Gwyneth Paltrow, a very rich woman with a blog called GOOP that promotes a very high-dollar lifestyle, is taking a hunger awareness challenge to live on a $29 food budget for a week.
What do you all think?
I’ve got opinions of my own (I’m sure no one is shocked by that) but I’m curious what other people think of it before I start on my dissertation.
Without searching for any details beyond the premise and the identity of the celeb in question (and her track record), it sounds like self-serving bullshit.
The comment I saw was, “You had $29 for food and you bought seven fucking limes?”
I think it was well-intended but will come across instead as “wealthy celebrity trying very hard to show she can ‘relate’ to average normal people.”
I don’t think it would be too difficult to live on $29 worth of food for a week.
I also think it was probably well-intended, but is going to look like poverty tourism.
My knee jerk impression is that she’s being an attention whore. People already assume someone of her size and socioeconomic class eats nothing but lettuce anyway. So if she says that budget constituted a dietary hardship, no one will believe her. And if she says she was able to survive on that budget, no one will be surprised.
And ya gotta know that she won’t cook it herself. I’m sure she either does, or can find a chef/chefs that can work magic with rice and beens.
Pretty much this. Anybody could do it for A week. The trick is doing it week after week after week after…
She can go fuck herself.
That was the first thing I thought. They were probably organic fucking limes, too.
I will say it will probably be less offensive than the time Tyra Banks wore a fat suit for a day so that she could get all teary on her talk show about how she can relate to normal people now.
I really don’t see what the big deal is. It’s like one lime per day for the vodka seltzers.
stuff like this always reminds me of this guy.
If you are willing to spend time cooking and baking, it is not that hard at all.
Actually, doing it for one week is harder than doing it week after week. To really save money, you need to buy bulk, buy in advance, and buy on sale. It only becomes cheap in the long run.
Judging by the stuff I see on Facebook, it doesn’t count unless she gets rid of her iPhone.
You can even starve for a week. Let’s see her stay under $754 for six month.
Some background for people who might not know what’s going on (this is pieced together from the internet, correct me if I’m wrong):
In 2012, Mario Batali spent a week living off a food stamp budget ($31 or something) in order to bring awareness to cutbacks in the program where he lived. (For what it’s worth, Mario’s original grocery list looked pretty reasonable, but I guess it was supposed to show how little room there was for flavor and how little convenience that budget gets you.)
For some reason, he recently started a hashtag challenge, like the ol’ ice bucket challenge, and nominated Gwyneth Paltrow and 2 other nobodies. Gwyneth posted her shopping list and the internet blew up.
But the thing is, it’s supposed to be difficult. If every celebrity put together a reasonable list of healthy foods that anyone could afford and live healthily on, then the hashtag challenge to raise awareness about food stamp cutbacks would have backfired tremendously. You can just imagine conservative lawmakers shouting, “Hey, even these out-of-touch idiot celebrities can live on $29 a week, we should cut back food stamps even more!”
This gamble requires celebrities to try and fail miserably so that other people will see these pathetic shopping lists and say, “Oh my, $29 is far too little, we should increase food stamp allowances!”
Of course, failing too miserably can also backfire, as we’ve seen here, but I really don’t understand the outrage. It’s not like she’s suggesting this as a serious option.
This is her week’s worth of food. I’m not seeing twenty-one meals in this picture.
From the looks of threads about this topic on other boards, this particular one will probably be moved in time to the Pit.
Do it for a year and then come back and brag.
