Okay, Mario Batali is awesome. Everybody knows it. And his efforts to bring attention to the difficulties faced by poor and low income individuals by spending a week living on a food assistance budget is fan-freaking-tastic.
However...
....however, when folks try to imagine living on food assistance, they tend to overlook a very, very, very critical component that limits peoples' ability to eat on food assistance.
It's not as much a matter of an insufficient amount food stamp money. It's a matter of having limited access to food. Hell...for many folks you could quadruple the amount of food assistance they get and they STILL wouldn't have a way to get to a grocery store that has fresh fruits and vegetables.
I occasionally do some work for the Health Disparities Reduction Coalition...it's a group of organizations in West Michigan that focus on helping disadvantaged individuals get access to healthy choices. Health disparities occur when individuals or groups don't have the same CHOICES as the general population.
It's true: folks have to take responsibility for their actions and make good choices. But first they have to have the good choices available to them. And at very least, they have to KNOW that good choices are available to them.
When the only apparently accessible store in town is a liquor store with a sign that says "We Take WIC" or "We Accept EBT" and all they have for food is potato chips, snack cakes, and overpriced canned soup and mac and cheese and one wrinkled, shrink wrapped bell pepper for two bucks....that's not a problem with food assistance.
It's not a problem with food stamps.
It's a problem of limited options...
When infirm and low income people can't stand out in the cold and wait for the bus to get to a respectable grocery store once a week...
When young adults with limited access to vehicles grew up in a poor neighborhood their whole lives and have NO IDEA that the super market just 4 miles away has better prices and better food than Jay's Drink All...
When a young, pregnant mother is living out on the edge of town in a cheap rental property with no reliable transportation and no mass transit...
When you work two or three jobs just to make ends meet and the only time you're off work you're taking care of your kids and it's later than the bus system runs....
When you suffer from dementia, or a mental disability...
....it's not a problem with the amount of money from food stamps.
It's a problem with actual access to healthy food.
Mario Batali and others who do the food stamp experiment should add the limited access factor into their lives to get a real taste of what's happening in America's impoverished cities.
Pretend you have no money or transportation. Pretend none of your friends have money or transportation. Pretend you're living in the boonies with limited resources for gas and transportation. Pretend you work three jobs and have no time even to sleep. Or you take care of a sick relative. Or it's so painful to walk that you simply cannot get to a respectable grocery store and you subsist on massively overpriced convenience store food.
Hat tip to high unitas for this one: