Sunday, April 19, 2015

"By glamorizing a limited budget in a piously frugal 'look what you can do with it' sort of way, it suggests that people who aren�t eating as beautifully are doing it wrong and deserving of additional scorn."

"This isn�t an exercise in actually eating what SNAP recipients can eat, and it creates false impressions of what this lived reality actually is, making it easier for people to make false comparisons to their own situation."

A former nutritionist named Stephanie Jolly told Darlena Cunha, a home-based parent and former television producer. Cunha has an article in WaPo titled "How Gwyneth Paltrow hurt America�s poor and hungry/Her uber-privileged food stamp challenge obscures the many obstacles low income people face."

We were just talking about Paltrow's food-stamp challenge here. There are lots of good comments in there. And Dan from Madison has his own blog post, here:
I decided to go to my local grocery store to see if I could get enough food to live on for one week for $29.... Vegetables, frozen, are a great deal.... The chicken thighs were an easy choice for protein.... The mayo cost us $1.59 - but that will help stretch all of that tuna that only cost us .625 per can (there was a deal at 4 for $2.50).  I would plan on tuna fish sandwiches or that PB and J for lunches at my job, and would bring an apple or banana along.  The bread was only .89 for the loaf.  For breakfast I could imagine a fried egg atop toast with a little yogurt and/or fruit on the side.  The cans of chicken noodle soup were an astounding .49 each.  For dinners, I imagined rice (.99 for the bag - and that is a lot of rice), and chicken with vegetables.... So the total for all of this food above was $23.99...
To that, Dan added a "flask of Shellback Spiced rum... $4.19." He declares: "I think I pretty conclusively proved that one person could easily eat for $29 for a week and still have money left over for bad habits like drinking."

Does that count as the "scorn" Stephanie Jolly was talking about? And, more importantly, will Dan be "eating beautifully"?

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