THE CAPS DID THAT

Food stamps are incredibly limited. What I had to work with was a bit over 100$. No hot food. No prepared food. So even though rotisserie chickens are pretty similar in price to raw roaster chickens, they're off-limits.

And of course, it's *just* food--not anything you'd need to buy at a grocery store in general. To quote Em, "goddamn food stamps don't buy diapers."

So no toilet paper, no diapers, no toothpaste, no shampoo. Shit you absolutely do need and can't effectively get by without. So food stamps as is are already lacking.

And meal boxes selected by a govt agency? Look. People know how to cook what they know how to cook. And they know what their families will and won't eat (try convincing a toddler that the govt is making them eat a certain diet and actually getting the kid to eat it)

And they know what people in their family are allergic to or have dietary restrictions for. From the sound of things in this article that hasn't been addressed at all. And that isn't even starting to get into that this plan doesn't include any fresh food.

There is an incredible amount of shaming of people in this country for eating "junk" when on food stamps as though we don't subsidize the components of the junk such that it costs way less than fresh food.

And then it's "ugh why are poor people so gross and unhealthy" when fresh food is financially out of reach and no one has any spare time to devote to full nights' sleep or exercise. That's not going to get better with cost-cutting ~delivery box~ situation.

and again. Giving people a box of random shit assumes they know how to cook everything in it, which isn't a given. That they have access to a stove, which isn't a given (weekly motels often don't, for a start). That they don't have any dietary restrictions.

That their kids will eat everything put in front of them (especially an issue for kids with dietary restrictions of their own or things like texture issues w/ autism. Or just picky kids!). This is 'donate cans to the food drive that are the cans you don't want to eat' of

food policy. My mom always made us go get cans/boxed food that could be assembled into a coherent meal because she'd been there. Most kids around us donated spinach and green beans and felt virtuous about it.

Food stamps are grossly inadequate for providing for families and do not cover non-food essentials you would get in a grocery trip--and other programs don't really either. But this is a goddamn mess. People know what their families need.

People know what they know how to prepare and what their kids will eat. This bullshit infantilizing nonsense of an idea where you just toss shit at poor people is only useful if you want poor people to suffer. Probably in this admin, they do.

AND FOR THAT MATTER sorry I'm still mad about this concept do you all understand what hunger looks like in this country? do you actually? I've seen it. I don't know if you have.

Go work in a school that's been written off as not good enough and you'll see it real quick. Or date someone who's on food stamps and can't contribute to the rent when he moves in with you but can offer up his food stamps.

Hunger in this country rarely looks like the charity commercials you see on TV. What we have here is food insecurity and a huge amount of malnutrition. Again. Our junk here is cheap. Junk has calories. It's just that's all it has.

When I was a kid, we had ten dollars in the bank and 20,000 in credit card debt, and my mom hid it from us as best as she could but she explained some things. One of those things was this country's form of calorie to expenditure economizing

You know what one of the cheapest things you can get if you are trying to maximize calories is? In the US, that is. Because of how our subsidies work. Cake mix. In a cruel sort of twist, we really can let them eat cake.

Cake mixes are generally under a dollar. Eggs are under a dollar. Oil is usually about sixty cents, in a medium-sized bottle. A cake is about 4,000 calories. If you have next to no money and need to at least have enough calories to live, you eat cake.

And, particularly in food deserts or areas where Walmart has driven out all the local grocery options, the other cheapest things are soda and chips. A lot of that has to do with the corn lobby's power. The end result is that the cheapest possible things to eat, if you are

at desperation point, have next to no nutritional value. Having been there, any time someone goes 'but produce is cheap!' I want to punch them in the face. The first priority as an animal is getting enough calories to live.

Everything else becomes secondary until you have fulfilled that requirement. So sure, you can buy a head of lettuce for, say, a dollar fifty. That head of lettuce does almost nothing to get you enough base fuel to get by.

When people scoff at poor people in this country "oh they're not *really* starving, look at them, they're fat" what you are seeing is people trying to get enough calories from any source to live who are at the same time withering with malnutrition

Sometimes having to wait a good long while between meals and when they got those meals they had no nutritive value, for that matter. And your body understands starvation mode and stores accordingly. This country's approach to food and poverty is shameful.

You cannot pretend a bag of chips and a bag of apples being the same price in a store--even if they are, and often they aren't--means people are just making bad choices. A bag of apples doesn't have enough calories. That's the baseline.

When you are in a place where it's eat food that gives you no vitamins, no protein, no micronutrients, etcetera, or eat food that does not give you enough basic breakdown of glucose to get your body through another day, you do not have the luxury

to "be healthy". If we gave a shit about health--actually gave a shit--we would make fresh produce free on food stamps. Not that that would help people in food deserts much--where you have one or two things at the convenience store at best

but it would be a start. As is, we screw people over by design, and then lecture them when they take the options most available and pragmatic to them. And then cut their benefits because they're not conforming to our standards.