One of the issues with the food stamp challenge is that for a LOT of MIDDLE CLASS Americans, the $50 per person a week that is the maximum benefit (its actually like $48 or something) is well above their per person food budget when they take out things like dog food and cleaning products. So they look at it and think “that isn’t hard, we do that all the time.” Frankly its a more than reasonable food budget. I can’t remember when it wasn’t a holiday that I spent $200 a week at the grocery store for my family of four on food - if I don’t count kitty litter and toilet bowl cleaner. (And it isn’t my husband shopping, who tends to buy expensive cheese, expensive chocolate, and if the kids go with him there are suddenly foods in the house that are never in my shopping cart - I have Pop Tarts in my house right now!)
But they aren’t factoring in lunches - which they eat in the corporate cafeteria or grab out. Or pizza night. Or the McDonalds drive through. They take good grocery stores and a car for granted. They have a decent kitchen with a fridge with a good sized freezer. If they spend $60 one week to take advantage of a sale on meatballs it isn’t $10 they don’t have. They don’t count swinging by the store for an extra gallon of milk.
My less than $200 a week at the grocery store is breakfast for two teenagers, toast for my husband and I skip food. Plus coffee - but we have a Keurig (expensive) and order the coffee on the internet (expensive, but it doesn’t show up on my grocery receipt - out of sight, out of mind). Its lunches only on weekends - weekdays everyone eats out. And its dinner maybe four days a week for everyone. It does include keeping a teenage boy in food - but he makes himself rice in a rice cooker or scrambles eggs.
The $29 average benefit assumes a family with very little money will kick in something for food. I think that’s part of the problem here - when your budget is so tight that food security is an issue, you end up spending the $20 per person per week the government feels you should kick in on things like a winter coat, or shoes for the kids, or dental work.
Really good points. Our grocery budget simply isn’t our entire food budget. Some people, of course, do eat almost exclusively of food they buy at the store. But others have a lot of restaurant meals, which we might not be taking into account when we think of “what it takes to feed our household.”
This is an oddly hostile post. What makes her such a cunt, in your opinion? As noted, she didn’t think this project up but participated when challenged to by Mario Batali. If she had said no, would you then be claiming “this rich cunt thinks she’s too good to try living on a food stamp-sized budget?”
I’m not a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow, for sure, but it feels to me like her heinous crime is being richer than you are. She certainly gives to a lot of charity for such an awful person.
My grocery store sells $1 frozen meals that have a mystery meat, a vegetable and a starch in it. I ate 2 of these a day and supplemented them with a sandwich using $1 a loaf bread and some kind of lunch meat or hot dogs or whatever fit the budget. I compared different types of food in bulk and bought the cheapest. I bought dented cans. I bought large cans of stuff and froze most if for future use. I took a generic vitamin to cover deficiencies. Sometimes I’d get a $1 pizza and throw in half a .69 cent can of something green. If I cooked it was something that would freeze well and bulk up cheaply like jambalaya. If I needed a recipe I’d look it up on the internet. There are plenty of sites dedicated to budget cooking.
In short, I was able to eat different meals that were palatable on that kind of budget. I don’t make any claims that the meals were the height of nutritional perfection but they kept me going through some hard times.
Given the power of the internet I don’t understand why people are saying there are no resources available to help people get the most out of their budget.
I really don’t know what to think of G.P.'s food stamp challenge. On the one hand, good for her to have tried, I guess? On the other, her selections simply made her look like a clueless idiot (which she may well be. Or maybe she is simply so well-protected from the very real issues of poverty - and certain that she doesn’t actually have to feed herself for $29 per week - that she has no frame of reference for shopping like a poor person.)
Due to our current circumstances (husband still recovering from automobile accident, currently housing a couple of spares who would otherwise be homeless,) my family receives food stamps - about $83 per month, per person, plus the school-age kids receive free breakfast and lunch at school. I’m grateful, and I’m also lucky: I have plenty of storage and cooking facilities, cooking skills, and I’m the queen of shopping on a budget. I actually joked earlier today that I’d made a Gwyneth shopping trip - wild Alaskan salmon fillets, whole grain mustard, a really nice pork loin, and organic greens*! And there’s enough on the card to buy one more gallon of milk if we need it before the benefits top off on the 23rd! The pantry and freezers are full, my family is well-nourished, and we are mostly able to pay the bills, so I know good and well that we’re better-off than an awful lot of people. But I also know that our benefit will be reduced by some amount, beginning next month, because our housemate now has a 10-hour-per-week job at a sandwich restaurant. And that summer is coming up, which means that the big kids will eat breakfast and lunch at home, mostly. That stockpile of food will disappear pretty quickly, I know.
However, I think the Food Stamp Challenge is pretty darned condescending. “Look at me! I’m living like a poor person!” It’s like putting on blackface to demonstrate the issues faced by minorities - not even a skin-deep experience. At the end of the day, no, you don’t “know” what it’s like to be poor. You can revert to your own middle- or upper-class lifestyle as soon as the food budget runs out, instead of insisting “no, I’m not hungry” when there’s only enough dinner for the kids. You don’t have to go pawn your TV to buy diapers for the baby** or pay for dog food**. No one looks at you sideways because you’re wearing nice clothes** and paying for your food with an EBT card. I understand that the goal is to “raise awareness” or such, but really - who’s not aware that there are poor folks? (Just like “pink for breast cancer.” We get it. Everyone old enough to spell the word “cancer” knows that you can get it in your boobs. Wear pink if you like that color, fine. But awareness is raised. You aren’t really doing anything helpful.)
*Salmon $4.99/pound - cheaper than a mediocre quality beef roast; pork loin $1.69/pound, and I have the freezer space, plus it’s a nice lean protein; whole grain mustard on close-out, with a coupon; and organic greens, buy one get one free, plus a coupon. Plus fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables. The cereal, tea, and coffee that were on sale BOGO. Milk and cheese. Etc. Except for cold cereals and the occasional treat, I buy ingredients. But again: I’m lucky. I know how to cook from scratch, I have the equipment and storage I need, and the time to do so. Not everyone has that luxury.
**All of these came along before the wreck that disrupted the family financial situation. Before the inevitable question of “why would you have a baby/get a dog/buy nice boots if you’re poor?”
I went to the grocery store this weekend and spent almost exactly $200 for my family of four - including the stuff that wouldn’t count. I did it completely without a budget - just throwing the stuff in the cart that was on my list or seemed like it was a good deal, or I remember I needed. I got enough New York Strip for two meals and pork chops for another four. Milk, eggs, butter, bread, cheese, lunchmeat, half and half, fruits and vegetables, baking soda, a few spices. I also got trash bags, dishwasher detergent and laundry detergent, Gatoraide for my ball player, and underwear. I was Costco shopping. And everything is Costco sized.
Completely doable to do the approximately $50 a week. Not hard (it was New York Strip, there was a lot of luxury in that cart) at $30 a week per person…But again. Things I take for granted.
I can afford a Costco membership and can get to a Costco
I can put four meals of porkchops in my big freezer downstairs.
I have a car to buy all this at once. In fact, my issue with Costco trips is making sure my trunk is empty. There is no shopping bag on the bus.
When ringing up, I don’t have to worry that I’ve gone over budget.
I have a full pantry at home.
If we run out of milk this week, I’ll run to the grocery store.
If we decide that we want pizza on Friday, we’ll order it.
I think the latter is the case - she really is that insulated from want. She’s been extremely wealthy all her life, she has never had to budget anything like that before. Of course she didn’t do a good job! She doesn’t know how. People are actually born knowing nearly nothing, we have to do something called “learn” to master things. Everyone does a crap job the first time buying food on a tight budget, it’s just that most of us have our first time in our early 20’s, if that late, rather than whatever age Paltrow is right now.
The fact she’s wealthy as Midas and doesn’t have any familiarity with want doesn’t make her a bad person. For all I know, she’s a wonderful, generous human being if you know her personally, but her wealth does generate jealousy and her naivete generates resentment.
I think it did raise her personal awareness, which is the heart of the challenge. It’s not to really live like a poor person, it’s to give otherwise clueless people a glimpse of the problems faced by the poor. I hope it increases her empathy for others, but only time will tell. Maybe it will make her thing twice before making some of more tasteless statements from a position of privilege. Maybe not. You know what? She’s an actress, not a saint.
I agree, it can be condescending… but it isn’t always. I don’t think she was saying “I’m living like a poor person!”. That isn’t the point anyway - the point is for people to realize that eating on such a limited budget isn’t easy, and frequently it’s not just a matter of scaling down what you normally eat, it’s completely changing your diet. Which is hard.
Some people are fortunate enough that they’ve either had prior experience with such a food budget, or have already made choices so their diet is close to what is needed anyway - to them, they don’t get the big fuss. They don’t understand the struggle that someone used to eating like Paltrow undergoes when suddenly they can’t anymore because the money just isn’t there. People who have never had to worry much about a food budget (and you don’t have to be Paltrow-rich to be in that category) might well have their eyes opened to some extent.
No, it’s not like being actually poor - for one thing, the budget struggles encompass everything, not just food - but consider it a tool to educate people. Like all tools it can be used well or badly.
$50/person/week is actually a pretty decent food budget - we’d eat like kings at my house on that. I wish I could spend that much on food!
Problem is, our actual food budget is more like $30-35/person/week.
I think one of the most upsetting things for me personally is that I have nearly no reserves anymore. I used to keep a week or two of “emergency stores” in the house (actually, it was all stuff we ate regularly, just a certain quantity rotated to prevent expiration). Now I have maybe a day or two. At most. I find that very unsettling psychologically. We have had events in my area that made shopping impossible or nearly impossible for days at a time (tornado, flooding, blizzard). Instead of being able to hunker down and live in relative comfort until things resolved/were repaired we’ll been squabbling over the last bowl of ramen noodles within a couple days and go to be hungry - which is no way to sleep. I find it much easier to cope with other stressors in life if my pantry is full because, if nothing else at least I’ll be able to eat. Except that’s no longer the case. That safety net is GONE. It’s not a matter of having a freezer or shelves for canned goods, it’s that I can’t afford to keep a reserve of stuff in the larder. We’ve dipped into too often to cover the rough patches, most recently when I took a week off from work - with no pay - to visit my dying father. It was a huge economic blow to the household to do that even though the trip wasn’t that much, but between the cost of going and the lost wages it imposed real hardship on us.
I am receiving food stamps right now. I live with, and care for my mom full time. She cannot afford to feed me, as well as herself. So, as a single person with no income, I receive $194/month in food stamps. Where are Batali and Paltrow getting the $29/week figure?
If you have no income its the $194 you get. For most people on food stamps, it actually is supposed to be a SUPPLEMENTAL program - you are supposed to kick in some of your income - the average benefit in the U.S. is $29 per person per week because the average food stamp recipient is the working poor.
Which is one of the reasons I say “living off $50 a week in groceries is reasonable” - you aren’t eating high off the hog, but you aren’t stretching pennies. But doing it on $29 a week per person, because the government expects you to kick in $20 a week that got spent on shoes for the kids, or a coat, or heat (or because you blew it on beer or cell phones or McDonalds - which is what some will point out, and no doubt that ALSO happens) - that gets harder.
