Cory Booker food stamp challenge

Seems like the food stamp challenge has legs thanks to Cory Booker. We've been following this with some dismay. We agree with his point that the difficulty of living on food stamps is really tough, and indeed tougher than when we did this in 2008. Our concern is twofold.  The first is that he seems to have been given poor advice or was so stubborn as not to take it.  The second is that he unfortunately reflects one of the major problems that we have in contemporary society: he can't or doesn't cook! Let's take these one at a time.

Living on the food stamp budget is all about two things. The first is total calories  and the second is nutrition with total calories being slightly more important. If it is a given that a man his age needs about 2500 calories per day, his adviser did not help him get there. He needed much more fuel. Lettuce is a luxury and certainly not a fuel. As an aside, fuel is even more important to a person who is (1)  making important decisions and (2) going off caffeine.  Instead of lettuce, there are more nutritious, and cost effective when frozen,  greens, especially when paired with beans and yams. Where was the focus on calories? Either you make an honest attempt or you are playing at it. Notice we didn't comment on the organic olive oil.

As for cooking ... a simple but important comment. What rookie cannot understand that canned beans are not mostly water. Buying dried beans is ALWAYS the best option. But, buying dried beans does require the most elementary cooking skills. We despair of the poor buying processed foods with limited resources but Cory was unable to show that with a modicum of cooking skills he could stretch his budget effectively. Buy a cheap crock pot and use it!

We are ending this up by saying that Booker's goal in addition to exposing the difficulty of living on a food stamp budget should also have been to demonstrate how to wring as much out of a food stamp dollar as possible. He whiffed on this.

As a very final comment, Marilyn says, " don't donate a can of pumpkin to your food bank, give them money!"