When you are acclimated to eating well, and then you take the "Food Stamp Challenge", like Mario Batali, you discover it isn't so easy to tell people they can eat well on a food stamp budget. And for many Americans, they don't even have as much as a food stamp budget would provide because they either don't qualify for food stamps or don't want to apply for them.
I was that way. When I was living out of the car with my children, we lived on less than what we would have had on food stamps. We were lucky, though, because I know how to wildcraft, hunt, fish, and barter and was able to supplement our meals with all of that.
People who live in the inner cities or in food desert areas don't know how to do what I did and can still do. That's why I share what I know as freely as I do. No one should have to go to bed hungry.
The problem with these "food stamp challenges" is that the people are only on them for 1 measly week.
One week.
I would be more impressed if they committed to being on a food stamp challenge for a minimum of 6 months. It takes a while for the grind and drag of poverty to sink in and one week isn't anywhere enough tome to really understand what it's like to eat inner city poverty style.
I admit it would be a hardship on me, too, to forego what I know about hunting, trapping, and wildcrafting and live only off of grocery stores I could walk to and food stamps. That would be a local 7-11 that's about a mile away. I'd have to walk to the next city over to get to a real grocery store. I'd probably break the challenge when I passed a mulberry tree, or a dandelion just budding. I'd snap up a handful of sourgrass without thinking, or snack on chickweed or young cleavers.
A food stamp challenge is surviving on $31 a week per person. People Like Mario Batali are starving on such a diet (for one week). He'd acclimate if he took the challenge for longer, his stomach would become accustomed to the smaller servings and he'd learn how to get the most calories and nutrition for his dollar. One week isn't enough time to learn that.
I spend less than that now. I buy about $20 - $25 worth of groceries a week, and that includes dog food and dog treats. But you've got to remember, I wildcraft, hunt, and garden, things many inner city people don't know they can do and therefore don't know how to do. I'd spend less if I didn't have the dogs. I buy a lot of chicken and yogurt for them.
I know how to collect, prepare, and preserve various plants, like these wild violets, dandelion petals, and redbuds:
Or these herbs and roses:
I have pantries full of things I've harvested all around to eat or add to food to make it tastier and more nutritious.
Not to mention things I grow:
I know what strawberries look like in the wild, before they ripen, so I can mark the patch and return for ripe sweet strawberries.
Once you have the knowledge, it's really hard to not have it any more. That's part of Mario Batali's problem - he has the knowledge to make his food better. Granted, his appears to be primarily purchased foods, but he still knows about better food and better quality food.
That makes it harder to both take the challenge and to understand what the challenge really is all about. And he doesn't completely get it.
It's not just that we need to put more money into food stamps to raise the amount of money people have to buy food. It's also about eliminating food deserts, and increasing small farms, and encouraging growing food in urban and suburban areas, in providing accessible plots for growing community gardens, for teaching people how to wild craft and how to hunt and how to supplement their diets and how to use what food they do have access to. I wrote a diary earlier about using up food that was nearly bad, nearly rotted, perhaps past their expiration date, wilted, withered, and stale - like how bananas are not rotten when they turn black, it just means they've finally properly ripened - we eat under-ripe bananas most of the time.
And really, what it comes down to more than anything else is knowledge and access. We need to widely share our knowledge about food and we need to make more real food accessible to many more people.
That's really what the food stamp challenge, to me, is about. Accessibility and knowledge.