If you read the article further, they talk about some unfortunate 21-yr old single mom who steals food from the supermarket. Further in the article we get this gem: “…gave up on local food banks because of the lines.” Here’s the part that gets me…she has no job, so it’s not like standing on line cuts into her busy schedule. What it does mean is that this person would rather steal than stand in line for free guilt-free food. Has no way to feed herself but can’t be bothered to stand in line when the food is offered free. :::SMH:::
Out of curiosity, I checked what a single person would get on food stamps (although they don’t call them that anymore). Assuming minimum wage, and if I did the math right, I’d get about $134 a month. Wanna hear the interesting thing? My current budget for groceries is less than that. I can, authoritatively, tell you that one person can exist quite satisfactorily on $134 in groceries per month. And not be a scarecrow. Heck, man…this is a country where you can go into most supermarkets and buy a completely cooked ready-to-eat chicken for $5-8 that will last you two days. And that doesn’t include whatever you scrounge with a little $20 lawnmowing gig, a $15 snow shoveling job, or just helping someone carry a sofa up three flights of stairs.
Heck, minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Discounting taxes (because, really, if all you earn is minimum wage you aren’t paying any federal taxes), all you have to do is work one hour a day to eat better than pretty much anywhere outside the developed world. Get together with another down-on-their-luck buddy, pool your $14.50, and you can both eat fairly well that day. But even on $7.25 a day, you’re not going to starve. At all. (Although it does require a bit of discipline and intelligence in that you need to know how to do basic cooking.)
I used to have a buddy who lived on a VA disability. He was always running out of money at the end of the month. His choice of food? He’d head to the supermarket and buy a meatloaf-and-mashed-potatoes dinner that was basically heat-and-eat. And for the price he paid for it he could have bought a sack of potatoes and enough ground beef to last him 3x longer than that one meal would. But, he didn’t think that way, and he claimed he didnt know how to cook. And as a result he was always behind the curve, borrowing money at the end of the month. When resources are scarce, and your back is at the wall, you have to think and make careful decisions…not do whats easy.
This isn’t to say that hand-to-mouth living on food stamps is going to be a walk in the park. Nope, nope, nope…my point here is that the goal is to not be dependent on .gov to feed you in the first place. This is why, when you have an extra $20 in your pocket, you pick up a 25# bag of rice, a flat of canned vegetables, a box of oatmeal, an assortment of spices, or whatever else will store nicely in your kitchen cabinets for a couple years.
And this isn’t some class-warfare you-hate-the-poor attitude I’m evidencing. I don’t hate the poor, and I don’t resent the rich. I could very easily be either one, all depending on my actions. I have food socked away so that if, tomorrow, I had absolutely zero income I could still eat. I could probably go for a month or two with literally no change in my current diet. After that, it’s into the stored food and that would carry me for about a year or more.
I can totally see people hitting a hard stretch and, through no fault of their own, having to lean on some form of public welfare….but stealing food from a supermarket because you’d rather not be inconvenienced by standing in line at a food bank is not the same as ‘stealing to keep from going hungry’.
