-at-home parent. But most people on food stamps work two or three jobs; the ones who don't, have to work off their food stamps at a rate below minimum wage. Most of them also have young children. You get home from work, the kids are hungry. Even if all you plan to do is nuke leftovers, you still have to clean, do laundry, shop, cut the grass, do what the kids need for their school activities. You probably never have a large bloc of time on your days off work (if any) to make a large quantity of food.

I'm lucky never to have been chronically poor, but I spent most of my career working with the poor. For the short time that my family of origin was poor, it was a single-income, two-parent household, with plenty of time to grow a garden, bake bread, cook from scratch, and make the two-hour round-trip drive to buy ingredients and canned fruits and vegetables in institutional-sized containers. For all its egalitarian talk, American society is incredibly stratified by class. Most people who've never received public assistance have no idea what survival is like at that level. People our age, even those who were poor as children, don't necessarily appreciate how the welfare repeal of the '90s changed the landscape of poor people's lives.