Time to cook is one thing, and something which I can’t come up with an answer for right now… but if we do not have the expectation that people can teach themselves how to cook, then why have the expectation that people can learn to read, drive, use a shovel, operate any machinery, type, cut grass, bag groceries, work on a car, assemble something from parts, or anything else that requires more than one step to perform.
It’s not a question of knowledge, but one of time and facilities (as **Diogenes **pointed out). Trying to shoehorn all poor people into a category of living situations where they have the time and facilities to make meals from scratch is just silly.
I think a lot of whether or not you can or should dictate how that money’s spent depends on your view about the assistance and its nature.
For example, many here view this sort of food assistance as a fundamental right, and a primary purpose of government.
Others may view it as a short-term, stop-gap thing, and as a huge drain on public coffers that are already depleted as-is.
If you take the second view, it’s not at all unreasonable to think that if the government is essentially giving someone that which they could in the vast majority of cases, go earn themselves, then the government has a duty to be a good steward of the taxpayers’ money.
Along that line of reasoning, it’s reasonable to think that the government not only has the right, but has the obligation to decide what is and isn’t reasonable for the recipients of the aid to spend that aid on. It’s reasonable for the government to expect aid recipients not to buy non-nutritious junk food on the public dime, especially when those same people are likely to be disproportionately affected by diseases that are directly related to diet, such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and hypertension.
These people have been approved for X amount of dollars worth of food support. Full stop. What food they decide to spend that money on is their business.
On a related note: My mom gets some ridiculous amount of food stamps per month. Something like $6. Yes, really.
The WIC program (women, infants, and children) does put restrictions on what can be bought with it, but it’s done as an exhaustive list. If one brand of cereal is on the list, but another equivalent brand isn’t, then you have to buy the brand that’s on the list.
It is cheaper to live on ingredients, if you don’t count the cost of your time. College students with a pantry full of pre-prepared foods, it isn’t because they’re cheaper.
A couple of older threads:
How many threads have we had on this subject? Is it time for another one?
So when I was getting assistance, having a cast from palm halfway to shoulder, I shouls have had to buy ingrediants and make meals?
Honey, if it couldn’t be nuked or eaten without cooking, forget it.
Because no one learns how to do most of those things on their own without someone teaching them. Who is going to teach people who don’t know how to cook things from scratch to do this? And who is going to provide them with the facilities to do so? Not everyone has a stove/oven/microwave or a refrigerator (or crock pot…gods :p). Or even pots, pans and other cooking implements. Hell, I know people who are middle class or higher who don’t have those things, let alone the poor who benefit from programs like food stamps.
-XT
Besides what other people have pointed out, it’s just not worth the trouble of the government to create a new bureaucracy to decide what food items are acceptable and what aren’t. It would cost more than it would save.
Well, not necessarily. There are an awful lot of people at the DoD who already do much the same thing.
The voice of reason, attempting to make sense.
Agree.
** standing and applauding **
Seriously, the judgemental posts here are from people who have no friggin’ *clue *what it’s like to be seriously, completely, overwhelmingly in poverty. I don’t mean “I can’t go out to dinner because otherwise I couldn’t pay my rent” type of broke. I mean “I can’t buy Top Ramen and even if I could I have nowhere to cook it” type of broke.
Crap like this:
doesn’t help either. Crock pots aren’t free, ya know. They can’t pay for their own food, and now you want them to purchase appliances?!?
No, he mentioned paying for the health costs of people on food stamps. ETA: I would also argue that we subsidize crap food that anyone of any class eats via high fructose corn syrup.
If I am going to be subsidizing something, I would rather pay for a crock pot, hot plate, microwave or pots and utensils, then pay for chips and pop. “Give a man a fish”, and all that…
Crockpots aren’t exactly speedy either.
I would say that they aren’t a bad suggestion for some folks in the kind of space and time situations we’re talking about because they aren’t that expensive (no more so than a hot plate or microwave), they don’t take a lot of space and they provide a tool to do some homecooked, economical meals that can be cooked while you’re out and about.
It’s not something can be practically used as an everyday, all purpose cooking tool, though. It can be helpful, it gives people some more options, but it’s not practical to suggest that everybody on EBT should limited to only being able to buy things they can cook in a crockpot.
That hadn’t occurred to me, but considering that we are doing just that, I agree with you.
Never mind. I withdraw my participation in this thread.
The answer is no, you can not make a snap decision about a persons lifestyle by nosing into what they bought one time. You do not know if they scrimped for a kids party . You do not know if they eat that way all the time. Mind your own business.
How about the electricity/gas cost to do all that lengthy cooking? You think that’s free? Yeah, let’s run the fifty dollar crock pot for twelve hours to make soup, it won’t cost a penny on the bill, right? And of course there’s no problem whatsoever when you’re living in a shitbox with ancient wiring to leave an electrical appliance running for hours, no chance of a fire there, of course not! And if you happen to be camping under a bridge, you can simply plug the crock pot in to one of the handy free electrical outlets so conveniently installed every ten feet or so. Easy peasy, one wonders why in the hell those stupid poor people don’t just do that, instead of buying shelf stable products that don’t require refrigeration.