It turns out that ridiculous story from The Daily Caller about how people use food stamps -- in which "reporter" Matthew Boyle misled the government to receive food stamps and spent all his benefits on one expensive meal at Whole Foods -- had something of an antecedent drudged up by the blog A Black Girl's Guide to Weight Loss. This, though, was a more thoughtful look at a phenomenon caused by the recession, titled "Hipsters on Food Stamps." It's about how struggling and out-of-work artists used their new benefits to maintain their organic, locally produced, socially conscious consumption lifestyles.
Young artists, many of whom probably went to college, on food stamps doesn't fit our assumptions about who needs assistance and what they purchase. None of them are poor, struggling widowed mothers buying meat and potatoes, which, judging from comments on this story and others, is the only type of person allowed to rely on the government for help purchasing food. The same people railing against the erroneous idea that poor people make the least nutritious food choices possible -- like buying soda and french fries with government money -- also think using government benefits to buy locally grown fruits and vegetables and meat alternatives is luxurious. One of the women told the reporter, Jennifer Bleyer, "I'm eating better than I ever have before. ... Even with food stamps, it's not like I'm living large, but it helps."
As Erika points out in her post, though, this is what's supposed to happen with food stamps: People are supposed to have better access to nutritious food than they would otherwise. And as she also points out, the fact that processed foods are cheap is actually the result of government largess, way more so than any food-stamp purchases.
But also, I need to correct myself for reposting a Christian Science Monitor graph that many commenters here and elsewhere found misleading, and made the data look more sensational than it should. Above is a new graph using the same data by Max Weselcouch, also to be found here.
-- Monica Potts
