Food Stamps - Part 2

It’s possible to eat on a $39 a month food stamp allotment, but it’s only possible to do so for a short time and remain healthy.

It isn’t just the lack of calories and nutrients that’s a problem. The diet I devised is one that no diabetic could eat. In addition to the obvious sources of carbohydrates, there’s corn syrup in the citrus punch and white bread, while cheap peanut butter has another form of sugar, dextrose.

If one substituted eggs for the punch, one would add cholesterol: 62% of the daily need, based on 2,000 calories. The canned vegetables are as bad for their high sodium content. The avocado and margarine contain saturated fats.

This is a diet that could lead to obesity, heart problems and diabetes. The limited calcium and vitamin D could add bone density problems for thin women. Without the vitamin C in the citrus punch and the wide range of vitamins and minerals in the potatoes, one would be worse off.

In addition, what nutrients there are in the diet are expensive. The 128-ounce citrus punch is only 1% fruit juice. 57 ounces of regular orange juice has been on sales for months for $3.49 and is more juice. The one cost $1.50 more, but the price for ounce of juice is less.

Likewise, the cheapest peanut butter is cut with cotton seed or canola oil, which increases the actual price for the peanuts.

The other hidden price is psychological. One would spend half the day preparing food and would probably be thinking about it much of the time. If a television was broadcasting images meant to make one hungry, the cravings to eat would be worse. It’s no fun walking through a grocery store hungry without enough money.

Pinto beans aren’t just the diet of the ancestors here. They also require the lifestyle: they have to soak for eight hours and cook for four. One would have to put them in water before going to bed. While the cooking time can be shortened with a pressure cooker or lengthened with a crock pot to make it possible for someone to work, I assume such appliances aren’t available to someone living of such limited means.

The cooking time makes it impossible to have an 8-hour job, unless one gets up in the middle of the night to start the beans to cook and immediately refrigerates them for dinner or eats them for breakfast.

Lentils and rice take about 45 minutes to cook, while potatoes take at least 25 minutes to boil.

The woman is probably wrong to think the government thinks she can live on $39 a month. Food stamps are supposed to supplement income that also would include money for food. But, if there is no extra money, if one thinks like she does, then one is thrown farther back in economic times, from the time of pinto beans and subsistence agriculture, to the life of the hunter-gatherer.

To supplement this diet, one would need to search out local food banks and places that provide free meals, and hope one could qualify. Again, scavenging precludes the ability to hold a job, although an evangelistic Christian center near her house periodically advertises free food in the evenings, at the price, I suppose, of a sermon.

So, now I know the price of pinto beans, but I’m not sure I know the full costs for a child whose tastes are formed by an inadequate food stamp assignment. I can see what a treat it would be to go into a fast food restaurant and order a sandwich that contains an entire day’s calories on a single bun and leave feeling really full.