The Ellesiouville Times ran a Sunday story about the high cost of food. (I had noticed already the crazy high price of food all by myself, thank you very much.) This story focused, as such stories often do, on the lurid and sensational. A single mother of two children under five, receiving $315 in food stamps per month, told how her household was out of food half-way through the month and of her scramble to keep her children fed until the beginning of the next month.
Let's not be too critical of the food stamp program. I think quite highly of it when it is not abused. I put myself through college working the night shift as an unlicensed nurse's aid earning only minimum wage. There were a few months in my senior year when I relied on food stamps to keep me in biscuits. After those few months, I never applied for them again. (Thank you, fellow taxpayers, for helping me through that rough spot.)
Let's also not ask where the father of these two children is or what the extent of his contribution to the grocery budget is.
Let's figure out how much it should cost to feed a young mother and two preschoolers. In my household, we have two adults and one preschooler. This household is, I concede, run by two skinny, stingy bastards who suffered through too many years of graduate school. In those lean years, we could not afford to get more than one pizza topping. We avoided group dinner outings, in dread of the suggestion that "we just divide the bill by [N]." We learned how to cook, and we learned how to have fun without spending a dime -- the swings at the local park were our favorite place to go on a date.
Recently, prodded by the high cost of food, we challenged ourselves to see how little we can get by on in a month. According to the Angry spreadsheet, factoring the restaurant bill, our total food expenses per month average around $400. Despite occasional excesses, our meat consumption is minimal. We do a lot of shopping at discount groceries. We buy in bulk. We eat a lot of legumes and grains, the Angry Baker makes all our bread, and most of our grocery bill goes toward produce and dairy. Once every few months we have to spring for a 50 lb. sack of flour.
Young children cost next to nothing to feed. The Angry Kid could live on milk and peanut butter alone. Of our monthly bill, I generously estimate she is responsible for maybe $75 of it. (Most of that $75 goes for Parmigiano Reggiano.) We grownups cost, then, $162 each. Back to our single mother, one adult at $162 + 2 children at $75 = $312. (I didn't even try to make that work out like that.)
So what's the deal? I know that food has gotten much more expensive. Our food budget is up at least $100 a month. The young mother in the story claims she needs over $600 a month to feed herself and her children. If we were talking about teenaged boys, I could be sympathetic. Even if she buys processed food, I don't understand why her bill is so high.
(If you haven't seen it already, check out this comparison of monthly food budgets around the world.)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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56 comments:
I am in grad school, eat meat every day, and am a giant fat bastard. I still manage to keep my food expenses well under $200 a month and that is without even trying to keep the bills down.
I cook a lot of soups (to use up leftovers), buy my bread from the day old rack or make it myself, get the cheapest cuts of meat and whatever veggies that are on sale.
You can save a lot if you eat seasonal food and never buy packaged goods.
But the ability to plan and budget is not one that is well developed in the general populace.
Furthermore cooking is a skill that is rarer and rarer these days. And if you buy packaged food you are looking at doubling your food budget.
There are a regrettable number of factors that conspire to keep the poor poor. For example, what if your rental apartment doesn't come with a refrigerator, or the refrigerator has broken and your landlord won't fix it? Awfully hard to save money by buying in bulk, or cooking a big pot of soup and reheating it later.
Plus too many urban neighborhoods have no decent grocery stores at all, not for miles. If you're on public transit, going more than five miles for groceries is awfully time-consuming with a job and two little kids, and it's hard to bring back more than a couple bags. No wonder people wind up relying on convenience stores.
If you start out middle class, you have a lot of resources - decent cookware, internet access to recipes, etc. - that make it easier to save money on food.
Thank you, fellow taxpayers, for helping me through that rough spot.
You're totally welcome, A.P. It was worth every penny.
(The good Lord knows my state' taxpayers pay through the nose for some fairly specialized and astronomically expensive needs that exist in my family, so I know all about that feeling of gratitude.)
As for the human-interest piece: You're a LOT savvier (and presumably a bit more experienced) than this mother. You probably think a lot harder about spending and saving than she does. Not an excuse; too obvious to be an explanation; but there it is.
But the Happy Meal costs $5 a pop!!!
Seriously, no one teaches/is taught frugality any more.
Let's say a box of pasta is $1. You can usually get a jar of sauce for $1 on sale. That's $2, and probably 2 meals for all 3 kids. My nephews love pasta with butter! It's relatively cheap, and they live on it!
Eggs are still under $2 a dozen. Lots of protein there! As you said, PB [&J] is a staple on most kids' diets...and also usually under $2 a jar [cheaper if you get the big size on sale].
Every few weeks this same sort of "news story" appears on one of the local TV news magazine shows...and the prices are *always* inflated by a factor of 3...and ignore the typical sale prices that a smart [and poor] shopper MUST be aware of to maximize a minimum budget.
I just think it's more bad journalism.
On food and other things bought at the supermarket, household items and such, I spend $400. This is being moderate ... not extravagant, not cheap. I say that is high but people tell me it is about average.
$315 for half the month, well if you don't have a car and you have to go to the more expensive stores ... ?
What on earth are those kids eating? Veal picatta and acai-berry pie? I live in a house with two 25-year-old boys and we spend about $100 on groceries every week, usually including things like paper towels/tp, etc. Granted, we eat out occasionally and that's not figured into the total, but I could easily cook at home for 3 adults for less than $600/month, and healthily, too! I agree with you that something strange is going on.
OK this is totally off topic but it is about shopping - for laptops. Should I buy one of those Dell computers with preinstalled Ubuntu Linux 7.10?
In Ellesiouville do you need a car in order to get cheap groceries? I've lived in places where middle-class, mostly white people had access to cheaper food than poor people of color for the simple reason that middle-class people could shop on the outskirts of town and in the suburbs, and the groceries were much cheaper there. There've also been times in my life when it was a challenge to save up to buy the big bags of rice, beans, flour, etc.
Ellesiouville may not work that way, but I think it's part of the explanation for a lot of poor people.
I used to work in retail, I've seen what people on public aid buy, and I am not at all surprised that she ran out of money half-way through the month.
And I realize it has little to do with the story the way you presented it, but we do a great disservice when failing to ask questions like the one you deferred: Where is the father, why did she have two children in less than five years if she could not afford it, what is sh doing to improve her situation?
Maybe she's buying lots of premade dinners or organic food or drinking bottled water? No idea what you can and can't use food stamps for.
600/month is approximately 50 per week per person. I spend that much in a *month*. But then I'm a starving grad student and know how to cook.
We spend about $500/month, to feel five of us. MOST of that is fresh produce and dairy. We buy in bulk, I make bread, and we own a freezer, so I put up meat (which we can buy in bulk in Lancaster). I make some baby food, but we buy some as well, and it can be expensive.
Now, we don't get convenience foods, which I think is the problem a lot of people have. Plus, we try not to order out a lot.
I would like to point you towards the blog written by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky when she tok the Food Stamp Challenge. (http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/jans_blog_the_f.html)
Young single mother probably doesn't have access or transportation to far-flung discount stores where she can buy groceries in bulk. Depending on where she lives, she may not easy access a decent grocery store, let alone one with competitive prices. Young single mother may have to rely on the bus to get her too and from grocery store, making bulk purchases difficult (especially if she has to manage 2 small kids plus a weeks worth of groceries). Young single mother may have to shop at stores that don't accept coupons. There are a lot of reasons why poor people wind up paying more for lower quality food.
The comments about transportation are interesting. That may be a factor, although Ellesiouville is noteworthy for the number of large supermarkets located in urban areas. I don't know where this mother lives, but many of these markets are in walking distance from urban residential neighborhoods. Nonetheless, she may live inconveniently far away, and, despite the Ellesiouville bus system, I can see that shopping and riding the bus with two little ones would be nearly impossible.
Aidan, I read the foodstamp challenge blog, and Schakowsky reports the national average foodstamp allotment to be $21 per week. If we allow that same amount for the kids, that comes to $252 per month. The mother in the story has been granted an extra week's worth, using that average. Making it on $252 would be a challenge, I agree.
Prof Zero, I don't know about the Dell, but I go for Linux every time. I've had my Dell laptop for 5 years, and it's been okay but a little quirky.
I just thought of one other thing: Buying in bulk requires a large initial outlay of cash which these people don't have, even though it translates itself into $1 meals over the next several months.
Not sure about Ellesiouville, but where I live, food prices have really gone through the roof in the past year. Our weekly food budget (for hubby, myself and our son) has gone from $75 to $115 in the past year. If anything, it should've been going down, since son has graduated to toddlerdom and eats mostly what we do instead of baby food. I've also stopped shopping at the expensive grocery store and only buy in-season fruit and veggies. The biggest changes I've seen have been in staples for little people (milk, bananas (from $.49 to $.99 a pound), and bread).
A lot of people have cited solid factors why this woman may be having trouble making it on food stamps. My question is, why is this issue a big deal at all? I've got two kids and a spouse, and I personally find it extremely difficult to manage to feed my kids healthy and cheap meals, so I can't imagine how hard it would be to feed two kids with no spouse around to help. It's great that you can save money by having the AB bake your bread, but that's not an option for most people, let alone most single parents. I would say that no matter how you look at it, the allotment for food stamps is miniscule. Pay for it out of middle and upper class tax increases; I personally wouldn't mind paying my share to feed single parents and their kids.
Feeding anyone who has a major food allergy (wheat, rice, milk, even nuts sometimes) is generally highly expensive.
And if said single mother works or is looking for work, there's probably not much time to cook for the kids, so prepared food it is.
Well, maybe food in Ellouseville is cheaper than where I've lived, but there's no way we feed our family (2 adults, 1 toddler) for 315/month. I sympathize with the mother in the story, because I've been cooking suppers without a second parent present for the past few months. When you've just gotten home from a long day at work, have a toddler hanging off your legs, wanting dinner "NOW," you end up turning to the processed and "convenience" foods out of necessity. Sure, after the kids have gone to bed, you could cook from scratch for the next day, but there's housework to be done and you're tired too, so it doesn't always happen.
Plus, I think the point about the initial outlay required for bulk purchases is a really good one. If your food budget is always tight, you can't ever afford that big trip to Sam's Club or wherever to get those bulk items. I bet if you looked at your monthly spreadsheet, you'd find that while your average might be $312, some months were substantially higher. The mom on foodstamps doesn't have that luxury.
The good thing about Ellesiouville (and most other urban settings) is that it's time for farmer's markets to open! Fresh produce from farms right outside of city limits - sold without a grocery tacking on their fees to the price - sounds like a plan to me.
I'm confused, too. $315/3/15 = $7/person/meal in the first two weeks of the month. Even if she's forced to buy high-priced convenience food due to lack of transportation, it can't cost $7/person/meal! A box of cereal and a dozen eggs may run you $8-10 total at a convenience store, but that will feed three people for two breakfasts (at least). How is she spending $42 on those two breakfasts, instead?
If the single mother is getting that sort of food stamp allotment, my guess is that she's not working, which really ought to free up time for both shopping and cooking as a practical matter.
I do think there's a larger social issue of whether she has habits of thrift in general or thriftiness related to food and nutrition. These habits are learned. If she's never seen anyone make supper from fresh food she's not going to think about doing it herself, and likely doesn't know how.
In ancient times I was a social worker, and saw routinely that the homemakign skills of the mother absolutely determined the quality of life of the family.
Well I can see spending $315 in 2 weeks if she started out with zero food on hand. When I go in and spend my $75 - with $25 left for things like brooms, or shampoo, or whatever else I might be out of - it presupposes I still have some staples, or remnants of them, left at home.
Also where I live, food has skyrocketed lately. I need to join a this farmer's coop which, I hear, actually delivers the things they give you (it isn't a full set of groceries though) to your house. But to do that I must go there first, in a car, and I only found out about it because I know this hippie artist type because I rent art studio space. So I know about it because I'm *not* on welfare.
Thanks for heads up on Linux, AP (and Dell comments).
Oo, but Jacklyn Hyde, those farmers' markets really aren't all that cheap. They tack on the "Organic" price. They wind up charging more because they can, since it's the urban hipsters who shop there. I can get stuff at the cheap, bulk, sack-your-own grocery store for way cheaper than at the farmers' market, even though I freely concede that the produce is better at the farmers' market, in general. Still, food costs are way up, and it's a nuisance. Milk for the kids, eggs, rice, even flour and sugar is more expensive. Meat is seriously high.
I just started my brand-new job after grad school, and I've always spent about $150 a month on groceries for just me. When I was in school (undergrad and grad), I was on food stamps for several years and got about that much. It is possible to live on, but I had to buy in bulk and eat a lot of beans and rice to do it.
I admit that it does seem excessive that this mother is out of money halfway through the month, but it depends a lot on what she's buying.
I eat very healthy food and the foods that are the healthiest are more expensive, even if you don't buy organic.
Yes, spaghetti noodles can be cheap, and I love them, but eating white flour pasta several times a week isn't healthy -- but whole grain costs more. Whole wheat bread costs way more than a generic brand of white bread. Yes, Jiff Peanut Butter or whatever is cheap, but it has sugar, salt and hydrogenated oil. The natural kind that's just peanuts is about twice as much, but way better for you. If you want to buy healthy/natural foods (not even organic) that don't have a lot of hydrogenated oil or high fructose corn syrup or white flour, it's expensive. And honestly? People should be able to afford healthy food for their kids.
I'm an old single mother and generally have been spending $320 a month on food for the girl and myself. This is mostly organic but without meat, and only a little fish (one or two meals per week). This is up from about $240 a month as little as a year ago. We haven't changed our eating habits that much and eat even less packaged food. We eat out perhaps once every two weeks and that is not included. The things that really add up are produce and dairy. If I were adding meat and prepared food, my total would be much higher
In the first comment, greatblue points out that people don't know how to cook anymore. This is important. I cook virtually every day, and it doesn't take long if I need it not to, and it amazes people that I do this without recipes, shopping lists,
and all sorts of stress.
Lise in NJ makes a similar point. I'd say that if the Angry Family spends $312 in a month with all sorts of cooking and budgeting expertise and info, and the ability to transport and safely store a 50 lb bag of flour, then someone with fewer skills of this sort might well spend more.
Practical question on the flour sack - do you keep it in Tupperware or what? I keep open bags of flour in the refrigerator because even canisters or Tupperware vermin seem to attack flour and rice, due to the humidity. It is as though they could self-generate in there, I am not sure how.
ScienceWoman, the Angry family spends $400 on average, which takes into account the months with the big outlays on bulk, as well as the months when we spend practically nothing and eat only what we have stocked up. (I love those months - all we buy is milk and produce. Maybe $100, tops.) Even if you have to resort to processed food, you can get a lot of stuff cheap at a discount market (like Save A Lot or Grocery Outlet). No way should the young woman in the story be needing $600 a month, even if she is throwing frozen pizza in a microwave.
Most vendors at Ellesiouville's farm markets take food stamps, but if anything I think the farm markets have more expensive produce that the big supermarkets. I still enjoy a good farm market, though.
There's one food option that no one has mentioned yet, and that's the hippie food coop. Go buy your peanuts there, and run them through the grinder. More peanut butter than you can eat for a month, and it only costs a few dollars. We get a lot of our grains and cereals at the coop.
Prof Zero, we keep our flour in 5-gallon buckets. You buy the bugs with the flour; sometimes you get lucky, sometimes not. We burn through it pretty fast, so it doesn't have time to mold (and the bugs, if they're in there, are too tiny or few to worry about).
We are working on cutting our food budget. Since we like to cook we are tending to buy more of the fresher food. We've also enforced "leftover day". I signed up for the local grocery stor cupon cards and tend to purchase things that we need on sales. We also try and keep to our list of food items.
We are looking at coupon sites as well and my friend knows a great fresh produce place near us.
I am looking forward to start cooking some more and with the summer it will be veggies galore!
I'd say my partner and I spend about $400 a month on groceries, but we buy organic, local foods. We probably spend another 10$ apiece on paper products, cleaners and toiletries. He doesn't eat meat, so that greatly reduces the amount of money we spend. We also don't buy packaged food.
I think the transportation thing is a huge issue. In our town, the closed the local big-name grocery store and opened a co-op in it's place. Now, the closest store to downtown (and the poorer part of town) that carries cheap groceries is a bus-ride away, instead of within walking distance. The co-op promised to carry cheap versions of all the foods it stocks, but the "cheap" stuff they carry is either not cheap or disgusting.
Also, the packaged food thing must be a huge factor. My partner's sister is on Weight Watchers and all of the food she buys is packaged (with the exception of some vegetables). She probably spends the same $400 dollars a month just to feed herself that my partner and I spend.
My partner is a full-time student living off of loans and I just barely make a livable wage...but we don't spend money on much else besides food, rent and utilities (and the occasional movie rental).
Professor Zero, if you put your flour in the freezer for 24 hours it kills the bugs that are there.
I was also going to mention the idea of freezing the flour to get rid of bugs.
I buy a lot of rice and sometimes you get it with the mealworm eggs already in it and they hatch and you get gross worms that grow up to be gross little moths. So I keep my rice in the freezer at all times and keep flour, corn meal and sugar in the fridge. No bugs!
For two people (and a third during college vacations) Quicken tells me we spent $6400 on groceries, $3975 on restaurants (including cafeteria lunches and takeout chinese) and $1325 on wine (mostly two-buck Chuck Shiraz) in the last twelve months (5/23/07 to 5/22/08). Given that the restaurant meals would have required additional groceries if they'd been made at home and that some sort of liquid would have been needed to replace the wine, I don't see $600-$650/month as a ridiculously high grocery bill.
I grew up in a house where every penny was pinched so hard that Lincoln yelped. I learned how to cook/shop with an eye on prices. This invaluable education is unfortunately not available to everyone.
The only reason I know how to shop is that my stepmom is a former home-ec teacher who pounded it into me as a kid. With prices going up, I'm finding myself doing meal-planning for the week based on the stores' loss-leaders or what's in my freezer, buying store brand, expanding our garden, and keeping track of prices like a hawk.
I have a car, though. I can drive from one end of town to the other to get the deals I'm after (I have taken gas into account on that, too). I'm a stay-at-home mom, so I can put something in the crockpot at noon or run errands while the kids are in school.
If she's living where there's no oven or no fridge (not uncommon for the poor), if she doesn't have a car, if she doesn't have a solid support network of family/friends to help watch the kids and drive her around or whatever, and if she's never learned how to grocery shop and cook, then her numbers make sense.
When my husband and I got married, he had no idea how to cook. His mom "cooked" by using bagged and boxed stuff. Now, I grew up in farmland with a home-ec stepmom and farm girl mom, and I learned how to cook. I was amazed at the things he'd buy on our extremely tight budget when I knew I could make it cheaper and better. He's much better now, and we spend less on food than we ever have. Still, there are skills we have learned along the way that not everyone has.
Long-time lurker, 1st time commenter. I'm a grad student, cooking for one. My average food cost over the last 6 months is $300 - $150 for groceries and the rest is eating out, either at restaurants, takeout, or at a cafeteria at school. So I might be able to cut it to $200, but I'd start feeling deprived at that point.
Here's the thing that was brought up only in passing by a couple people: I'm here temporarily, over $600 miles from my home. It cost me well over $200 to get a decent "pantry" stocked up (oil, margarine, flour, pasta, soup, whatever). At least half of that "pantry" is in my bedroom because it simply doesn't fit in the kitchen I share with 3 other people. I have one large skillet, two small pots, one bowl, and a couple of plates. I'm also sharing a rather small fridge/freezer with 3 other people.
Making large batches of stuff from scratch is not feasible simply due to space constraints, and cooking for one means I have to eat the same damn thing at least a couple days in a row so that whatever fresh veggies I have don't go bad. There's a multitude of number of ways AP has a head start on your typical poor single person.
Continually asserting "people no longer know how to cook" is really missing the point -- even if she were living on convenience food alone, the numbers don't add up. That's an incredibly large average meal cost, one that would allow them to purchase every single meal at Boston Market or Chipotle, for example.
I spend $600 on two adults, but:
1. I live in south Florida
2. I shop at my neighborhood grocery store instead of commuting to a Super Walmart
3. I buy some fancy things like humane eggs and organic lettuce
But seriously, even non-organic produce here is $2-5 a pound. Crazy.
I am very much enjoying the 'where's the father' comments - as if his non-contribution is also this woman's fault.
But I digress. I am a poor grad student, and until I bought a car, had no idea how much the local grocery was gouging me in my working class neighborhood. I learned that my local Dominicks has different prices than the suburban one, for example, and that my local store never had sales of staple items like rice and pasta. My food bill dropped nearly $100 a month when I had the ability to drive 7 miles to another store.
As well, there is a lot of cultural capital assumed in the ability to budget, plan meals, and have time to cook these meals.
I hope we are all spending at least as much time in communication with our senators and representatives about waste and corruption in the Pentagon budget as we are in speculating about why this single mother can't make her food stamps stretch.
i'm a little upset by the way everyone keeps focusing on the location of the father.
for all you people know he could have died! but even if he didn't that is no excuse to question whether her assistance should be dependent upon his existence. what if she did make a mistake and have two children out of wedlock? guess what everyone makes mistakes and wait for it, omg food stamps was made to help people out in their time of need!!! no not that, that sounds like too much common sense.
and i love how everyone is questioning whether she is doing anything to improve her station in life. that's heartless and unnecessary to the point of the story.
I worked in several grocery stores to make the rent money through college. One store was in a particularly poor section of town, but you wouldn't know from looking at the food people would roll out on the taxpayer's dime. Racks of ribs, prime cuts of steaks and pork, bags of chicken, etc.
Also there's the WIC program, which allots juices, milk, eggs, baby formula, and peanut butter to disadvantaged parents, so they don't even have to spend their food stamps on those items. So whenever I hear one of these sob stories, I have a hard time being sympathetic.
I couldn't even get financial aid for school because my retail wages were "too high" and the government assumed I was depending on my parents (I wasn't). I don't come from privilege. We work our asses off to get the things we need/want, and we do without what we don't need. We don't make extravagant purchases.
So when I wheeled out three grocery carts full of prime meats and other foods totaling $600 or more at the first of every month, and I was told to load it all into the back of a tricked-out Escalade...hmm.
This is, of course, one of the Big Problems. I have been in the "single mom, 3 kids" school for a time; we managed, but it was hard. Now, admittedly, part of our problem was that I had never been taught money management. (Do they teach that now, in high school? WHY NOT?!?!?!) But I' acutely aware of the great problem with *abuse* (not as pertains to our hypothetical mother). I live in a very modest area and quite a few neighbors have both WIC and foodstamps. I think our store is partially responsible...I HAVE seen beer and cigarettes paid for with food stamps. No, that's not legal. Makes me crazy. Interesting topic, though, Doc.
I can probably sum up where her food budget is going in one word: Milk. If her kids are heavy milk drinkers and she's using it in cooking and feeding them yogurt, she's probably seen her food bill rise enormously the last few months.
A gallon of milk is a dollar more than a gallon of gas, and everybody's complaining about the price of gas.
My husband and I spend $315 on *veggies* a month, rampaging yuppies we are. If you buy fresh food, $315 doesn't go far either; those of you who assume it's all about packaged food are missing the point. So now we've established that packaged food is expensive, fresh food is expensive, and carb-loaded bulk foods have low nutritional value. Of course, now that we're having a "child's obesity epidemic" thrust down our throats, she'd be cast as terrible mother if she didn't buy skim milk and fresh food etc and fed them on pasta and potatoes the way we're recommending.
I really wish grad students would quit comparing themselves and their budgets to single parents. Being in grad school is voluntary, you can stop any time you want, and you have enormous flexibility and control over your time. Gee, why O why would a single mom buy prepared foods, if that's what is what she is doing? It's clearly because she's not frugal and people aren't taught the ways of goodness and right the way we were. Or, might it be because she comes home from work tired with two really hungry kids who want to eat right away? Well, by gum, she should just spend her weekends making big pots of chili and casserole to freeze so that the rest of us can approve of her frugality while spending our weekends relaxing and mowing our lawns and improving our tax-subsized-wealth accumulation plans (aka houses).
It's $315 *a month* people. I could write a check to her myself each month and barely notice it. If you are worried about "Your Tax Dollars" take on Halliburtan instead of this woman. Even if she isn't as frugal as she could be, she's small fry in terms of waste.
Assuming you refer to this AP story, the single mother in question lives on the South Side of Chicago. The reporter apparently found "One Stop Food & Liquors" the most convenient grocery store to include in the story. It seems possible that this neighborhood is one where the only place to shop is a high-priced corner store. Perhaps someone more familiar with the South Side of Chicago could tell us how many hippie co-ops and farmers markets might be found there.
First: Chaser -- I think I love you. If my wife says it's ok, will you marry me? (I understand this may require us to move to California or a ranch in Texas.)
Anon: The One Stop Food & Liquors is, indeed, the most convenient store for that neighborhood. It isn't a corner store -- it is actually a grocery store about the size of old Piggly Wiggly's -- but the prices are high and the emphais is on packaged foods with really crappy produce. Located in what, until recently, could only have been described as a slum, and set on the lakefront between Chicago's Loop and Hyde Park Nieghborhoods, it is now only on the very fringes of gentrification. This, I'm sure, drives up the rents, placing increased economic pressure on an already stressed community. The neighborhood doesn't have adequate public transportation, making it difficult for residents to travel to better stores.
The nearest hippie co-op, in a better neighborhood almost two miles away, went under recently and was replaced by an expensive yuppie market that even the yuppies say is too expensive.
what bothers me most is the abuse of the food stamp system, multi-millionaires use it which makes me sick.
http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com
If that AP link is the right story, then it clears up something I was wondering about. A lot of comments here focused on $600/month. I didn't see a claim of needing $600/month. What the article says could as easily square with food stamps all used up by the 15th, food bought on the 15th gone by the 21st, then about a week of scrambling for food. That lands on a total of about $400-450 for the month.
I'm curious about the government's bare-bones diet of $542 for the month, for a family of four. Based on the reports here, it seems people would think that number is too high too.
People were saying $600 because AP said the article she was referencing said the mother who receives $315 was out of food halfway through the month.
Jobetta, I'm not sure that "out of food by the 15th" isn't a misreading. I read the article to say that she was out of *food stamps* halfway through the month, not food. And I think it's the zero balance on the card, regardless of what's in the cupboard, that makes the mental impact, and draws the attention, but I'm not sure it reflects the exact situation.
Just for the record, the AP story is not the one that appeared in the Ellesiouville Times. The mother in the Ellesiouville story claimed she was out of food halfway through the month and that she received $315 per month in food stamps. The cost of living (and food) in Ellesiouville is significantly less than Chicago's South Side.
chaser, are you arguing that public assistance should provide the same level of food indulgence made by two childless professionals? Even though most of the families working to pay for public assistance can't themselves afford that sort of lavishness?
Professor Zero, it sounds like you're referring to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share. I just bought one this year, and it's awesome. One word of caution: try Googling "CSA" and your area to find a list of CSAs that serve you, and comparison shop. Every CSA offers different sized shared (lots of them are designed for families of four, so if you are a smaller family you might be getting too much food), different payment options, and different delivery options. Most will have various drop sites around your area, and you go pick up a box every week or two. Home delivery is pretty unusual, although not completely unheard of. You definitely need to be an adventurous cook, since they just give you an assortment of what they are harvesting that week.
As far as the idea that the woman isn't buying things in bulk, she may just not think that way. For some reason, it doesn't always occur to people to actually do the math and see if they can save money doing something that seems counter-intuitive. For example, my grocery store sometimes puts 1 lb. boxes of pasta on BOGO sales. Conventional wisdom is that one will get a better deal buying the larger container. But when the smaller boxes of pasta are BOGO, they are actually cheaper per ounce than 2 lb boxes. I see plenty of people in the grocery store reaching for the bigger box without even checking the unit price. I wonder if they even know that the unit price is printed on the tag (it's in very tiny letters).
Unlike most of the excellent posts here, I'm not sure of the point.
It almost seems like you're arguing that this single mother doesn’t deserve food stamps because she never went to grad school (where, like you and me, she would have learned how to cook frugally)?
Or are you making the controversial point that a particular PhD professor has better brains and life skills than a particular food stamps recipient?
I live in a student coop, so all my food is built into my rent. Luckily, the food portion of it is currently posted on the freezer, and it just happens to be the May 1 - May 20 allocation.
Apparently, for that time period (~2/3 of a month), it was 79.97USD per resident, making around 120USD per month.
That IS how much I pay for food each month, as I get ALL my food from here. I'm sure the other students are subsidising my food by paying the same amount to the coop but eating out regularly (though occasionally they'll have friends over eating our food--certainly not enough to offset their not being here).
Being a house of twenty students who mostly eat vegetarian, we buy in bulk (We buy eggs by the gross--no, wait, the 1.33 gross.) and probably mostly relatively cheap items.
Most of my coworkers (AmeriCorps volunteers) are on food stamps. For a few, I think it makes sense, but I think most really shouldn't. AmeriCorps, however, thinks we should, and I'm unusual in turning down free government money. I figure it's for people who /really/ need it, not people who think a stop at a gas station is a reasonable place to buy a snack (or an entire lunch) and then discover they're mysteriously low on funds by the end of the month.
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