Hipsters on food stamps

March 16, 2010 8:49 AM

"At first, I thought, 'Why should I be on food stamps?'" said Magida, digging into her dinner. "Here I am, this educated person who went to art school, and there are a lot of people who need them more. But then I realized, I need them, too." Salon takes a look at the growing wave of young people utilizing food stamps.
posted by porn in the woods (885 comments total)

She applied for food stamps last summer, and since then she's used her $150 in monthly benefits for things like fresh produce, raw honey and fresh-squeezed juices from markets near her house in the neighborhood of Hampden, and soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from a Whole Foods a few miles away.

$150 a month. If you can live on that, I don't care how you spend it.
posted by three blind mice at 8:55 AM on March 16, 2010 [38 favorites]

They lost me when they described the types of food I'm purchasing for these folks... I DON'T have food stamps and spend my money on inexpensive pasta, shopping the sales in the supermarket, eating well planned leftovers..... I don't shop at whole foods, I don't go to boutique grocery stores...

"They're young, they're broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that? " well, fuck yes!

wtf...
posted by HuronBob at 8:56 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Kudos for eating healthy and all that, but for some reason, this article seems like it'd be more at home in The Onion:

Savory aromas wafted through the kitchen as a table was set with a heaping plate of Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, Chinese gourd sautéed in hot chile sauce and sweet clementine juice, all of it courtesy of government assistance.


I'm guessing that a family of four on food stamp assistance is probably not shopping at Whole Foods. I could be wrong, though.
posted by jquinby at 8:57 AM on March 16, 2010

Isn't this a big problem in countries with better social services than the US?
posted by smackfu at 8:58 AM on March 16, 2010

Pleasebefake Pleasebefake Pleasebefake
posted by cavalier at 8:59 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Why should I be on food stamps? ... who went to art school

I think you answered your own question.
posted by wcfields at 9:00 AM on March 16, 2010 [50 favorites]

One thing the article failed to mention was how often food stamps are underutilized by those who are eligible for them. Here in New York state, "[i]t is estimated that one-third to one-half of all eligible New Yorkers are not receiving food stamp benefits." That worries me a lot more than "hipsters" and their organic, free-range chickens.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:00 AM on March 16, 2010 [33 favorites]

"I'm sort of a foodie, and I'm not going to do the 'living off ramen' thing,"

...

"Faced with lingering unemployment, 20- and 30-somethings with college degrees and foodie standards are shaking off old taboos about who should get government assistance and discovering that government benefits can indeed be used for just about anything edible"

...

"Is it wrong to believe there should be a local, free-range chicken in every Le Creuset pot?"

!!!
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 9:01 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

this article is problematic. I think it's manufacturing the outrage kind of a lot. Basically, any article that has the headline "Got a problem with that?" is pushing your buttons on purpose, especially since no one interviewed said that or seems to have that attitude. If people are eating on $150-200 a month, they're not going and buying expensive anything. And the article doesn't seem to be explaining very well that this was a desperation move, and that people who may have been fortunate enough to learn to cook for themselves with healthy ingredients are doing the best they can now to keep eating healthy on a miniscule budget. For every quote this guy put in of someone saying "I'm kind of a foodie," there were probably a dozen quotes he didn't use of that same person saying "I'm just trying to eat something that I can afford with these stamps that isn't full of unhealthy shit."
posted by shmegegge at 9:02 AM on March 16, 2010 [187 favorites]

I'm guessing that a family of four on food stamp assistance is probably not shopping at Whole Foods. I could be wrong, though.

In Oregon (read:Portland) it seems like virtually everyone in their 20s is on food stamps, along with many people in their 30s with kids. I have been surprised many times to be at New Seasons (whole foods-lite) to see what I would consider to be a Yuppie mom pull out the EBT. The card is called 'Oregon Trail Card' so being on food stamps is known as 'riding the trail'.
posted by wcfields at 9:03 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Yeah because food stamps should only be used to buy the cheapest, most caloric food possible and fuck it if it's drenched in pesticides and packed with preservatives. You know what else is courtesy of government assistance? Hormone- and antibiotic-filled meat. Corn and sugar products.

We (collectively, as a society, and also some people on mefi) bitch about how poor people should eat better and then when they do we whine and bitch about how they spend "our money." We are fucking stupid.
posted by rtha at 9:05 AM on March 16, 2010 [341 favorites]

Yeah, I started out thinking "stupid hipsters" and finished thinking "smart hipsters." They're doing what they can with what they have.
posted by sallybrown at 9:05 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

I remember when the kids were little and we would save our food stamps and splurge on some fancy items like organic dried fruit and nuts for the christmas cakes and puddings. In the years since, we've developed into full-fledged federal taxpayers and paid back many times over what the USDA spotted us for grub (as will most of the recipients in the Salon piece). And as a US taxpayer, I would certainly rather feed artists and hipsters than equip drones with incendiary bombs.
posted by squalor at 9:06 AM on March 16, 2010 [72 favorites]

I honestly am not sure what the point of this article is except to get people riled up. Food stamp recipients come in all shapes and sizes?

There may be some inequaities going on here. But there are greater inequalities out there in the real world (who gets good schools, who gets into good colleges, the investment banker network etc.) that this seems like a minor distraction and worse yet, getting all the disadvantaged folks to fight each other for what is basically ... scraps.
posted by vacapinta at 9:06 AM on March 16, 2010 [11 favorites]

Somewhere out there, an investment banker who earned a seven-figure bonus funded in large part with bailout funds is laughing his ass off that people are being scrutinized for how they spend their $1,800 per year in food-stamp money.
posted by brain_drain at 9:07 AM on March 16, 2010 [163 favorites]

This sounds like one of those Ronald Reagan anecdotes about welfare queens driving Cadillacs. Sad that Salon indulges in such BS.
posted by octothorpe at 9:07 AM on March 16, 2010 [40 favorites]

Even the government thinks it's HIP (Healthy Incentives Pilot) for those who need assistance to eat right and eschew processed, HFCS-laden junk.
posted by porn in the woods at 9:07 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

On the one hand, yeah, artisinal honey with food stamps feels a bit precious -- but on the other hand, hell, if I qualified for food stamps, I'd for damn sure be all over that.

and yes, I may have followed thepinksuperhero's link to check whether I was eligible. I am not.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:07 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I am really sincerely torn about this. I know several friends who abuse food stamps, i.e. are making fraudulent claims to receive benefits and as someone else said above, are buying organic and/or 'gourmet' groceries that are out of my means. Now I earn a pretty high salary, and I wholeheartedly believe I have a social, moral and ethical obligation to help others in need. But, on the other hand, I have nearly a hundred thousand dollars in educational debt and I worked hard to earn that salary. I have serious moral qualms about sharing that salary with those who commit fraud (and are, in essence, taking away from those who have less than they do), who choose not to work, who choose not to report the support they receive from their children's fathers, who own small businesses but don't report all of their cash income, and so forth. I have serious qualms about continuing to remain friends with people who are, in some tortured logic, stealing from me. I am working to pay for my food, and theirs. My healthcare, and theirs. My rent, and theirs. My car, and theirs. The least they could do is help me out with those student loans. To be clear, these are not apocryphal welfare queens. These are friends, whose situation I intimately know. Who save so much money on food because of their food stamps, that they have unopened, never used, designer cosmetics to give away (and I know, because that Chanel perfume I wear was a gift). And so forth. On the other hand, I don't want to make food stamps and assistance harder to get for those who desperately need it, who aren't committing fraud, and so forth.
posted by bunnycup at 9:08 AM on March 16, 2010 [18 favorites]

If people are eating on $150-200 a month, they're not going and buying expensive anything.

What makes you think they are eating on $150-200 a month? Nothing in the article indicates to me that the folks described use EBT as their only source of food. I think it a lot more likely that they are just supplementing their own costs with it. As in, they had enough money to eat for a month anyway but the EBT lets them buy fresh organic juices, free range chicken, and wild salmon instead of cheaper meats, pasta, and store-brand juice.
posted by Justinian at 9:08 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Savory aromas wafted through the kitchen as a table was set with a heaping plate of Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, Chinese gourd sautéed in hot chile sauce and sweet clementine juice, all of it courtesy of government assistance.

Not to leap to the defense of Kids These Days or anything, but just because ingredients seem exotic doesn't mean they're expensive. You could buy everything you need to make those dishes for ~$8 if you aren't buying them at Whole Foods.

But really, why should they not be buying organic salmon on food stamps? Money that's earmarked to help people live shouldn't force them to live off of angel hair pasta and Frito pie. Whether someone's buying 12 cans of black beans or 2 pounds of grass-fed organic flank steak it's still only $150 a month.
posted by soma lkzx at 9:08 AM on March 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

As has been pointed out elsewhere in the blogosphere this morning, it's a no-win situation. If they buy junk food, they're contributing to the obesity epidemic. If they buy healthy food, they're "elitists".
posted by Joe Beese at 9:10 AM on March 16, 2010 [43 favorites]

Is this who will end up as the next Republican President's Cadillac-rocking welfare mom from the streets of Cleveland? "Meet Sarah M, the curry-and-turmeric buying, Whole-Foods-patronizing hipster from the mean streets of Baltimore! Stay tuned for frothing from the mouth from Glenn Beck at 5pm!"

And the article doesn't seem to be explaining very well that this was a desperation move, and that people who may have been fortunate enough to learn to cook for themselves with healthy ingredients are doing the best they can now to keep eating healthy on a miniscule budget.

Yeah, Salon doesn't seem to do a good job of explaining things much at all anymore (if ever it did). Salon and Slate seem to be in an eternal death-cage match for the most boringly bland yet outragey B-grade webnewsy content out there, along with their gloppy stuck-in-2001 web design. Hipsters are "discovering that government benefits can indeed be used for just about anything edible, including wild-caught fish, organic asparagus and triple-crème cheese." Oh, the horror!
posted by blucevalo at 9:11 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Isn't this a big problem in countries with better social services than the US?

I don't know about other countries, but in Sweden everyone uses - or can use - "food stamps."

"Lunch coupons" (lunchkuponger) are issued to people receiving public benefits and also to employees by employers as part of your compensation package. Point is that everyone uses them - they are only legally used for food (or in restaurants) and you have no idea if the person who is using them is on benefits or not.

Idea of course is to not stigmatize poor people - which is the subtext of the FPP - why is "she" spending money on that? No one asks that question here.

So yeah, it's probably a "big problem," but no one knows it's a problem so it's not a problem.
posted by three blind mice at 9:11 AM on March 16, 2010 [23 favorites]

Food is a moral choice, and whatever it is you are eating for whatever reason makes you a bad, bad, person.

You are very bad. Also, LOLHIPSTERS
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:11 AM on March 16, 2010 [20 favorites]

three blind mice : $150 a month. If you can live on that, I don't care how you spend it.

The problem (and outrage) here doesn't come from having to "live on that" - These people clearly don't live on that, they merely abuse it to maintain a lifestyle they currently can't afford.

If you really need to eat on $150/month, you buy boxed Macaroni and Cheese by the case and mix it with grade-C ground beef. You don't buy bottled water and organic produce.

The end of the article mentioning that these people at least feel some shame, rather than making me more sympathetic, pretty much cinches it - They know their actions count as "wrong" in some way, but don't actually care enough to not do it.


sallybrown : "smart hipsters." They're doing what they can with what they have.

Correction - Doing what they can with what they don't have - With what we as a civilized society give them under the pretense of keeping them alive during a rough time, not so they can garnish their farfalle with organic shitakes rather than bulk white mushrooms.


Sorry folks, but this story should piss off the truly compassionate among you far more than it does me - I care only because they abuse my tax dollars; You should care because these asshats effectively take money away from people who really do need it.
posted by pla at 9:12 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

I wish I had thought of this.
posted by brundlefly at 9:12 AM on March 16, 2010

My mother would talk about the recession in the 70s, because most of our neighbors were on food stamps while our family made $5 above the cutoff to qualify. She heartily resented the people using food stamps to buy steak while she raised her kids on mac and cheese and ramen noodles.

I for one am not so bothered. Food stamps come in a limited allowance; it costs the same whether it's a hipster eating caviar or a mom of five eating ramen. (OK, the mom probably gets a slightly higher allowance.) If someone can creatively stretch their food stamp dollars and eat well, more power to 'em - there is the possibility that eating the fresher food keeps that person from calling on my tax dollars for aid in other ways, or affecting me economically by putting pressure on the private healthcare system.
posted by medea42 at 9:13 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Fuck it, I'm calling this a Depression.
posted by mattbucher at 9:13 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

three blind mice: "$150 a month. If you can live on that, I don't care how you spend it."

Uh, they're not just living on that. Believe me. If they were the gourmet ice cream wouldn't be an option.

Anyway this is the best part of the article:

Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else.

Toiled. Heh. Truly a hero of the working class.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 9:13 AM on March 16, 2010 [17 favorites]

The article seems to willfully imply that food stams are some sort of unlimited credit card that these people are using to rack up a huge bill with their fresh food. It's a fixed amount. No more tax dollars are used if you buy tofu at Trader Joe's than if you buy Vienna Sausages at the A&P.

I wish the author had just come out and explicitly presented her much more messy point, which appears to be: "People who are from a social class that would appreciate this type of food should not be using food stamps. Food stamps are for the social class of people who eat wonder bread and american cheese."
posted by the jam at 9:14 AM on March 16, 2010 [84 favorites]

soma lkzx : Money that's earmarked to help people live shouldn't force them to live off of angel hair pasta and Frito pie.

Yes. Yes, it should. If you can afford to live while still eating organic salmon, get the fuck off public assistance ASAP.
posted by pla at 9:14 AM on March 16, 2010

What makes you think they are eating on $150-200 a month?

I don't know anything for certain, I admit. But the article seems to be saying that the people being discussed are unemployed, so I can't help but think it's a moderately safe assumption that they're not just supplementing an already adequate income for shits and giggles. Maybe I'm wrong. But of the two options, I think the former is the more likely.

As in, they had enough money to eat for a month anyway but the EBT lets them buy fresh organic juices, free range chicken, and wild salmon instead of cheaper meats, pasta, and store-brand juice.

Well, again, the article says it's talking about people who went on food stamps because they're unemployed and - in this economy - may be so for some time. While I'll admit that they may be receiving assistance from parents, or some other source, and should not therefore be receiving food stamps, the article isn't making that assertion and instead seems to be trying to manufacture outrage that young, educated people are using food stamps at all, regardless of reasons why.
posted by shmegegge at 9:15 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Dammit hipsters, must you ruin everything? Foodstamps are for cheap beer and cigarettes at the bodega with bare shelves.
posted by geoff. at 9:15 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Sorry folks, but this story should piss off the truly compassionate among you far more than it does me

Your presuming what should piss me off pisses me off more than an unemployed hipster buying arugula.
posted by blucevalo at 9:18 AM on March 16, 2010 [15 favorites]

medea42: "I for one am not so bothered. Food stamps come in a limited allowance; it costs the same whether it's a hipster eating caviar or a mom of five eating ramen. (OK, the mom probably gets a slightly higher allowance.) "

If disposable income + food stamps = caviar, it implies that food stamps aren't really necessary. Of course, we don't know these people, don't know what money they have, don't know if they eat nicely because they spend no money on rent and live in a shitty row house in Baltimore with 12 other people. Etc.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 9:18 AM on March 16, 2010

Can it be argued that these gourmet foods perhaps offer more economic stimulus than buying the cheap, crappy mass-produced foods? And maybe the health benefits mean they'll be less of a burden, health care-wise?

Just trying to be the devil's advocate and look on the bright side. That said, if anyone who needs food stamps get denied because of these people, that's major depressing and they deserve at least a stern talking-to.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:18 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I agree with shmegge, this article is just trolling. They get a set amount per month, who am I to tell them how to spend it? I mean, likely they're not covering a whole month's worth of food with their EBT so really the luxuries are just an example of young poor people being irresponsible with their resources, which is hardly new.
posted by ghharr at 9:18 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I am a 20-something on food stamps, and I have to agree with rtha- being outraged that someone would dare to eat healthy and organically on government stipend is really stupid. With EBT going electronic and card readers being in most groceries, access to healthy foods with EBT is going up - and I have no idea why that would be a bad thing. I guess because I'm young, white, and college-educated I should stick to buying my couscous with my own money and let the poor other people spend their EBT on ensure and mountain dew.
posted by Think_Long at 9:19 AM on March 16, 2010 [22 favorites]

Food stamps get hate because Americans hate poor people. Extend food stamp benefits to everyone (like social security and medicare are extended to everyone) and Americans will think that food stamps are a natural, divinely granted good and scream bloody murder if they even suspect the government of thinking about cutting them.

I don't know why Americans hate people who can figure out how to eat tasty food on a tight budget, but if I had to guess I'd say it's something to do with how Americans hate pleasure even when the pleasurable thing is good for them, and doubly hate it when poor people experience pleasure or have or make good things for themselves.

note: These results may hold for people from other countries, but as an American I don't know much about what people in other countries think.

Also, sometimes Salon.com invents a fictional trend and pretends to seriously analyze the implications of it. They have (a few) writers and an office in San Francisco to pay for, and that strategy draws hits (or whatever metric people are using these days to assess website popularity).
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:20 AM on March 16, 2010 [58 favorites]

Seems they should bite the bullet and seek some supplemental employment. Being unable to find a gig 'in your field' doesn't qualify one as a welfare recipient. Two days after receiving my BA in English (in the shitful, recession-plagued job market of 1983), I was on the back of a garbage truck. That gig segued into a stint paving parking lots and driveways, supplemented with video store clerking and night time retail POS work to stave off the dreaded heating bills and pay the student loans.

Not whining or making a "back when I was a kid" kind of rant. It was just necessary, so I did it. And they were good times.

Oh yeah -- and the eventual foot-in-the-door publishing gig resulted in a net pay cut, so be careful what you wish for.
posted by VicNebulous at 9:20 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

Is it wrong to believe there should be a local, free-range chicken in every Le Creuset pot?

I'm sorry, but food stamps and Le Creuset cookware do not belong in the same article.
posted by alynnk at 9:20 AM on March 16, 2010

I'm not worried about it. These people, when gainfully employed again, will pay it all back in a couple months of salary taxes. If you're eating out of Whole Foods or the vegetable market rather than the scratch-n-dent aisle at Albertsons, you've got a future. And they'll carry that "I used food stamps" vibe with them for decades and it will help them be more compassionate. And some of them may even go on to help educate people with less of a future how to eat better.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:21 AM on March 16, 2010 [36 favorites]

If you really need to eat on $150/month, you buy boxed Macaroni and Cheese by the case and mix it with grade-C ground beef. You don't buy bottled water and organic produce.

Bullshit. My spouse and I live on about $150 a month for food, not counting beer, wine, liquor, and household goods which I believe aren't covered by food stamps.

The difference between the lifestyle (and the gastronomic lifestyle described in this article) we maintain on $150 a month and, say, the average family that uses food stamps is that we don't have any kids, and one of us is unemployed (so we can forgo processed foods and cook mostly from scratch).

Seconding Joe Beese that this is a total Catch-22. I was previously yelled at for advocating that we should first ensure that poor folks have enough to eat before we worry about what they're eating. Now that some non-traditional-seeming poor folks are worrying about what they eat, they get a lecture too?
posted by muddgirl at 9:22 AM on March 16, 2010 [28 favorites]

If you really need to eat on $150/month, you buy boxed Macaroni and Cheese by the case and mix it with grade-C ground beef. You don't buy bottled water and organic produce.

Well, that's not really true. An individual can live off of $150 a month quite easily. If you have a family, hopefully you are getting more than that. Being on food stamps does not require somebody to be at the absolute bottom rung of the nutrition chain.
posted by Think_Long at 9:22 AM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

shmegegge: I guess I have to appeal to common sense. If they are actually living on $150 a month, does it seem plausible to you that Magida would spend 5% of the total month's budget for food on one pint of ice cream?
posted by Justinian at 9:22 AM on March 16, 2010

This got me thinking about what I spend on groceries. I don't buy organic-free-range food, but I also don't buy packaged garbage. I can't track what mrs ozzy spends now, but in the year before we lived together, I spent $130 a month on groceries for myself (I always, always paid for groceries with a particular credit card). I didn't eat out or order in much.

As a single person, $200 a month would buy me an awful lot of grass-fed beef. Feeding a family... not so much.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:23 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Due to Metafilter-led cutbacks, from now on, food stamp recipients may only purchase Mefi-approved Cheetos and Hawaiian Punch.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:23 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

OH NO NOT A %.0000000000000001 TAX INCREASE HOW WILL THE DOD CONTINUE TO SPEND MONEY LIKE WATER IF WE LET HUNGRY PEOPLE MAKE HEALTHY CHOICES???
posted by DU at 9:23 AM on March 16, 2010 [42 favorites]

A quick note on use vs. utilize.

I suppose I could say something snarky about art school here, but my real feeling is that enlightened societies don't starve their citizens to death.

If you are talking to someone on the right you can say Christian societies don't starve their citizens to death.

Anyone who argues that everyone would be on food stamps if they were more available hasn't used them. They aren't enough and they are no fun.

IIRC there were stamps for different kinds of food in West Virginia for a while. This resulted in Meat Stamps. Meat Stamps were same as cash in the holler, and you could use 'em to buy ammo.
posted by poe at 9:24 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Now that some non-traditional-seeming poor folks are worrying about what they eat, they get a lecture too?

Of course. Poor people in the United States exist for no other reason to be lectured, scapegoated, and stigmatized by the holier-than-thou.
posted by blucevalo at 9:24 AM on March 16, 2010 [17 favorites]

The problem (and outrage) here doesn't come from having to "live on that" - These people clearly don't live on that, they merely abuse it to maintain a lifestyle they currently can't afford.

I don't defend fraud. Whatever the amount - and even if you only spend it on potatoes and rice - fraud is wrong.

But if it's not fraud, why the concern over 150 bucks a month? I haven't lived in America in 15 years, but even in the mid-90's 150 bucks a month doesn't allow you to maintain much of a "lifestyle".

I know some people who have been so poor for so long that they feel "entitled" to treat themselves to a little luxury now and then. Frankly, I can't really be hard-ass about that sort of "excess."
posted by three blind mice at 9:24 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

no other reason than to be lectured
posted by blucevalo at 9:25 AM on March 16, 2010

I wish the author had just come out and explicitly presented her much more messy point, which appears to be: "People who are from a social class that would appreciate this type of food should not be using food stamps. Food stamps are for the social class of people who eat wonder bread and american cheese."

I don't have any hard data to back it up, but isn't it generally acknowledged that hipsters tend to support their expensive lifestyles using money from their wealthy parents? With that in mind, the point might be that unemployed hipsters should be using their parent's money for food the same way they do for rent and other expenses, rather applying for food stamps from the government, because many low-income people do not have rich parents to bail them out. Especially considering that many wealthy people do not politically support the kinds of government assistance programs that provide things like food stamps.
posted by burnmp3s at 9:25 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Also, I feed a family of 7 on around $450/month. Granted, 5 of those 7 are children, but among them they easily eat as much as two adults, if not more. So that's ~$100/month per "adult".
posted by DU at 9:25 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I have serious moral qualms about sharing that salary with those who commit fraud...

if you haven't been listening to talk radio, you'll want to check that out.
posted by fallacy of the beard at 9:26 AM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

If they are actually living on $150 a month, does it seem plausible to you that Magida would spend 5% of the total month's budget for food on one pint of ice cream?

So you feel it's irresponsible to splurge for a luxury item every once in a while if you are received state assistance? Do you think it's irresponsible for my parents to splurge on a pint of ice cream because their food budget comes from Social Security Disability payments?
posted by muddgirl at 9:27 AM on March 16, 2010 [12 favorites]

shmegegge: I guess I have to appeal to common sense. If they are actually living on $150 a month, does it seem plausible to you that Magida would spend 5% of the total month's budget for food on one pint of ice cream?
posted by Justinian at 5:22 PM

Does it make any sense to have 'Le Creuset' pot thrown in there randomly? How did fancy cookware get in ther? Does it then make sense that the writer of this article has omitted crucial facts? This article is pure polemic. I wouldn't trust it to deduce monthly budget expenditures.
posted by vacapinta at 9:27 AM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

I'm sorry, but food stamps and Le Creuset cookware do not belong in the same article.

Yes, if you are going to get eat on my dime, you will eat your gruel and it will be of the poorest possible nutritional quality minimally capable of sustaining your miserable, useless little existence. You'd better just be grateful you didn't get the back of my hand instead, so shut up and take what you get like the good little non-person you are.

That's my standard speech to dinner guests, as well.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:29 AM on March 16, 2010 [66 favorites]

Frankly, I'd love to eat like they do on $150 a month. If they're able to do that, without dipping into savings, I think one of them should write a book or blog on how they pull that off.

Still, even if they are dipping into savings, I still think it'll work out in the long run. They're buying healthy foods, meaning they'll live longer and healthier, which means they'll cost less to the insurance companies and MediCare. Plus, it's stimulus for high quality, sustainable food companies. It's really hard for me to get really mad at these people, because I'd probably do the same thing in their shoes. And if we're going to get mad at misuse of government money, let's look at that half of the budget going to defense and war.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:29 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Oh, and I don't know about y'all, but groceries are damn expensive where I live, period, whether you're buying them at Walmart, Whole Foods, Safeway, Trader Joe's, Publix, or Ye Local Upscale Hipster Snooty Snob Emporium of Your Choice -- and whether you're buying Spam and Fritos or edamame and Riesling.
posted by blucevalo at 9:30 AM on March 16, 2010

This is really just outrage-filter. You get food stamps if you make little enough money to qualify and they give you a set amount of money to spend on certain types of food every month. And there are only certain type of food that you can spend the credits on, for instance ice cream is not allowed. But if you want to be stupid and spend it all on expensive foods, that doesn't really reflect on the system.
posted by octothorpe at 9:30 AM on March 16, 2010

I've been on foodstamps twice. I didn't want to be either time, but I was because I couldn't afford to eat otherwise. I bought as fresh and organic as possible.

Shame on you for chastising someone for buying that way. Everyone should have the opportunity to eat that way, regardless of income.

Or is being healthy only reserved for the rich?
posted by Malice at 9:30 AM on March 16, 2010 [21 favorites]

They qualify for this program, yes? This program is to buy food, yes? They're buying food, yes? No, I don't have a problem with that. Why do you have a problem with that?
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 9:30 AM on March 16, 2010 [40 favorites]

rtha: "We (collectively, as a society, and also some people on mefi) bitch about how poor people should eat better and then when they do we whine and bitch about how they spend "our money." We are fucking stupid."

I have a different definition of poor than you do! I tend to make a distinction between poor and broke.

By my definition, I have never been poor. Raised by wealthy, highly-educated parents, prepped for college, good degree, never worried about food or clothes, traveled the world as a child, I have skills, diction, credentials, connections, safety nets.

I have been broke, meaning sleeping in a car, eating nothing but rice and beans (and running out occasionally), etc.

These people are not poor, they're broke. It's different.

vacapinta: "But there are greater inequalities out there in the real world (who gets good schools, who gets into good colleges, the investment banker network etc.) that this seems like a minor distraction and worse yet, getting all the disadvantaged folks to fight each other for what is basically ... scraps."

Again, disadvantaged people fighting for scraps?! Yes, it certainly happens, but not in this situation. One of the people in the article went to the University of Chicago! Not exactly a victim of poor schooling.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 9:32 AM on March 16, 2010 [11 favorites]

So you feel it's irresponsible to splurge for a luxury item every once in a while if you are received state assistance? Do you think it's irresponsible for my parents to splurge on a pint of ice cream because their food budget comes from Social Security Disability payments?

You're shifting the goalposts big time. The article makes it clear that Magida does not splurge for a luxury item every once in a while; luxury items make up the bulk of her purchases. There is absolutely no reason to buy gourmet ice cream from Whole Paycheck Foods. It's a waste of money, whether it's your own money or everyone else's.
posted by Justinian at 9:33 AM on March 16, 2010

I don't have any hard data to back it up, but isn't it generally acknowledged that hipsters tend to support their expensive lifestyles using money from their wealthy parents?

Well, that is indeed the stereotype. Yes. However, I have had a hard time finding it in real ife.
posted by brundlefly at 9:33 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Does anyone remember when Salon used to be one of the best things to read on the 'net? I used to read it daily, even subscribed to a premium account. Now they're barely better than Huffington.
posted by octothorpe at 9:34 AM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

But if you want to be stupid and spend it all on expensive foods, that doesn't really reflect on the system.

Yeah, exactly. If the food they are buying is "too expensive" then they'll just be hungry for a few days at the end of the month. Or pay for it themselves. Either way, what's the outrage-ous part?
posted by DU at 9:34 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Poor people can buy organic salmon with their food stamps (SNAP benefits) if they want to as well. Who cares? Here is another story for you: "Rich guy cheats on taxes, takes system for hundreds of thousands of dollars." Shocking.

The fact is that any type of "welfare" recipient is an easy target, while corporate welfare recipients get nada. Corporations have PR firms to craft their sterling image.

Look into how much is not collected by the IRS from corporations who are contractors of the US government and OWE taxes. After that discussion, we can talk about how the NY scene hipsters are violating a government program.
posted by zerobyproxy at 9:34 AM on March 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

If you really need to eat on $150/month, you buy boxed Macaroni and Cheese by the case and mix it with grade-C ground beef. You don't buy bottled water and organic produce.

My monthly budget for groceries is $120-160 and I can afford to eat good quality food - Annie's mac and cheese instead of Craft-by-the-box, produce, nice bread. If you're a family living off that amount it's obviously not the case, but I don't buy the idea that these food stamps are a supplemental income for a fabulously expensive diet. As long as you have access to decent stores, you can buy good food; just because something sounds fancy doesn't make it super costly and unaffordable.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 9:35 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

If you're eating out of Whole Foods or the vegetable market rather than the scratch-n-dent aisle at Albertsons, you've got a future.

Metafilter in one line.
posted by enn at 9:35 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Hmmm.

"Exotic" produce can be super cheap at ethnic markets, and it's sometimes cheaper to buy from the bulk bins at places like Whole Foods than to buy stuff in packages at downscale supermarkets. Despite the mentions of organic salmon and whatnot, I wouldn't be surprised if these people were actually eating pretty frugally. If you ate organic salmon once a week and a lot of lentil curries for the other six days, you could get by on a pretty meager food budget.
posted by craichead at 9:35 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

shmegegge: I guess I have to appeal to common sense. If they are actually living on $150 a month, does it seem plausible to you that Magida would spend 5% of the total month's budget for food on one pint of ice cream?

I don't know. What's the larger context? Did she buy this one thing because, thanks to frugality, she was able to make this one extravagant purchase at the end of the month? Maybe not. Maybe she's abusing the system. But maybe she's just unemployed and broke and doing what she can and "what she can" this one time included a pint of ice cream.

the point I'm making is that this article is short on facts, except for out-of-context details that seem pretty clearly designed to raise hackles. The author happily tells us when she buys ice cream, but not what her income situation is, how much she finds herself needing to live on, how she pays rent, etc... This isn't a piece about how these people live, it's a piece about what they're buying and where because for some reason it's apparently our business how people spend their food money. or maybe these details are chosen to elicit rage, because rage earns pageviews.
posted by shmegegge at 9:35 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

I feel stupid for getting sucked into the troll article; but I did.

I really did seethe with Salonangst for a few minutes- how dare those kids enjoy creme freche on my dime- while I'm limited to smoked salmon crudettes just on weekends?

The comments on military spending put me back at calm though, so thanks, metafilter. The entire EFT purchases in a year probably amount to roughly what Halliburton expenses on hotel minibars.
posted by mrdaneri at 9:36 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

seanmpuckett: "I'm not worried about it. These people, when gainfully employed again, will pay it all back in a couple months of salary taxes. If you're eating out of Whole Foods or the vegetable market rather than the scratch-n-dent aisle at Albertsons, you've got a future. "

Poor people who stay poor and eat cheap food don't HAVE A FUTURE?
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 9:36 AM on March 16, 2010

This sounds like one of those Ronald Reagan anecdotes about welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
Spot on. This is absolutely par for the course so far as attacks on welfare benefits are framed, when as TPS rightly points out above, the real story is almost not waste or fraud but lots of people not taking what they're entitled to.
posted by Abiezer at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Of course, we don't know these people, don't know what money they have, don't know if they eat nicely because they spend no money on rent and live in a shitty row house in Baltimore with 12 other people. Etc.

Precisely.

Let me say it a bit louder: I actually followed thepinksuperhero's link out of curiosity, to see if I qualified for food stamps.

It's not quite so easy. The fact that I have an IRA with 2 grand in it, and work part-time, and have a roommate, pretty much made me ineligible. That money is not disposable -- but it counts as a resource, so I'm out.

So if someone honestly does qualify, more power to them. "Honestly" being the key word, there, though -- someone who's claiming that they live alone so they don't have to report their 3 roommates' share of the rent, or someone who's not mentioning any kind of a monthly payment from an inheritance or something, just to qualify for food stamps, is something else again. But there's nothing to indicate that these people in the article necessarily are doing that. They're just being meticulous about how they're using their resources -- and people with their own money do that, so hey.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010

Scrutinizing peoples' shopping lists is not part of the deal.
posted by amethysts at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oh noes, not "organic salmon!" Maybe they've decided they'd rather eat 5 oz of good meat than a pound of the bad stuff that gives them the shits? Maybe they're buying that jasmine or basmati rice by the 5 pound sack, and it actually costs less (per unit) than Uncle Ben's boil-a-bag? That, and eating healthy food will reduce their medical expenses, and give them more energy to get back on their feet.

The negative comments in here are like people who'd berate someone for drawing on unemployment. Simply put, if you don't make enough money, you get food stamps. That's the rules.
posted by explosion at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

'almost always'. Gah.
posted by Abiezer at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010

random Williamsburg guy: I sometimes use food stamps to buy healthy food.

Salon: OMG, hipsters use taxpayer assistance to buy healthy food.

Hannity/Beck/O'Reilly: Public assistance for healthy food should be eliminated. And what the fuck is arugula anyway?

Slate: Contrary to what you may think, healthy food is bad. If you think healthy food is good, you are an idiot.

The New Yorker: Here are some playful, erudite observations about people who talk about hipsters buying healthy food with food stamps.

New York Post: ORGANIC WELFARE QUEENS CUT IN LINE
posted by brain_drain at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [82 favorites]

And as a US taxpayer, I would certainly rather feed artists and hipsters than equip drones with incendiary bombs.

godless anarchist.




... and for what it's worth, garlic + onions are still dead cheap, and nothing smells better than these two frying up together.
posted by philip-random at 9:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

a) this article exists solely to get the phrase "government cheese" back into regular use
b) welfare abuse+hipsters+food porn = JOURNALISTIC TRIFECTA
posted by GuyZero at 9:38 AM on March 16, 2010 [14 favorites]

Boy, wouldn't there be egg on our faces if they ate like we told them to, and then they all got heart attacks and had to get their medical care paid for by MedicAid?

Let's just drop the charades and say it: Poor people suck, and shouldn't be allowed to make choices that make them happy.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:38 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

Frankly, I'd love to eat like they do on $150 a month. If they're able to do that, without dipping into savings,

If they have savings to dip in to, they are not actually eligible for food stamps. Well, any significant savings. I believe the amount is $2000. If you have bank accounts of any kind with at least $2000 combined, you are not supposed to be eligible. (I think there are exceptions for disabled people, etc).

To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with people who need food stamps buying organic, healthy, whatever. I just don't think the people in this article need food stamps. I know people like this; see bunnycup's comment. Now, the article is likely picking out people who represent a very small subset of the program. That's undoubtedly true. But it's the article we're stuck with and what's under discussion.
posted by Justinian at 9:38 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

(even if it were costly, who cares? Are we going to make a list of food products acceptable for poor people to eat? "No apples for you! Pasta instead - and don't get any idea about that fancy whole grain stuff, store-brand HFC-enriched only!")
posted by Solon and Thanks at 9:38 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yes, if you are going to get eat on my dime, you will eat your gruel and it will be of the poorest possible nutritional quality minimally capable of sustaining your miserable, useless little existence. You'd better just be grateful you didn't get the back of my hand instead, so shut up and take what you get like the good little non-person you are.

Not my point. But food stamps are for those with a low income, yes? I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance.
posted by alynnk at 9:39 AM on March 16, 2010

You're shifting the goalposts big time. The article makes it clear that Magida does not splurge for a luxury item every once in a while; luxury items make up the bulk of her purchases. There is absolutely no reason to buy gourmet ice cream from Whole Paycheck Foods. It's a waste of money, whether it's your own money or everyone else's.

Gourmet ice cream makes up the bulk of her purchases? Or do you consider all food bought at Whole Foods to be "luxury items"? Have you ever actually shopped at a Whole Foods and compared the prices to, say, Walmart? Have you compared the prices at your local ethnic market to Walmart?

You are taking this opportunity not just to moralize about the "choices" of people who are broke (I place "choices" in quotes because this article was clearly written to make us biased against these broke people), but against the choices that all people make. Why should anyone buy gourmet ice cream?? Because they fucking want to eat some. It's that easy.
posted by muddgirl at 9:39 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

But food stamps are for those with a low income, yes? I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance.

Sometimes people lose their jobs, and I think the resale value of even fancy cookware is pretty low. And I suspect a lot of people who own that stuff got it as wedding gifts and never paid for it themselves.
posted by craichead at 9:41 AM on March 16, 2010 [12 favorites]

I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance.

You're right. And the same goes for outlandish purchases of exotic and expensive cooking appliances like these so-called microwave ovens.

Shouldn't they be forced to heat their canned gruel over a hotplate like real poor people do?
posted by saulgoodman at 9:42 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

"Exotic" produce can be super cheap at ethnic markets, and it's sometimes cheaper to buy from the bulk bins at places like Whole Foods than to buy stuff in packages at downscale supermarkets.

Or, say, the weekly farmer's markets.

The ugly truth behind all of our wailing about food budgets and costs is that the few groceries in low socio-economic status neighborhoods actually tend to charge more for fresh produce and basic nutritional goods than markets a few miles away, while stocking less of them.

But yes, this is definitely outrage filter and yellow journalism.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:43 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

I thought part of being an American was letting other people spend their money however they liked. Food stamps are essentially a sum of money that the government gives people to buy groceries. We don't ban people from buying the unhealthy foods, nor should we ban them from buying the healthy "rich people" foods. And shaming them one way or the other is just as stupid.

This article has some weird classism going on. The message I'm getting is that poor people should have a terrible diet, because poor people need to be miserable so that they'll try to be rich people. When has that line of reasoning ever worked that well in practice?
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

Yeah, this article is written pretty much just to whip people into a froth.

A tasty, organic, no HFCS, WIC-qualified froth, sure, but still.
posted by darkstar at 9:44 AM on March 16, 2010

We should have government run food stores. These stores would carry only food that meets some sort of nutritional standard. The government could negotiate to get whatever prices and products they want. Food stamps or their equivalent (charge card, etc) would only be allowed to be used at these government stores. There would be independent stores located rurally who would be given authority to accept food stamps in places where it was not feasible to have a government food store nearby. There would be no money going in and out of these stores. You couldn't buy products from these stores.

This way, everyone gets fed. They get decent food. If they want some other crappy food, they are welcome to go buy some whenever they want or can.

I don't like giving people money. I like giving people food, clothing, shelter, and health care.
posted by flarbuse at 9:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I remember how ashamed I was to have gone on food stamps a couple of times in my early twenties, fresh out of college and out of work and unable to afford even my usual diet of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. I wish that I could go back in time and tell myself to get them right away, get them every month that I was eligible for them, and to tell anyone that might notice that I was using them and give me the stinkeye for doing so to pound sand up their ass. I don't begrudge them to anyone who needs them and this sort of "organic salmon hrumph hrumph" thing that Salon is doing is yet another reason why I won't give them a plugged nickel.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [14 favorites]

Malice: "Shame on you for chastising someone for buying that way. Everyone should have the opportunity to eat that way, regardless of income."

Oh, come on, we're not going to their house and inspecting their cabinets. Although, if they are willing to feed me something nice I might end up at their house more often. They agreed to be interviewed for an article, I think they will be okay with some internet strangers hating on their food choices.

Anyway, AmeriCorps members should get a MUCH larger stipend than they do. There is no reason they should be on food stamps. They should just get more money.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 9:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I was on foodstamps when I was a graduate student and made only $9,000/year. Yes, going to graduate school was a choice I was making. I also had an additional job (which still didn't pull me over the poverty line), and the food stamp office in my state was fully aware of where my income was coming from/my student status/the fact that I had a roommate. I also shopped at the cheapest grocery store in town; that extra $48 a month really made the difference between having to live completely on prepackaged foods and being able to get, say, bread from the Albertson's bakery (oh, what a luxury!).

I'm not guilty. Sorry, guys, if you want me to be.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 9:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Missed on preview:

"Exotic" produce can be super cheap at ethnic markets, and it's sometimes cheaper to buy from the bulk bins at places like Whole Foods than to buy stuff in packages at downscale supermarkets. Despite the mentions of organic salmon and whatnot, I wouldn't be surprised if these people were actually eating pretty frugally.

Exactly. I've started going to Chinatown once in a while to stock up on things -- it's way cheaper to go there for produce than it is elsewhere.

And heck, what we think of as "exotic" also often isn't as exotic as you think. For instance -- Right now, in my fridge, I have two kinds of homemade pate. Sounds fancy, no?

However -- the chicken-liver pate cost me a total of about three bucks: about $1.50 for the pound of chicken livers, and another $1.50 for two sticks of butter. I only used one for the pate, so that's not even three bucks. And I have a good pounds' worth of pate. I used part of the other stick of butter for the other pate -- that one I made with salt cod, which I picked up for about two bucks. There was a special on bread, so that was $2.50.

And presto, I have elegance at my disposal, for only about $7.50.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance.
Maybe it was a gift. Maybe she purchased it when she had a job and could afford it. Maybe she got it at a garage sale or thrift shop for a pittance. Maybe she found it in the woods, stuffed with porn. You don't know, do you. You have no idea how the Le Creuset was aquired.
And yet you judge.
posted by Floydd at 9:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [28 favorites]

Making average Americans scrutinize poor schlubs was the biggest fucking coup the Republicans ever scored.
posted by applemeat at 9:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [42 favorites]

How can you blame anyone for trying to eat on the government's dime nowadays? If they qualify, let them spend it, regardless of a) education level, b) what kind of cookware they might possess, c) what they do in their spare time or d) the color of their skin.
posted by ofthestrait at 9:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Let me say it a bit louder: I actually followed thepinksuperhero's link out of curiosity, to see if I qualified for food stamps.

Me too. Despite the fact that I'll be living on a taxable $23K grad student stipend in Manhattan, have hardly any savings, and own no real estate, I don't qualify. Because I'll be a student. A hungry, hungry student.
posted by oinopaponton at 9:46 AM on March 16, 2010

I have a different definition of poor than you do! I tend to make a distinction between poor and broke.

By my definition, I have never been poor. Raised by wealthy, highly-educated parents, prepped for college, good degree, never worried about food or clothes, traveled the world as a child, I have skills, diction, credentials, connections, safety nets.

I have been broke, meaning sleeping in a car, eating nothing but rice and beans (and running out occasionally), etc.

These people are not poor, they're broke. It's different.

I'm missing your point. What is it?

We were on food stamps for a while when I was a kid. My mom had (well, was in the process of getting) a PhD. I never worried about where my next meal was coming from and my cothes always fit me, even if they weren't the latest hippest brands.

Were we poor, or were we broke? Can you tell from my description? If we were only broke, should we not have gotten food stamps?
posted by rtha at 9:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

If you really need to eat on $150/month, you buy boxed Macaroni and Cheese by the case and mix it with grade-C ground beef. You don't buy bottled water and organic produce.

You know, I couldn't agree more that the lives of the poor should wherever possible be total in their agony and deprivation - in this case nutritional - but the part that amazes me, pla, is that you ignored the obvious final solution to this problem.

To wit: if you are poor you should be obligated to use your own body as food. What better incentive to get out there and get a job already than looking down and realizing you'll have nothing but a truncated stump for a left foot if you can't find gainful employment that week?
posted by gompa at 9:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

alynnk: "I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance."

My first hand-hammered wok - a thing of beauty - was given to me by a friend. I later discovered that it was recovered from a dumpster.

No food stamps involved!
posted by charred husk at 9:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

for anyone who's interested, this discussion is a nice demonstration of why right-wing politics has become dominant in the U.S.
posted by ennui.bz at 9:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [18 favorites]

If you really need to eat on $150/month, you buy boxed Macaroni and Cheese by the case and mix it with grade-C ground beef. You don't buy bottled water and organic produce.

I would prefer that they do this, because then I'd be able to stand in judgment of those on food stamps for being fat and eating such unhealthy food, as would be expected of such a culturally inferior group of people who so clearly cannot take care of themselves, which is why they need foodstamps.

I mean, criticizing people on food stamps for eating good, healthy food is fun, too, but I feel that I cannot exploit my feelings of moral and personal superiority to as great a degree, and that's the whole point of criticizing aid to the poor, isn't it?

God forbid I should ever find myself on foodstamps, and even worse to have to resort to foodstamps if I have children, but you can bet that if I do, I'm going to use them to feed both my children and myself with the healthiest food possible. And if I can use them to buy $1.99 bags of cumin and curry powder that will last for several months, well you can better bet that I'm going to do that if it makes the food tastier and easier to eat.
posted by deanc at 9:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

If you can pay for it, eat food, not a lot, mostly plants.

If you're on food stamps, eat products, until you're obese, mostly Easy Mac.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [20 favorites]

Who said they purchased it? I'm currently unemployed (fingers crossed, part-time gig looks like it's in the pipeline), and I got two Le Creuset pots for Christmas. Should I have refused them? Is it not possible that they purchased this cookware before they fell on hard times? It's one thing if they're committing fraud in applying for and receiving these benefits, but as I see it, they're just not buying what you want them to be buying.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 9:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

I know people like this; see bunnycup's comment.

ok, I think you've largely been reasonable in this thread, though we've disagreed. but statements like this are like a huge red signal flare fired directly into the sky that erupt into a firey arrow pointing at you with flaming text saying "hot fuck look at my biases now!" I don't know if you really meant to come off this way, and I'd like to assume you didn't. but "I know people like this," needs to not be a part of the food stamps discussion, for anyone. Food stamp abuse exists, and I'm as for making sure it isn't as the next guy, but there are no "people like this" who universally abuse food stamps because they fit a certain type so you can always spot them. anyone who wants to is free to suggest a method for eliminating abuse from the food stamp system, and I'd like to think we could get an interesting discussion out of that, but let's be clear about something:

this article is not about food stamp abuse.

it sure as hell comes across like it is, doesn't it? But then, how do we recognize food stamp abuse? well, the people bunnycup mentioned seem to fit the bill. so let's look at the article. if we look for the telltale signs (supplemental money from parents, undeclared income from partners or babyparents, etc...) we can't actually find them in there. we just see nice eye-catching terms like Whole Foods and Organic and Foodie and c. This really should be the thing that makes you rethink the article. It's doing everything it can to make you think "FOOD STAMP ABUSE" without actually describing actual abuse. And it's playing to our biases by describing the hated hipster, but not by actually demonstrating abuse. that is important.
posted by shmegegge at 9:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [45 favorites]

It may well be money well spent -- maybe we're subsidizing a lifestyle, but at least it's a reasonably healthy one. Healthier diets, healthier people, far less likelihood of them eating themselves into becoming a burden on the health system... which for anyone on food stamps, we're also on the hook paying for.

I'd bet it actually saves us money in the long run, but we won't realize/admit it because nobody bothers to think beyond the next fiscal year/quarter anymore.
posted by Pufferish at 9:48 AM on March 16, 2010

I thought part of being an American was letting other people spend their money however they liked.

But it's not their money. If it's public assistance money, you only get to spend it in the ways that the people who know better prescribe.
posted by blucevalo at 9:50 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Re: cookware -- points taken. Fair enough.
posted by alynnk at 9:50 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

The card is called 'Oregon Trail Card' so being on food stamps is known as 'riding the trail'.

YOU HAVE DIED

http://www.80stees.com/products/Dysentery-Oregon-Trail-T-shirt.asp

OF DYSENTERY
posted by mwhybark at 9:50 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Also, I feed a family of 7 on around $450/month. Granted, 5 of those 7 are children, but among them they easily eat as much as two adults, if not more. So that's ~$100/month per "adult".

About $400-$500 for a family of four plus our nanny here, but I live in an area (one of the boros of NY) where food is far more expensive than in other areas of the country.

We buy our food at Target, BJ's (it's like Costco or Sam's) and our local supermarket -- because we've learned that certain foods are less expensive at one store than the others, and some items are only available at one of them. For example, my kids go through a gallon of whole milk every 1.5 days. It's more than $1.50 less per gallon at BJ's compared to our local supermarket. But our supermarket is closer and more convenient for certain items. They have a wider, fresher variety of fruits and vegetables.

We eat pretty simply. Fresh meat, fruits and vegetables. Breads, pastas, juice, milk etc. We keep away from pre-made meals or processed junk food as much as possible. We love to cook and that helps.

I don't give a damn what these people buy with their food stamps. It's not for me to judge, I'm glad the program is available to them and good on 'em for making healthy choices.

I wonder how long it will take for any of the prominent right-wing pundits to blame the victim and point to this article as reason why the poor don't deserve assistance.
posted by zarq at 9:51 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Justinian: To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with people who need food stamps buying organic, healthy, whatever. I just don't think the people in this article need food stamps. I know people like this; see bunnycup's comment. Now, the article is likely picking out people who represent a very small subset of the program. That's undoubtedly true. But it's the article we're stuck with and what's under discussion.

Now you see, I don't feel I can make a judgement about what the people in this article need, because this article is so obviously a biased piece of garbage. Salon and Ms. Bleyer squandered their credibility on that point shortly after the lurid head and subhead.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:52 AM on March 16, 2010

I don't know why Americans hate people who can figure out how to eat tasty food on a tight budget, but if I had to guess I'd say it's something to do with how Americans hate pleasure even when the pleasurable thing is good for them, and doubly hate it when poor people experience pleasure or have or make good things for themselves.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't know if it's a distinctly American thing, but we are so fucked up in our relationship with pleasure, and our relationship with food. We treat the former as if only morally worthy people should enjoy it, and the latter as some sort of - well, I don't know. Food is the enemy, and it's also necessary, and it's medicine, and it can kill you. God. It doesn't bear much scrutiny because there doesn't seem to be any way out of our destructive and unhealthy ways of thinking about food and pleasure.
posted by rtha at 9:53 AM on March 16, 2010 [15 favorites]

I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance.

I would disagree with the notion that one should be able to outlandishly presume to dictate what people purchase or don't purchase.
posted by blucevalo at 9:53 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

This is hilarious. I'm from Baltimore.. I have not even read the article, but a number of my friends are mentioned in it. I had a feeling this would get posted to MetaFilter.. it's a shame I arrived so late to the debate.
posted by cloeburner at 9:54 AM on March 16, 2010

You know what? Fuck this shit- when I was in grad school, I lived for several years on incomes in the neighborhood of $15,000. I had very little funding, and I didn't have these mysterious "rich parents" everyone always talks about to bail me out. If I had known that I was eligible for food stamps (and maybe I wasn't, I just don't know), I would have taken them and spent the money to add more variety and healthy choices into my diet.

And if asked, I would probably say that I am a Hipster. Got a problem with that?

Now I have a decent job and pay taxes in two different countries. I would rather my tax money went to support people who want to make healthier choices in their diets. I would rather that poor people got more to eat, and that the food they were getting was of better quality. Got a problem with that?

Also, it is possible to find le Creuset cookware in thrift stores. I considered it quite a coup when I did.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:54 AM on March 16, 2010 [15 favorites]

shmegegge: "It's doing everything it can to make you think "FOOD STAMP ABUSE" without actually describing actual abuse. And it's playing to our biases by describing the hated hipster, but not by actually demonstrating abuse."

This.

I enjoy Salon, actually. I'd visit it daily for Greenwald, if nothing else. But this article is a stalking horse for "entitlement reform" and I hate it like poison.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:55 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I thought part of being an American was letting other people spend their money however they liked.

I thought the American credo was "if you don't work, you don't eat".
posted by acb at 9:55 AM on March 16, 2010

brain_drain seems to have missed...

Metafilter: How dare you suggest some hipsters may abuse food stamps. You right wing jerks!
Hipster: Hey, can you spare some change for the bus?
posted by ecurtz at 9:55 AM on March 16, 2010

All this talk of living on gourmet ice cream has me thinking about Grey Gardens. Fucking hipsters are even ruining cult classic documentaries.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:56 AM on March 16, 2010

cloeburner: "This is hilarious. I'm from Baltimore.. I have not even read the article, but a number of my friends are mentioned in it. I had a feeling this would get posted to MetaFilter.. it's a shame I arrived so late to the debate."

Its never too late! If you can fill in any details that would be welcome.
posted by charred husk at 9:56 AM on March 16, 2010

I've been half expecting this. Living in Portland, Or with its large hipster population this is just inevitable. There are more kids here with art school degrees than jobs (any jobs, really.) For the most part they spent the boom years living off their parents. Now, that the economy has soured, the parents don't have the same money they used to have. Suddenly those six figure college debts mean something.

So now we have a population of people who consider themselves "over-educated" because of their degrees in pottery (or what have you) that have never bothered to develop any kind of job skill, much less a work ethic.

Getting stuff is all they know.

What is interesting here, and very different from Reagan's "welfare Queens" is these kids don't come from backgrounds of generational poverty. They come from a background of generational entitlement. They are failing within a system that was built for them.
posted by elwoodwiles at 9:57 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Whether someone's buying 12 cans of black beans or 2 pounds of grass-fed organic flank steak it's still only $150 a month.

Jesus Christ, steak has gotten expensive.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:57 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I thought the American credo was "if you don't work, you don't eat".

you're thinking american christianity. easy mistake.
posted by fallacy of the beard at 9:57 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

These people, when gainfully employed again, will pay it all back in a couple months of salary taxes. If you're eating out of Whole Foods or the vegetable market rather than the scratch-n-dent aisle at Albertsons, you've got a future.

What is this even supposed to mean?
posted by kmz at 9:58 AM on March 16, 2010

In college, I unabashedly used my grandmother's food stamp card to fill my cupboards. After rent, my monthly income was $35. Eventually, I applied to get my own food stamps out of a slowly nagging guilt over using my grandmother's card, the state gave me $18 a month. The moral of the story? Be old.
posted by kerning at 9:59 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Does it make any sense to have 'Le Creuset' pot thrown in there randomly?

It makes total sense if they bought it when they were employed.
posted by desjardins at 9:59 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

This really should be the thing that makes you rethink the article.

shmegegge: To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you discuss the article you have, not the article you wish you had. I have no doubt the article is deliberately setting out to make people look bad. But that's what got posted. If someone wants to make a post about the history, effects, and successes of the food stamp program in the United States, well, then that's what we'll talk about.

Until then, this is the one we've got.
posted by Justinian at 10:00 AM on March 16, 2010

Also this?

a heaping plate of Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass

The ingredients are exotic to most of us, but this is street food, folks. It is not fancy, and in a city with a lot of Asians it is not expensive. I make my own curry paste all the time - maybe $10 worth of ingredients (bag of chilis, a few stalks of lemongrass, a bulb of garlic and a bag of shallots, some frozen galangal) for a three-to-six-month supply of paste, which freezes effortlessly. So let's say for one meal it's $0.50 for the paste.

My big local Asian grocer invariably uses coconut milk for a loss leader, so the two cans of it for a family-sized curry would be about $2.00. (All prices western Canadian, by the way.)

Throw in a 1/4 bag of frozen beans or peas (or fresh if in season), maybe say $0.75 to 1.50. Live large - cut up two chicken breasts from a whole bird bought at the farmers' market and throw those in there. $6.00.

A tablespoon or two of vegetable oil and a couple cups of rice: $0.50.

Total cost: $9.75 to $10.50, usually yielding enough for my family of three to eat at least two meals. Yes, I could've done the same with Kraft Dinner and cut-rate last-day-of-sale ground beef for five bucks or so, but if I skip the chip and cookie aisles I figure I'm near to breaking even.
posted by gompa at 10:00 AM on March 16, 2010 [31 favorites]

This whole thread suffers from a large lack of data and a partial lack of perspective.

YOU'RE WELCOME. <> $1,000/mo (benefits start at <>Fiscal PARTICIPATION BENEFIT AVERAGE MONTHLY BENEFIT
Year Persons Households COSTS Per Person Per Household
FY 2009 33,722,293 15,232,105 50,360,147,162 124.45 275.52
FY 2008 28,409,880 12,728,981 34,608,397,238 101.52 226.57
FY 2007 26,468,563 11,789,594 30,373,271,078 95.63 214.69
posted by The White Hat at 10:00 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Savory aromas wafted through the kitchen as a table was set with a heaping plate of Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, Chinese gourd sautéed in hot chile sauce and sweet clementine juice, all of it courtesy of government assistance.


So, would this be an "acceptable" use of food stamps for an Asian family? This food may not be what you eat on a daily basis, but it's actually standard American fare. (It also only costs about $2 a serving, if that.
posted by OmieWise at 10:03 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Oh, and I went to the University of Chicago. Got a problem with that?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:03 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

rtha: "I'm missing your point. What is it?

We were on food stamps for a while when I was a kid. My mom had (well, was in the process of getting) a PhD. I never worried about where my next meal was coming from and my cothes always fit me, even if they weren't the latest hippest brands.

Were we poor, or were we broke? Can you tell from my description? If we were only broke, should we not have gotten food stamps?"

I would say broke but hey, I wasn't there. I have no problem with broke people getting help, including food stamps. Education is great, too; subsidized student loans are great.

I still think it's silly to use the same word for vastly different situations. So people who criticize the people in the article are "classist" and want poor people to eat gruel because they hate poor people, with the implication that being unemployed for a year is the same as being raised in poverty, by parents who were also poor. No. It's not the same and pretending like it leads to "I was poor for a while while I was in grad school, and you don't see me complaining!"

Bullshit. If you want to see actual classism, scroll up and find the comment about people who have a "future" and people who don't. Because they buy food from dented cans.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 10:04 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's doing everything it can to make you think "FOOD STAMP ABUSE" without actually describing actual abuse. And it's playing to our biases by describing the hated hipster, but not by actually demonstrating abuse. that is important.

Exactly. It plays off of at least two well-known biases (hipster-hate; kids-today) and throws in a hefty dose of class-baiting. It carefully arranges what carefully-selected facts it does disclose in a deliberately emotionally manipulative and provocative way to create a vague general impression that something's not right here, and we should be outraged.

But essentially the same factual content could have been presented in a different arrangement to put an extremely positive spin on what's essentially the same story.

For example, with one unrelated quote from some random public official on the value of school health programs, the story might have been reworked under a headline like: "Due to Success of Health Awareness Education Programs, Younger, Better Educated Food Stamp Recipients More Likely to Choose Healthy Diet Alternatives."

As it is, this is well-constructed, anti-welfare agitprop. And that's all it is. There simply isn't anything else here, content-wise. The form dominates the content.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:04 AM on March 16, 2010 [26 favorites]

Oh, and shmegegee, I'm not concerned that some hipsters might be buying "the wrong stuff". I don't care what people buy if they are given money that they need. My only concern is to try and help the maximum number of needy people that we can with limited resources.
posted by Justinian at 10:04 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

You have the right to food money
Providing of course you
Don't mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation
posted by octothorpe at 10:05 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

The paycheck I deposited on Friday has not cleared yet. Today, for lunch I had a double cheeseburger at McD's, a place I rarely if ever frequent or purchase food from, for $1.49 plus tax. Hopefully, my check will have cleared by tonight, but just to be sure, I'll take some snacks home from work to tide me over until the boss buys lunch tomorrow.

That's where I'm at, and I'm working full time, ineligible for food stamps.

Also, I spent $8.25 on a pack of Camel Lights, but that's neither here nor there. After all, first things first.
posted by jsavimbi at 10:06 AM on March 16, 2010

What is this even supposed to mean?

I am imagining someone putting "Whole Foods consumer" on their resume, or shouting, as the cops drag them away, "You've got it all wrong! Don't you know where I shop?"
posted by enn at 10:06 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Let 'em eat tiramisu.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:07 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Until then, this is the one we've got.

Yeah, Justinian, you say that, but the article we've got includes no evidence or even direct insinuation that the subjects are cheating the system. As far as one can tell from the argument, they have a legitimate right to access food stamps.

So if we're sticking to the article we've got, the only issue at hand here is whether or not people on public assistance should be required to eat cheap, unhealthy food on principle, and if so, based on what the hell principle exactly?
posted by saulgoodman at 10:07 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

er... "As far as one can tell from the argument article
posted by saulgoodman at 10:09 AM on March 16, 2010

"This is hilarious. I'm from Baltimore.. I have not even read the article, but a number of my friends are mentioned in it. I had a feeling this would get posted to MetaFilter.. it's a shame I arrived so late to the debate."

Too late?! This one's just getting started. I sense at least 200 comments.
posted by josher71 at 10:10 AM on March 16, 2010

That's it. I've had it with all the hipster hate around here.
META!
posted by charred husk at 10:10 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Sorry folks, but this story should piss off the truly compassionate among you far more than it does me - I care only because they abuse my tax dollars; You should care because these asshats effectively take money away from people who really do need it.
posted by pla at 9:12 AM on March 16

WARNING
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
CTRL-F "POSTED BY PLA"
YOUR FRIENDLY PARK RANGER
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:11 AM on March 16, 2010 [14 favorites]

When I've been on unemployment and/or in school, food stamps have been a lifesaver. I did complain that the government should be giving magazine stamps, too, to no avail.

The problem with focusing on fraud is that it means some people who really need help won't get it, just to make sure that some people who someone thinks shouldn't need it won't get it. That focus on fraud was what led to single-parent families in the underclass, since if there was a man in the house, it was assumed he should be working and providing (no matter what the local unemployment rate was). The social cost of stopping "fraud" ended up bing a lot higher than the actual fraud would have been.

We'd be better off overall if we had a guaranteed minimum income that everyone got, whether they applied for it or not, and then paid back in the form of taxes. If you're really worried about people wasting it on drink and drugs, put it in the form of food stamps.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 10:12 AM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

My only concern is to try and help the maximum number of needy people that we can with limited resources.

Red herring. We ARE maximizing the number of needy people being helped. These people are needy. They are being helped.
posted by muddgirl at 10:12 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, Justinian, you say that, but the article we've got includes no evidence or even direct insinuation that the subjects are cheating the system. As far as one can tell from the argument, they have a legitimate right to access food stamps.

I don't get it; is someone arguing that we need to send the food stamp police over to investigate these people? Are we likely to encounter these people in daily life and treat them badly because of a mistaken impression given by a biased article?

Yes, the article is standard LOLhipsters with added dose of class warfare. Unless we're going to actually implement bad policy (and we're not) because of this article, rolling our eyes at the hipsters here is no different than for any other LOLhipster article. They don't stop being hipsters because they're unemployed. Hell, that's practically a requirement.
posted by Justinian at 10:12 AM on March 16, 2010

I, for one, would much rather have my tax dollars go to support an educated young person who buys healthy foods than to the chronically dependent who started families at too young an age and feed their children food-like shit.

Can it be argued that these gourmet foods perhaps offer more economic stimulus than buying the cheap, crappy mass-produced foods? And maybe the health benefits mean they'll be less of a burden, health care-wise?

I couldn't agree with you more. Major food corps (the 3 of them) prey on the poor. No one is going to buy a $1.25 organic bell pepper when they could buy a cheeseburger for $.99. They buy the cheap, shitty high-caloric foods which later give them adult onset diabetes (1 in 2 people in a minority get AOD) and puts them in the hospital. And of course they don't have insurance, which means the costs are absorbed by tax payers and the premiums of policy holders - and soon the real cost of that $150 monthly EBT is exponentially greater. We are a society of the short-sighted. Just like the food industry, we seem to think it's better to find some short-term fix for a problem, usually throwing some money at it, than looking at actual systemic solutions. I mean, talk about a god damned vicious cycle.

Effectively, encouraging the poor to use EBT or food stamps to purchase shit food is akin to calling for government support of Tyson or Monsanto. Those companies already get enough in subsidies and pork, imo.

It's in everyone's best interest if food stamps are used to buy healthy, organic foods. Not only does it decrease health care costs down the road and makes people generally happier, it also encourages the market to shift toward healthier, more sustainable food products and manufacturing methods. And it isn't just about the food. Organic food producers generally treat their workers with a modicum of respect and dignity - which cannot be said for the major food corps employing undocumented workers they underpay, treat like shit and then later sell out to the DHS.

Re: the always stupid and tired hipster hate thing here - hipster or not, this is a young person struggling. I mean, if you're a baby boomer hating on the youngins in this situation, take a good hard look at the causes. You told them they could do anything they wanted, you gave them insane loans to pursue those dreams, telling them they'd be fine and great, while you ran the economy into the ground, setting the stage for them to graduate with massive debt and no job prospects. And you're angry because they use food stamps to buy healthy foods? What? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

In Oregon (read:Portland) it seems like virtually everyone in their 20s is on food stamps

I'm a 20-something in pdx and I don't know a single person on food stamps. Also I think I saw some kids on your lawn you might want to yell at.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:13 AM on March 16, 2010 [27 favorites]

Also, I spent $8.25 on a pack of Camel Lights, but that's neither here nor there. After all, first things first.

Holy shit. Is that what a pack of cigarettes costs these days? So a pack a day smoker spends about $250 per month? Wow.
posted by zarq at 10:14 AM on March 16, 2010

According to Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain, during the Great Depression in Britain, welfare was rigorously means-tested, and recipients were subjected to home inspections to make sure they weren't squirrelling away high-quality food or living above a basic subsistence level on the government's dime.

Perhaps this should be brought back, only updated to modern circumstances. For example, organic food and exotic foods would be out, as would anything exceeding the cheapest means to sustain oneself (i.e., high-fructose corn syrup). Also, owning a Mac (whassamatta, Windows is good enough for everyone else but not for you?), a fixed-gear bicycle or spending money on aesthetic products would immediately revoke one's eligibility.
posted by acb at 10:14 AM on March 16, 2010

Ok, I read the comments. I too am on food stamps, it has helped me gauge how much I spend per month on food. Oddly enough, I've discovered that I only spend about 100 bucks per month [but I also dumpster a lot of food], I'm also very skinny. I don't fault Gerry or Sarah for shopping at Whole Foods, and I know that at least Gerry is very wise in his shopping decisions and tries to buy animal parts that other people wouldn't consider eating.

I'd say about half of my friends are on food stamps, and all the better for it. I only made about 2000 dollars last year and I would have had a very difficult time surviving without the stamps. Many of my friends are in the same boat. We're all minimally employed, work is hard to come by, but rent is extremely cheap due to most of us living in wacky situations [12 roommates, no heat, middle of abandoned slums etc].

When we get food stamps, we are not depriving someone else of them, the social workers at the food stamp office are more than willing to give out food stamps, almost as if they have some quota to reach.

I suppose I just find it funny that so many people are in favor of socialism, but when it is put to practice they immediately throw a fit.
posted by cloeburner at 10:15 AM on March 16, 2010 [14 favorites]

Imagine two families on food stamps, identical except for this key difference: one family decides to buy and subsist on mass quantities of macaroni and cheese and grade C ground beef, and the other buys more nutritious and interesting fare: a huge bag of rice, some dried beans, and a little organic produce and salmon every week.

One family is going to be more healthy, less depressed, probably a lot more interesting at a job interview, and the kids (or college students) are going to learn better in school.

I happen to think that's a good use of my tax money.

Please let this be a way we as a culture learn to eat a variety of healthy foods for less money.
posted by amtho at 10:16 AM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

shmegegge: To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you discuss the article you have, not the article you wish you had.

I'm sorry, man, but I don't understand what you're saying. discussing the article in front of us, its merits and flaws, is precisely what I'm doing. As I recall, you asked me how I knew these people weren't abusing the system and my response was [heavily paraphrased] "I don't, but what I'm responding to is how badly and dishonestly this article has been written, so that we should make a point to critically analyze it because it's not presenting the facts to us, just playing on our biases." so, yeah, I'm pretty sure that discussing the article we have is precisely what I'm doing. and then you made the point that you knew this type of people and all that, at which point I tried again to bring it back to the article at hand and how it plays to our outrage and not the facts at hand. what's the problem?
posted by shmegegge at 10:17 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

I am glad they are able to get food stamps. About 15 years ago I lost my job and after a few months I was reduced to selling plasma for food money (now The Clash's 'Know Your Rights" is playing in my head). I honestly could not find a job and looked into government assistance. I was told it was mainly for single mothers but I could try. It would have been a paltry amount and lot of hassle and wait and uncertainty to get it. This was before Clinton's welfare reform so I imagine it's harder these days. I lived for a while on soda crackers, peanut butter, and apple juice. Those offered the most calories for the dollar. Bread was too expensive. This article is pretty much bullshit. It's manufactured controversy. Someone who has $37 a week to eat on is not going to spend it at Whole Foods unless they are buying store brand staples.
posted by Tashtego at 10:18 AM on March 16, 2010

Is that what a pack of cigarettes costs these days?

That's a little bit higher than average, but only because I bought them at the chi-chi wine/cheese/organic bodega instead of walking over to Chinatown, like I should have. Lazy impulses have their margins too.
posted by jsavimbi at 10:19 AM on March 16, 2010

what a load of wank
posted by edgeways at 10:19 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Potentially more data, from this previous post, the 2011 U.S. federal budget allows $80B for food stamps.

Potentially more perspective, my family was on food stamps when I was a kid. Now I'm a productive, tax-paying, member of society. I want to thank you all for helping us through a tough time, and hope you consider it a good investment.
posted by Edward L at 10:20 AM on March 16, 2010 [25 favorites]

Major food corps (the 3 of them) prey on the poor. . . . 1 in 2 people in a minority get AOD

Interesting simplification.
posted by tantivy at 10:20 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I would say broke but hey, I wasn't there. I have no problem with broke people getting help, including food stamps. Education is great, too; subsidized student loans are great.

Okay. I'm still not sure I get your point (poor != broke - well, okay, but so what?), but I'm also not sure it matters. If people are broke (I guess by this you mean a temporary lack of money/job, but with the class background of education/family to fall back on), you still think they deserve help, and if people are poor (longer term no-money, less or no access to educational advancement, no financially stable family to fall back on), they also deserve help.

I guess what I'm not grokking is the fightiness of your tone, or maybe I'm just misreading that too. (It's the internet, it happens.)
posted by rtha at 10:20 AM on March 16, 2010

blucevalo : Your presuming what should piss me off pisses me off more than an unemployed hipster buying arugula.

I specifically directed that toward the "truly compassionate".

If you want to stand up and defend hipster abuses of money that could go to people who actually need it, well now that would make you falsely compassionate - A liberal poseur, if you will.

So... Either I didn't address you, or yes, yes TFA should bother you.
posted by pla at 10:20 AM on March 16, 2010

jesus christ, pla.
posted by shmegegge at 10:21 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Re: the always stupid and tired hipster hate thing here - hipster or not, this is a young person struggling. I mean, if you're a baby boomer hating on the youngins in this situation, take a good hard look at the causes. You told them they could do anything they wanted, you gave them insane loans to pursue those dreams, telling them they'd be fine and great, while you ran the economy into the ground, setting the stage for them to graduate with massive debt and no job prospects.

No I didn't. I told them to go to Real School and get a Real Job.
posted by bunnycup at 10:22 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

but isn't it generally acknowledged that hipsters tend to support their expensive lifestyles using money from their wealthy parents?

Nope!
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:22 AM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

cloeburner:
Thanks for painting that picture for us. Sometimes people need to be reminded that there are all sorts of different ways of getting by in the world when things are rough.
posted by charred husk at 10:24 AM on March 16, 2010

The issue seems to be that young, able, educated people are unemployed. Because they're young, they (nominally) have no assets to dip into. Because there's 17% underemployment, it's impossible to say that they just aren't trying. By objective metrics, they qualify for means-tested assistance.

What's so intuitively odd about them is that we feel that they should have assets. Brought up several times is that they probably have parents supplementing their income. Viewing their parents wealth as an asset makes sense in a way (they'll likely inherit it, we already do this for college loan subsidies), but not in others (some parents won't do that and it would be bad to make them). More to the point, that they will probably get good jobs in the future is an asset. Anyone getting a degree knows this game: when you get loans for food and rent you are borrowing against your future income. These people have a high expectation of future income, and should (to some minds) borrow against that rather than draining the public funds designed for people who don't. That's impossible right now due to the lack of consumer credit and the absurd rates charged. This is something we have to eat. I suppose that you could tack past welfare benefits onto future (high-income level) tax liability, but that would probably be more in administrative cost than revenue.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 10:26 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

My state senator gives speeches exhorting people to sign up for food stamps if they qualify, even if they don't feel they need the money, to bring federal money into the neighborhood. It's not a zero-sum game; or rather, it is, but there's no reason to think that someone who is signing up for food stamps but could manage without them is taking money from people who couldn't rather than taking money from, say, Rumsfeld's defense contractor friends. Buying people food — whoever they are and whatever kind of food it is — seems to me like one of the more defensible uses of tax money, all things considered.
posted by enn at 10:26 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

I told them to go to Real School and get a Real Job.

Well, perhaps our ideas of real jobs differ, but being an art preparator is a pretty decent job. It pays well, requires technical knowledge and skill, and serves an important purpose in society (of course, I enjoy going to art museums, so ymmv). The industry got hit by the recession just like any other.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:26 AM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

If you want to stand up and defend hipster abuses of money that could go to people who actually need it, well now that would make you falsely compassionate - A liberal poseur, if you will.

C, WAA.
posted by zarq at 10:26 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I, for one, would much rather have my tax dollars go to support an educated young person who buys healthy foods than to the chronically dependent who started families at too young an age and feed their children food-like shit.

What is "chronically dependent," exactly? And who defines that? And how do you know that someone who "feeds their children food-like shit" doesn't live in a situation in which "food-like shit" is the only food-like shit that they are able to afford/buy in their neighborhoods?

I, for one, would rather not make as few value judgment about the people to whom my tax dollars go to support, whether they're hipsters or not.
posted by blucevalo at 10:27 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Not that it matters, but Hampden is one of the nicer neighborhoods in Baltimore. Used to be mostly white and working class, now it's mostly bo-bos and trustifarian art school dropouts and the like.
posted by electroboy at 10:27 AM on March 16, 2010

Why are all these people on food stamps on Metafilter? Shouldn't they be saving their $5 and going on Yahoo Answers?

jk
posted by mccarty.tim at 10:27 AM on March 16, 2010 [16 favorites]

Major food corps (the 3 of them) prey on the poor. . . . 1 in 2 people in a minority get AOD

Interesting simplification.

The AOD stat is true, actually (it's 1 in 3 if you're talking about the general population).

The 3 major food corps is actually not that far off, either. The average supermarket has something like 47,000 products, but only about 3-4 manufacturers are represented.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:28 AM on March 16, 2010

"Bo-bos"?
posted by josher71 at 10:28 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

but isn't it generally acknowledged that hipsters tend to support their expensive lifestyles using money from their wealthy parents?

Nope!
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:22 AM

Maybe!
posted by electroboy at 10:30 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Why are all these people on food stamps on Metafilter? Shouldn't they be saving their $5 and going on Yahoo Answers?

jk

I bought my account several years ago with a friend... we paid 2.50 each. No joke. But he's since moved on to greener pastures.
posted by cloeburner at 10:31 AM on March 16, 2010

Lutoslawski, no, I don't disagree with you. I don't think there is really any sector that isn't getting hit with serious job shortages right now. I mean heck, how many kids have graduated law school and can't find jobs? I do agree we, as a society, should not have so readily encouraged so many kids to believe they would have long term, dependable employment earning a living wage in the arts, but I don't say that to suggest that fine arts are frivolous or unimportant.
posted by bunnycup at 10:31 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

"feeds their children food-like shit" doesn't live in a situation in which "food-like shit" is the only food-like shit that they are able to afford/buy in their neighborhoods?"

I grant you that my value judgment was a bit hasty and undefined, but this argument is BS. No matter where you live, you have a choice to not buy your meals at McD's. Spreading this notion is simply exacerbating the problem and ensuring years of prosperity for the round-up ready soy bean and meat filler.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:32 AM on March 16, 2010

You know that bit where we feel so good about telling our young children that they can grow up and be anything they want to be? Yeah, well, apparently we get over it.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:34 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

(1 in 2 people in a minority get AOD)

Do you have a cite for that number? (I'm not trying to be a stickler, I just think it's an interesting stat, but the numbers I can find suggest 23.6 million people in the US with diagnosed and undiagnosed DM, in 2007, and approximately, for instance, 41 million African Americans in the US in 2008. Is it a worldwide number?
posted by OmieWise at 10:35 AM on March 16, 2010

No matter where you live, you have a choice to not buy your meals at McD's.

....Point of order: there ARE neighborhoods where there isn't as much of a choice as you think. Sure, they have a choice not to buy their meals at McD's -- it's just that that alternate choice may be something like Popeye's, KFC, or the corner convenience store where all the "produce" is the color of carbon and may possibly be sentient.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:36 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

"Bo-bos"?

Bo-bos.
posted by electroboy at 10:36 AM on March 16, 2010

Bunnycup - I'm just jaded because I feel like I was duped into borrowing a lot of money for a degree that probably won't be worth it. I see my intelligent, capable and educated friends - 25, 26, 27 - struggling to find unpaid internships (or worse, internships they have to pay for). It's easy to blame the baby boomers - they are a convenient scape goat. And they aren't without blame, certainly, but I also agree that you accept some personal responsibility when you take the art school risk.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

rtha: "Okay. I'm still not sure I get your point (poor != broke - well, okay, but so what?), but I'm also not sure it matters. If people are broke (I guess by this you mean a temporary lack of money/job, but with the class background of education/family to fall back on), you still think they deserve help, and if people are poor (longer term no-money, less or no access to educational advancement, no financially stable family to fall back on), they also deserve help.

I guess what I'm not grokking is the fightiness of your tone, or maybe I'm just misreading that too. (It's the internet, it happens.)"

Yes, I think everyone needs help when they need help. That is because I am relatively mellow about spending government money to keep everyone fed and happy.

I am not mellow about people calling themselves (or other people) poor with the implication that they had it hard, too! when the reality is they are advantaged and working within a system that was made for them. It irritates me; even though many people do not have a conscious desire to conflate temporary hardship with generational poverty, using the same word for both is one of many ways that we, as a society, refuse to acknowledge that there are different classes with vastly different opportunities and prospects for financial stability. Upward mobility--Horatio Alger aside--is rare. Few people go from "poor" to "middle class" with one job interview. Nor do they go from "middle class" to "poor" due to a few years in grad school.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 10:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Maybe!
posted by electroboy at 10:30 AM on March 16

Every human interest story in "NY/Region" AKA UWS Wankfest is a lie

WACKY STREET VENDOR BELOVED BY ALL
Local Microcelebrity Not Widely Ignored

HANDMADE POGS HOT ITEM AT BROOKLYN FLEA
Some of Them Have Ironic Sayings

IN THIS ECONOMY, HIPSTERS SELL THEIR OWN ORGANS
Haha a Weiners Joke Goes Here
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:38 AM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

Some young, hip, health-conscious people are rich! News at 11!

Some young, hip, health-conscious people are not rich, and are trying to get through life just like you are! Not on the news, because making fun of regular people is boring!
posted by oinopaponton at 10:40 AM on March 16, 2010

So you feel it's irresponsible to splurge for a luxury item every once in a while if you are received state assistance?
Yes.

Do you think it's irresponsible for my parents to splurge on a pint of ice cream because their food budget comes from Social Security Disability payments?
Yes.

Maybe my point of view comes from being raised on food stamps by parents who were way too irresponsible to have kids.

There was a time in my adult life that I qualified for food stamps, and had some friends on them. But instead of living on hand-outs like a child, I moved from a depressed area to a place with jobs, got one, and supported myself like a grown-up.

I understand that circumstances may force some people to take hand-outs, but I've never understood why people refuse to change those circumstances.

Here's a start.
posted by coolguymichael at 10:41 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

(1 in 2 people in a minority get AOD)

Do you have a cite for that number?

Admittedly, I took this stat from Food, Inc., (book & movie). Perhaps it is bullshit, but the film was well-vetted and I'm obliged to believe it. I'll look and see if I can't find where they got the stat.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:42 AM on March 16, 2010

making fun of regular people is boring

Your Mama is so regular, she doesn't even need yogurt. Good thing, too. She can't afford it.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:42 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

To get assistance you need to qualify your income, etc. If you are jealous of those who can live on that amount, go try it - or try it again if it was so awesome the first time.

To be called a hipster you need to qualify your BMI at some ghastly low level. If you are jealous of those who can live on that amount, go try it - or try it again if it was so awesome the first time.

I like the distinction in this thread between poor and broke. College prepared me to be broke for long periods of time. If I have to share an apartment with 5 people again, and eat cheap whole foods in bulk (since I can't just eat one wee piece of anything) I can hack it. I couldn't have done that without help. The help I got at the time was the loan of a car once in a while rather than stamps, but it was help all the same.

Oh, and when does my MeFi "Honk if I'm paying your mortgage" bumper sticker come in the mail?
posted by drowsy at 10:43 AM on March 16, 2010

Nor do they go from "middle class" to "poor" due to a few years in grad school.

I think you're underestimating the amount of real downward mobility among, let's say, the hipster class. Not everyone gets a good job in the end, even if they did get the fancy degree, and treating them as though it's a foregone conclusion that they're going to do so and so their poverty doesn't count seems kind of misguided to me.
posted by enn at 10:43 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

No matter where you live, you have a choice to not buy your meals at McD's.

Where I live, in the middle of a city in a mixed neighborhood, there is a McDonalds, a Subway, a 7-11 and a Wendy's in walking distance. There's no supermarket within an easy walk.
posted by octothorpe at 10:43 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

shmegegge : jesus christ, pla.

What? He can stand here and mock anyone who dares to call abuse of public assistance "wrong"... But I can't return his serve?


blucevalo : What is "chronically dependent," exactly?

Free hint - If your parents received TANF and you have never lived without it. If you went on assistance 20 years ago and now approach retirement age still on it. If you actively avoid work because it would disqualify you (and before you reflexively cry "BS", follow the link below) .

In my state, we have such a problem with 2nd and even 3rd gen welfare recipients that last year the state senate took action to try to reduce those numbers... Though of course in the current economy, they may as well have tried to lower home heating bills by capturing unicorn farts.

posted by pla at 10:43 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

> Few people go from "poor" to "middle class" with one job interview. Nor do they go from "middle class" to "poor" due to a few years in grad school.

Apparently, Art School has boosted me from working class to middle class as of next fall, actually. I'm gonna be on a pretty sweet fellowship for 4 years. Who knows if I'll find a good job after that, but I can fall back on contract bookkeeping or something else, because I'm not a hipster, I guess. My poor mama raised me "right," with all the meritocratic mythos of the white working class conservatives.

So let's drop the "real school" thing, please. It's my gamble to make, and my country told me to try to do my best, and this is it.

The debate at hand? It's ridiculous. I have no interest in scrutinizing people's grocery bills. What, y'all wanna go be IRS auditors? I bet they're still hiring; do it.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

No matter where you live, you have a choice to not buy your meals at McD's.

This isn't about buying at McD's or not. Portland may be an exception, but this is about urban neighborhoods in which some people live where it is often impossible to find a supermarket or non-shit foodstuff store, indeed in which it is often impossible to find anything but liquor stores and convenience stores, for miles. That has to do with urban zoning and planning priorities, not the meat filler industry.
posted by blucevalo at 10:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

they abuse my tax dollars

They abuse your tax dollars by eating healthy food and carefully spending their public aid money on wise purchases? What, exactly, do you want them to do with their aid money if that's what you consider an "abuse"?

Maybe my point of view comes from being raised on food stamps by parents who were way too irresponsible to have kids.

Except that what we're reading about is people who are on food stamps who are obviously responsible enough to make good nutrition decisions and responsible enough to understand when they can get a pint of ice cream without messing up the rest of their food budget.

It just goes to show: when it comes to aid-to-the-poor journalism, the subjects just can't win. You're either an irresponsible ne'er-do-well, or a slumming-it poseur "abusing the system."
posted by deanc at 10:46 AM on March 16, 2010

I understand that circumstances may force some people to take hand-outs, but I've never understood why people refuse to change those circumstances.

In the case of an elderly couple receiving disability payments -- a couple you admitted should not splurge on ice cream now and then -- exactly what circumstances would you suggest they change?

It's disability. Moving to another state is not going to magically heal someone with a disability. Now what?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

but isn't it generally acknowledged that hipsters tend to support their expensive lifestyles using money from their wealthy parents?

Nope!

As I said I don't really have anything to back that claim up, but to me it didn't seem out of the ordinary that one of the subjects of the article was from one of the top ten wealthiest counties in the country.

If you are on food stamps and are also in public housing or have some other kind of public assistance to pay for the rest of your expenses, that makes sense. But if you unemployed with less than $2000 in assets, and in addition to the food stamps you qualify for and use for expensive food, you also have to pay for the other hipster lifestyle requirements like rent in an expensive city, iPhone service, high speed Internet, and whatnot, where does the rest of the money come from?
posted by burnmp3s at 10:47 AM on March 16, 2010

Just to clear things up, Baltimore is far from an expensive city. I know people here who pay 80 a month in rent. I pay about double that...

Baltimore is not Brooklyn.
posted by cloeburner at 10:51 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ambrosia Voyeur: "Apparently, Art School has boosted me from working class to middle class as of next fall, actually."

Awesome, although I think you might have misread. I was stating that being in grad school and short of money does not mean that you are no longer "middle class".
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 10:51 AM on March 16, 2010

(and that's the general "you", not you specifically)
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 10:51 AM on March 16, 2010

In my state,

Oh, man, Mayor Curley was right after all.
posted by Nothing... and like it at 10:52 AM on March 16, 2010

Where I live, in the middle of a city in a mixed neighborhood, there is a McDonalds, a Subway, a 7-11 and a Wendy's in walking distance. There's no supermarket within an easy walk.

This isn't about buying at McD's or not. Portland may be an exception, but this is about urban neighborhoods in which some people live where it is often impossible to find a supermarket or non-shit foodstuff store, indeed in which it is often impossible to find anything but liquor stores and convenience stores, for miles. That has to do with urban zoning and planning priorities, not the meat filler industry.

Ok, the zoning point is fair, and I would say that this sucks and this is exactly where the kind of systemic change necessary to actually fix this problem should start. Tell your city planners you want decent walkability in your neighborhood, including access to food markets.

I've lived in three very urban places, though perhaps they are all exceptions, and a couple very rural places - and I've always had easy-enough access to things like produce, bulk grains, etc. This is only my experience and is not representative.

Also, and I know it isn't possible for everyone (so before you all jump on me), if you lack access to produce, a lot of foods are really quite easy to grow in your yard (again, if you have one, etc...), take hardly no time, and yield a lot of food.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:52 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Perhaps this should be brought back, only updated to modern circumstances. For example, organic food and exotic foods would be out, as would anything exceeding the cheapest means to sustain oneself (i.e., high-fructose corn syrup). Also, owning a Mac (whassamatta, Windows is good enough for everyone else but not for you?), a fixed-gear bicycle or spending money on aesthetic products would immediately revoke one's eligibility.

Back in the dark days, before Facebook Purity, one of my Facebook friends did a quiz that asked if people on food stamps should be required to undergo drug testing. Naturally, my FB friend was all for it. We are a nation, as someone else pointed out, that viscerally, rabidly hates the poor. Being poor is a moral failing, and anything that happens to you as a result of your poverty is well-deserved. The corollary is that people would rather have their whole family literally starve to death than to know that even a single penny of tax money went to someone they think didn't deserve it.
posted by dirigibleman at 10:52 AM on March 16, 2010 [14 favorites]

Why was my generation stuck with slacker when hipster sounds so much more soigne? And BTW, this article reeks of Stephen Glass to me. When I was a social worker you couldn't get adequate help even if you needed it, much less have the ability to support some conservative's fantasy of liberal all-you-can-eat hypocrisy. Getting the food stamp maximum allotment meant that you had zero extra dollars for food after all of the poverty cut-off lines that were atrociously low. They would deduct whatever extra you could budget for food from the amount of stamps you received. Which leaves one of several possibilities - things have changed a lot (doubt it), in some areas food stamps allotments are more than they were where I was (can happen), the recipients fudged their neediness (possible), or the article is creating something that doesn't exist. If the story is that these people are fudging their need, that's the story - food stamps won't pay for good food.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:53 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

you also have to pay for the other hipster lifestyle requirements like rent in an expensive city, iPhone service, high speed Internet, and whatnot, where does the rest of the money come from?

To be fair, I know a lot of hipsters who don't have high-speed internet, iPhones, and live in houses with 15 people to afford the rent.

Hipsters, like every other demographic, are not subject to the stereotypes put upon them, generally.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:54 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Loopholes are for the rich. That is is the American way.
posted by dirty lies at 10:54 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

But food stamps are for those with a low income, yes? I would disagree with the notion that one should be purchasing outlandishly-priced cookware if they are currently unable to provide food for themselves or their family without assistance.

I had a conservative friend in grad school who thought like this. He was incensed that some high percentage of people receiving food stamps had color tvs, because by his logic if you had a color tv you were by definition unpoor (or poor but so foolish with your money that we should punish you).

In both cases, the logic... well, there isn't one. If you go to a food stamp recipient's home and see that they have a Le Creuset pot, what does that tell you? It tells you only that at some point in the last 40 or 50 years, someone in the recipient's family (including the recipient) had enough money to purchase that pot, possibly used.

And presto, I have elegance at my disposal, for only about $7.50.

Well, you shouldn't. Decent godfearing people should stop by and steal that pate from you so that they can have it, and you can bloody well subsist on rice with weevils like horrible stinky poor people should. hamburger.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:55 AM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

Two things.

1) I make several times the financial limit for qualifying for food stamps. I spend about $200 a month on food. Tonight's meal? A chicken/mushroom curry dish from scratch, which will cost about $10 to make but will feed me for about three days. I eat well and could continue to eat well if I dropped that to $150. $150-200 a month is only a small amount of money if you're trying to feed a family. For a single person, it's entirely adequate.

2) I think we're dealing with the mess that class concepts have become in America. It's no longer linked purely to money; education and other markers of prestige have as much to do with our class consciousness as anything else does. So Salon is--arguably irresponsibly--riffing off the cognitive dissodence of someone we normally associate with one social class acting like someone from a lower social class, forgetting for the moment that social and educational status are no longer directly linked to financial status in the way they have been in the past.
posted by valkyryn at 10:55 AM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

It irritates me; even though many people do not have a conscious desire to conflate temporary hardship with generational poverty, using the same word for both is one of many ways that we, as a society, refuse to acknowledge that there are different classes with vastly different opportunities and prospects for financial stability.

Maybe something to this, but food stamps are not targeted at eliminating generational poverty. They're targeted at feeding people who don't have enough money to afford to eat right now, regardless of their family history. Why? So people of all social classes having a hard time right now don't starve and so they aren't as likely to end up falling into that population of people stuck in generational poverty.

Social programs aren't just about taking pity on some imaginary species of human beings branded for life as "the poor." My grandfather was born into generational poverty as a sharecropper's son, but worked his way up to become, for a time at least, a wealthy timber-man. Later in life, he fell onto hard times again (though we never went on food stamps). How would you classify him? Or me, for that matter? By income or family history?
posted by saulgoodman at 10:56 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

I moved from a depressed area to a place with jobs, got one, and supported myself like a grown-up.

So you had the resources to do this, at a time when there was a place "with jobs" to move to. Bully for you.

And no one on public assistance is deserving of a $3 bit of pleasure in the form of, say, ice cream. Man, I don't want to live in your world.
posted by rtha at 10:56 AM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

The "Le Creuset" pot is really the key to this article: you go back and take a second look and realize that it is not an actual thing in the article, it is purely a concept: a symbol, in fact. It is there to push exactly the button that the discussion here demonstrates so admirably is getting pushed: the belief, in absence of any actual evidence, that these individuals must have too many resources to ethically qualify for food stamps. I'm comfortable with the theory that I have no clue, maybe, like I so often did when I was young, they are skipping 2 out of 3 meals.

The real issue is that anyone with half a brain knows that "young foodies" are of no god damned significance whatsoever to the big picture of poverty, hunger, and government support. You're an idiot if you think this journalistic slop is anything aside from cheap outrage bait made from the usual trick of padding out some legitimate but dull trend (more working poor need help to eat? Yawn!) with whatever anecdotes suggest themselves out of the flavor of the month buzzword bin. Being connected with a church that runs an increasingly active food shelf, I can tell you there is a real story out there about people finding themselves among the ranks of those who need food support for the first time, and it sure as hell doesn't have anything to do with this stupid, self indulgent little exercise in hipster hating.
posted by nanojath at 10:56 AM on March 16, 2010 [29 favorites]

Let's do the math. In order to qualify for food stamps Mek would have to have under $2,000 in countable resources, including a bank account and have an income of no greater than 130% of poverty threshold which for one person is $14,079 (1173.25/month) per Maryland's Department of Human Resources. So, basically, he can supplement his $200 per month with a little bit of his own cash and still afford rent, which affords him the ability to buy chi-chi groceries. I think there's an additional implication here that Mek's getting cash assistance on the sly from his well-to-do family in West Chester, which would totally not surprise me and I can't believe the writer did not put the question to him directly, though he couldn't answer it honestly because he could then be prosecuted for welfare fraud. But the possibility of welfare fraud here is pretty high, because, honestly, these guys are spending their stamps on shit they don't absolutely need, which is not how people who really desperately need food stamps spend them.

So, yeah, this dude in particular is probably at the high range of allowable income and countable resources which changes his picture as a welfare recipient. Your typically welfare recipient who receives SSI for a mental health disability, for example, lives on less than $7000 per year income and has no countable resources. This individual would have very little other income or resources to use to supplement their $200 per month, so, no, they would not be spending it on organic salmon, they would be spending it on shitty HFCS laden breafast cereals and other assorted cheap bullshit that will last a whole month. Or they would supplement their stamps with more shitty quality food from a food bank, though right now food banks are mostly bare because these non-typical new-poverty types generated by the current recession are slamming those resources also.

And, fucking journalists, man. Any journalist who wants to do a story on food stamps should be forced to at least visit a county assistance office so they don't wind up looking like total fucking morons in the eyes of people who actually work on poverty problems.
posted by The Straightener at 10:57 AM on March 16, 2010 [25 favorites]

Amongst others, Horatio Alger makes my top ten list to go back in time and convince to do something else if I ever perfect this damned time machine thing.
posted by edgeways at 10:58 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

But if you unemployed with less than $2000 in assets, and in addition to the food stamps you qualify for and use for expensive food, you also have to pay for the other hipster lifestyle requirements like rent in an expensive city, iPhone service, high speed Internet, and whatnot, where does the rest of the money come from?

The Hipster Defense League General Membership Fund pays dividends for approved lifestyle expenses for members in good standing. Unfortunately, they only pay in street cred and Irony Bux, which can only be traded for bowling shirts, diner coffee, and a free download from iTunes. But every little bit helps. I think some hipsters may also supplement their incomes by selling Protestant babies on Craigslist.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:58 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

It irritates me; even though many people do not have a conscious desire to conflate temporary hardship with generational poverty, using the same word for both is one of many ways that we, as a society, refuse to acknowledge that there are different classes with vastly different opportunities and prospects for financial stability.

While I agree that we (as Americans) have an incredibly screwed up view of and relationship with class (financial, educational, social - pick one or all), I don't think that the solution to unscrewing it is to pit "the poor" against "the broke." How does that do any good? And where's the cut-off?
posted by rtha at 11:01 AM on March 16, 2010

I bet everyone here would be shocked to learn that there's an ENTIRE COUNTRY of POOR PEOPLE that eat VIETNAMESE FOOD EVERY DAY.

It's called Vietnam.

Also, while "roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes" sounds fancy, for a one-person meal it's actually pretty cheap as rabbit is a very cheap meat. For whatever reason they used to sell it at the "No Frills" on Landsdowne in Toronto (Toronto hipsters, you know the one - the "No Frills" with the live fish counter and all the imported Portuguese food). And sweet potatoes are also, in their raw form, really cheap.

Anyway, anyone actually upset by this article has been trolled and hard. Salon needs to end articles with "YHBT. HTH. HAND."
posted by GuyZero at 11:01 AM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

I like my poor people to be a certain way.

This makes me... uncomfortable.
posted by mazola at 11:02 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

If you actively avoid work because it would disqualify you (and before you reflexively cry "BS", follow the link below) .

Yes -- I'll be sure to "follow the link below" and not cry BS to your reflexive Republican Party talking points link.
posted by blucevalo at 11:02 AM on March 16, 2010

And no one on public assistance is deserving of a $3 bit of pleasure in the form of, say, ice cream. Man, I don't want to live in your world.

Welcome to America where there is no difference between economics and morality.
posted by GuyZero at 11:03 AM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

I've lived in three very urban places, though perhaps they are all exceptions, and a couple very rural places - and I've always had easy-enough access to things like produce, bulk grains, etc. This is only my experience and is not representative.

I find it a good policy to remind myself that "this is only my experience and is not representative" whenever I hear of how others are living their lives in a way different from me. Others may wish to reflect on this.

Case in point:

...a lot of foods are really quite easy to grow in your yard (again, if you have one, etc...), take hardly no time, and yield a lot of food.

Oh, believe me, I'd love to have a yard to grow things in. But I am restricted to two large pots on my windowsill. I have herbs. I tried tomatoes last year, but that didn't work so good.

At least I have a supermarket, though. A lot of the "no supermarket" zones also are spaces where no open land to farm ON is available. So people are doubly screwed.

...Again -- "only my experience and is not representative."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:03 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

remember when you'd be fighting with some other kid over a rocket pop or whatever and he'd lick it just so you couldn't enjoy it if you got it

AMERICA
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:03 AM on March 16, 2010 [29 favorites]

I don't care what they buy with the money allotted to them through food stamps. I have enough to worry about concerning my own life and cooking to care what they bother buying. What's it my business? It's not like they're getting $1000 a month food allowances. That being said, this is what bothers me:

Josh Ankerberg, a 26-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., started getting food stamps a year ago as an AmeriCorps volunteer, a group that has long had special dispensation to qualify for them....

He chose to go into AmeriCorps and is using food stamps on top of stipends given to them for programs that may or may not help the communities in meaningful ways? Stipend + food stamps for doing volunteer work while some guy without a college degree works twice the amount of hours for min wage without any kind of health insurance to make as much as the stipend volunteers (who generally have college degrees, some kind of health insurance for when they really have an emergency, prescription coverage, transit stipends, and get an educational scholarship and federal competitive eligibility for govt jobs) get?
posted by anniecat at 11:04 AM on March 16, 2010

Just to clear things up, Baltimore is far from an expensive city.

Yes, but it's quite clear from the article that the subjects have friends, listen to music, and hang out in the city and are not unhappy or culturally deprived. How dare they!??!??!!??? Damn trust fund hipsters!

I can't think of anything more responsible than living in a area with a very low cost of living and eating healthy food while you look for a job in the greater DC-Baltimore metro area which, thankfully, has a pretty decent job outlook.

Look, I feel sorry for the people whose lives are so boring an empty that they get resentful when they read about underemployed young adults living with multiple roommates simply because they have the audacity not to self-flaggelate, but come on, guys-- get a more productive hobby.
posted by deanc at 11:04 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Oh, and I should also mention - de-regulation of dairy production means that the US has pretty much the lowest prices in the Western world for butter. I mean, $2.50 a pound? I should bathe in butter living in the US compared to what it cost in Canada, not to mention France, the UK, Germany, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 11:05 AM on March 16, 2010

Never mind, I take back what I said. I'm too apathetic to really care what happens or get riled up about this.
posted by anniecat at 11:06 AM on March 16, 2010

"Here I am, this educated person who went to art school,

I went to art school with the full expectation that I had a lifetime of scurvy to look forward to. Just sayin'.

(No disrespect meant, and I will now read the whole thread.)
posted by grapefruitmoon at 11:07 AM on March 16, 2010

I know Sarah - have known her since she was a kid, actually, and AFAIK she doesn't have wealthy parents. Haven't seen her for many years but I'm glad to hear she's doing okay and, yes, buying decent food with food stamps. I mean, why the hell not? If she's buying at local stores and the farmer's market (yes, many markets, including the one in Baltimore, take food stamps, oh the horror) then that's money that is actually staying in the community. Last I checked, Baltimore could use all the investment it could get.

Every time this subject comes up I feel great admiration for the Republicans, who have since the 80s successfully used a crazy and illogical sense of entitlement "I work hard at a job I hate and eat poorly! They don't have jobs and are eating good food! Therefore they are the enemy and not the corporatocracy thinly masquerading as a government under which we live! I will vote for people who actively want me to remain poor just so nobody gets a helping hand!" to turn a naturally Democratic or even further left constituency into a frothing horde of psychotic libertarian assholes. This kind of shit is divide and conquer class warfare and nothing else. What does it matter what a person buys with their food stamps? Why are we so determined to eliminate all possibilities of choice from the poor?

I remember the era of welfare queens; that would be when I was struggling with getting WIC so I could feed my kids. Now WIC makes you choose relatively good food - don't you naysayers want to remove that? Why should those parents be getting real milk instead of processed pasteurized milkfood? - and it has educated many a young mother. Yes, I got government help. I might have to get it again in the future, given the way this economy is going and I hope it's still there, because if the day comes when I'm back on food stamps, I'm totally using them to buy decent, local food.
posted by mygothlaundry at 11:08 AM on March 16, 2010 [25 favorites]

> you might have misread.

No, not really. Just offering a counterexample. I would never argue that living on student loans means you're poor or demoted classwise; I agree with you, I think.

My point was the "art school" judgement is worthless and as undemocratic as the judgments on dietary choice. The practicality police always show up in these debates in some form. The thing I am best at is "impractical." I'm not really defensive about it, but I think my perspective can demonstrate the fallacy of that argument's socially invested impuse. I'm an art worker of a sort; I may have to do other things to survive in the end; that would be sad, and worse for the country's culture, if my judgment about my own utility is not mistaken. Well, soul janitors, genius middle-managers and artisanal car mechanics are out of work right now, too. Seeking work "in your field" isn't always possible, but it can be the best thing for the culture at large. We should all be encouraged to reach our full potential. Yeah, in my case, I don't have a safety net of wealthy family to allow me to dally in the choicemaking process, and I don't think that makes me unusual, even among "art-workers."

I don't really believe the wide world has a great number of "trustafarian hipsters" or whatever this strawman we're dancing around is to be called. On the contrary, I figure a disproportionate number of the people speaking here have been exposed to the mythology of that type or its real-life traces. I don't think I have met one, personally, in my public school experiences leading up to grad school. But maybe that's not me being common sensical, just lucky. I've mostly seen rich kids and poor kids, not the former masquerading as the latter.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 11:11 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

This is, after all, a generation steeped in Michael Pollan books, bountiful famer's markets and a fetish for all things sustainable and handcrafted. Is it wrong to believe there should be a local, free-range chicken in every Le Creuset pot?

I went back and read the article a second time, and I really don't think that the young woman in question actually has the Le Creuset pot. I'm reading that as a hypothetical pot presented by the author as a means of getting us even further riled up.
posted by librarianamy at 11:12 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Every time this subject comes up I feel great admiration for the Republicans, who have since the 80s successfully used a crazy and illogical sense of entitlement "I work hard at a job I hate and eat poorly! They don't have jobs and are eating good food!

It's straight-up neo-Calvinism.

a) pleasure is sinful <> suffering is good
b) hard work is the only path to salvation <> sloth is sinful

It's not hard to read between the lines and the wink-wink attitude in this piece.
posted by GuyZero at 11:12 AM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

anniecat, I have a good deal of friends who did/are doing Americorps programs, and they deserve every dollar of public money they get (whether it be free subway fare, subsidized healthcare, or, yes, food stamps). If it were easy to bring about the kind of changes these young people are devoting years of their lives to while living, quite literally, well below the poverty line without any federal support, we wouldn't need Americorps volunteers at all.
posted by oinopaponton at 11:14 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

I'm just sad that Justinian isn't going to come over to my parent's house and judgy judgy judge them for all the "luxuries" that they are buying with SS assistance. We would have taken him out for a pancake breakfast... with his tax dollars!
posted by muddgirl at 11:14 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Yeah, these people should get a food service job and eat the same "free" crap everyday just like every body else. [hamburger]
posted by schyler523 at 11:15 AM on March 16, 2010

Bowling shirts? Are the 90s back already?
posted by entropicamericana at 11:15 AM on March 16, 2010

> owning a Mac (whassamatta, Windows is good enough for everyone else but not for you?), a fixed-gear bicycle or spending money on aesthetic products would immediately revoke one's eligibility.

Just because I haven't found a place to share this completely off-topic anecdote, which at least pertains, to an extent, to my confusion about wtf these types are all about...

The other night, my honey and me were riding our bikes to his folks' house for supper. He on a BMX, me on a Gary Fisher Opie. A young woman leaned our of her Ford F350 and hollered "GET A FIXED GEAR" at us.

*blink. blink blink.*

Exurbs have identity problems.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 11:15 AM on March 16, 2010 [12 favorites]

It's straight-up neo-Calvinism.

Calvin and Hobbes isn't just a comic strip, but the philosophical foundation of the Republican Party.

(Perhaps if it were created today, it'd be named Calvin, Hobbes and Rand?)
posted by acb at 11:16 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Listen to nanojath. The Le Creuset pot is just a rhetorical flourish.
posted by chinston at 11:16 AM on March 16, 2010

I grant you that my value judgment was a bit hasty and undefined, but this argument is BS. No matter where you live, you have a choice to not buy your meals at McD's. Spreading this notion is simply exacerbating the problem and ensuring years of prosperity for the round-up ready soy bean and meat filler.

The problem is time and money. Sure, most people have access to a grocery that stocks produce. That grocery might be an hour away via public transit (which imposes limits on how much you can effectively carry), but its available. But the facts here have been well-supported by some pretty solid peer-reviewed research that's been posted here on metafilter. Poor neighborhoods pay more money for less selection and lower produce quality. Travel time to groceries is also much higher for residents of poorer neighborhoods.

Our system for serving the nutritional needs of Americans is dysfunctional at almost all levels of the supply-chain from subsidies for production down to the structure of neighborhoods. A small number of people abusing a tiny part of the system strikes me as misplaced outrage.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:16 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Bowling shirts? Are the 90s back already?

Class warfare never goes out of style.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:16 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Can't really tell if you're snarking at me, EC, but I meant it honestly when I said it was only my experience and wasn't representative.

But I am restricted to two large pots on my windowsill. I have herbs. I tried tomatoes last year, but that didn't work so good.

fwiw, when I lived in a tiny shithole in Manhattan, my SO and I grew tomatoes in a hydro-box indoors.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:17 AM on March 16, 2010

I understand that circumstances may force some people to take hand-outs, but I've never understood why people refuse to change those circumstances.

Ayn Rand got a MetaFilter account!

One of my primary jobs is connecting people who lost their homes in Hurricane Ike to food stamp benefits that they don't know they qualify for. The vast majority of them lived in public housing before the hurricane and will continue to do so afterward. But I can't share my experiences right now because my blood pressure is so high that I have to talk a walk around the community center, breathing deeply.
posted by greekphilosophy at 11:18 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

I don't really believe the wide world has a great number of "trustafarian hipsters" or whatever this strawman we're dancing around is to be called.

Possibly not, but Hampden is lousy with them. I live in the next neighborhood over.
posted by electroboy at 11:18 AM on March 16, 2010

I've mostly seen rich kids and poor kids, not the former masquerading as the latter.

Unless of course they fooled you.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:19 AM on March 16, 2010

I should probably stay out of this, but as someone who once qualified for food stamps, and used them to buy local and organic foods and taught other people who used food stamps where to shop for local and organic foods and cheap, good meals to make from said local and organic foods: I don't have a problem with this at all.

The $150 a month is not a handout, it's a very useful and specific tax cut, only this one goes to actual Americans and not huge faceless corporations. As such, it should be invested as wisely as possible to promote healthy living and local commerce.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 11:19 AM on March 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

Savory aromas wafted through the kitchen as a table was set with a heaping plate of Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, Chinese gourd sautéed in hot chile sauce and sweet clementine juice, all of it courtesy of government assistance.


I'm guessing that a family of four on food stamp assistance is probably not shopping at Whole Foods. I could be wrong, though.

If you're buying lemongrass at Whole Foods, of course you're spending a lot, but here in Cleveland the Asian groceries are well-stocked and very cheap. The Middle Eastern groceries are even cheaper. That tiny glass container of McCormack's coriander that costs $6 at the big box grocery? You can get a good sized tub full for $2 just around the corner.
posted by Hubajube at 11:21 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Bowling shirts? Are the 90s back already?

I thought that the current look was the Vampire Weekend preppie look and/or 80s retro kitsch (much in the way that yacht rock has taken the place that lounge music occupied in 1990s hipster culture).
posted by acb at 11:21 AM on March 16, 2010

I understand that circumstances may force some people to take hand-outs, but I've never understood why people refuse to change those circumstances.

How can you be on MetaFilter and not have seen AskMe questions where people describe how horrible they feel, how immobilized they feel, and how crippled they feel by their circumstances, and how they would do anything to get out of their funk, anything, and then they ask for guidance on how?

Most people don't like feeling depressed. The ones who are okay with being poor aren't profitting off of our taxes that much.
posted by anniecat at 11:23 AM on March 16, 2010 [11 favorites]

Maybe my point of view comes from being raised on food stamps by parents who were way too irresponsible to have kids.
posted by coolguymichael at 10:41 AM on March 16

So if you could go back in time you would ensure that your parents didn't receive benefits . . . so . . . you'd . . . starve to death? That is something, all right.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:23 AM on March 16, 2010 [11 favorites]

Yeah. I gross about 1300 a month as a manager of a small business, and I use food stamps to go to the local organic grocery. Everything I buy there is some form of healthy organic food, and the vast majority comes from growers and suppliers within 100 miles of where I live. I do not see a problem with this. After monthly expenses, my takehome net is about 350 bucks. My food budget is about 175. Seems like a reasonable choice to take advantage of something my taxes help pay for. God knows I won't see Social Security.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:24 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I resent the use of social services by those who don't need them. It feels unfair to me that people who could avoid burdening the system aren't avoiding burdening the system. That's the tragedy of the commons, I suppose.

Personally, I feel uncomfortable when I use social services like, for example, doctors' visits. (I live in Canada.) Here I am, talking to a doctor about a cut on my hand when she could be spending that 10 minutes dealing with someone who needs more care. I know that, in some abstract way, I pay for my own visit and that I am entitled to it - but I still feel reluctant to milk it for all it's worth just because nobody's going to stop me. Doesn't it feel the same with food stamps, or unemployment insurance? I understand that being poor and needy is punishment in itself, and the additional burden of guilt over using social services sucks, but I think it's an acceptable price for us all to pay to increase the efficiency and reach of social services by reducing freeloading.
posted by Fraxas at 11:25 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ayn Rand got a MetaFilter account!

Seriously. I kept thinking of Keating's line to Roark in The Fountainhead: "I'm a parasite. I've been a parasite all my life."
posted by zarq at 11:25 AM on March 16, 2010

The job market is freaking wretched from top to bottom, including for those "not-in-your-field" service jobs that folks are encouraging the hated hipsters to go out and get. pla is arguing that more people should be added to that job market, making work even harder to find and bringing wages even lower. I am for increased public assistance to everyone.

People who are on public assistance are helping to reduce the number of people looking for jobs and thus make it easier for people who want to work to find a job and by reducing the supply of workers makes the cost of labor go up. The cost of labor is extremely low right now, and has been low since the 70s, which is why the few folks with the money to buy labor in quantity have been making off like bandits (which makes sense, because they are).

If pla is concerned about her precious tax dollars, it is a remarkably focused and specific concern. For every outrageous penny that goes to a not-quite-poor-enough-for-her-standards person, there are hundreds of dollars going to agribusiness that she does not mind one bit. It is baffling, and makes me suspect that instead of being concerned about her tax dollars she just hates people who are poor, even and especially those who are poor enough to qualify for America's meager public assistance but not poor enough to meet her standards for picturesque deprivation.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:25 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

internet fraud detective squad, station number 9>
If they can find a way to make that fit into a limited food allowance every month, I have no reason to care what they eat. They're the ones who may have to dumpster dive if they make bad decisions with their purchases, and it's costing me the same from my taxes either way. I don't agree with how some people drive or what they drive, but I still pay my taxes because I like the convenience of using roads, too.

If I ever end up so screwed as to need food stamps, the freedom to make some choices will likely be a relief. As will the fact that at least there's something place to keep me from starving.
posted by medea42 at 11:26 AM on March 16, 2010

electroboy, you might live by them, but you certainly don't know them or the rent they pay. I know Sarah and I know others who live in Hampden and they are certainly not trustafarians. Stop harping on people just because they look different from you/have different interests from you.

Although I will admit I don't like the look of Hampden these days, it's a bit too manufactured and family friendly, the particular people in this article are not those Hampdenites. They don't go to Cafe Hon or the Pet Emporium or whatever. They just live there and help out in the neighborhood as much as possible.
posted by cloeburner at 11:26 AM on March 16, 2010

Bowling shirts? Are the 90s back already?

I thought that the current look was the Vampire Weekend preppie look and/or 80s retro kitsch (much in the way that yacht rock has taken the place that lounge music occupied in 1990s hipster culture).

*sigh* It was a rhetorical flourish. I'm an old, old man. I have no idea what the kids these days are actually doing out there on my lawn. I only know that some of them are apparently hungry, and I don't give a fuck what kind of food they're eating, I'm happy to feed them. I'd personally prefer not to limit my tax dollar assistance to people like me. (There are no people like me.)
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:28 AM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

smackfu: Isn't this a big problem in countries with better social services than the US?

................

three blind mice: Idea of course is to not stigmatize poor people - which is the subtext of the FPP - why is "she" spending money on that? No one asks that question here.

So yeah, it's probably a "big problem," but no one knows it's a problem so it's not a problem.

I think we in the U.S. have our puritan founders to thank for much of this country's ass-backwardsness. In reasonable societies, people seem to be comfortable with the idea of their tax dollars going to things like food assistance or ***gasp*** universal healthcare, because in the long run it benefits everyone when people can afford to eat or go to the doctor.

In this country, you can't get past a self-righteous debate about who "deserves" the benefit of these programs... and because there's a possibility that someone, somewhere might get away with doing something like using food stamps to buy vegetables at Whole Foods instead of American cheese and Wonder Bread, we'd apparently be better off denying them to everyone.

As annoying as the hipsters interviewed in the article are, it's pretty much a troll crafted to evoke MAXIMUM! MORAL! OUTRAGE!
posted by usonian at 11:31 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

This is just a terribly written article. burnmp3s makes some observations based on assumptions, but assumptions that might be worth exploring, and perhaps even doing some research on.

Why, the writer of this article might have had a perfect chance to do research on those very things: how large of a percentage of food stamps recipients is this particular group, do they receive other forms of monetary assistance, are their families the type to vote in support of food stamps, how to they balance expensive food on that budget?

If the author were actually a journalist, they might do such research.

I felt my own GRAR OUTRAGE towards the subjects of the article, too, because the economy is so bad right now, and that article is written in such a terrible, sensationalistic, and wholly fact-free way. This is exactly the wrong type of journalism we need right now, with government benefits such a contentious topic of discussion in this country.

Come on, media, help us out here.
posted by lillygog at 11:31 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Tell your city planners you want decent walkability in your neighborhood, including access to food markets.

Hah! It was city planners who tore down the business district in the neighborhood to run a highway through so that suburbanites can get to football games faster.
posted by octothorpe at 11:32 AM on March 16, 2010

blucevalo : Yes -- I'll be sure to "follow the link below" and not cry BS to your reflexive Republican Party talking points link.

Yep, you caught me, giving a link to a conservative shill website... Ending in ".gov", from a state with two RINO senators and some of the most progressive welfare policies in the country.


Optimus Chyme : CTRL-F "POSTED BY PLA"

For the 43nd time - "I disagree" does not translate to "troll". Try to keep up.
posted by pla at 11:32 AM on March 16, 2010

I understand that being poor and needy is punishment in itself, and the additional burden of guilt over using social services sucks

Being poor is an economic state of being. Punishment is a moral state. Again, economics and morality are not the same thing.

Also, guilt is an emotion. A food bank is where you get food. I think the only people who associate the two are people who want to confuse economics and morality for their own ends.
posted by GuyZero at 11:33 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

You're right, I don't know as many people in Hampden as I used to. The people I knew had to move out when the rents went up.
posted by electroboy at 11:33 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, upon reading the whole thread, I've got no beef with the actual concept being discussed. The article itself was very manufactured "ZOMG! OUTRAGE!" but people using food stamps to buy food? Yeah, go ahead. I haven't been there myself, but I know people who have - and I also know that if you're buying staples (pasta, canned tomatoes, that kind of boring stuff), Whole Foods is only marginally more expensive than much lesser quality foods at Stop & Shop.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

The "hipster" thing is total manufactured bullshit. Would anyone care if the people buying organic food were elderly? That would be all "Elderly people game the system FOR AWESOME! Granny's figured out the sekrit to GOOD EATIN'!" The article just falls flat unless it has a crotchety "You kids, get off my lawn!" component.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 11:35 AM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

I am a supply chain consultant. Here's the thing: the high-calorie, pre-packaged food you dont buy at Whole Foods, is made possible by extensive, super-efficient supply chains that achieve their efficiency because of massive scale (and massive scale needs predictable, hard-to-spoil, less-tasty, less-good-for-you food). But the fact is that in the US, these supply chains are indirectly subsidized by extensive, federally-subsidized highway systems and cheap, almost un-taxed gas.

In the rest of the world, where transportation costs are higher (because of less extensive roads or toll-roads, or gas taxed based on its impact to society/infrastructure), local, organic food is much closer in price to bulk, industrialized food and it's thus much less of a 'luxury'.

So, food-stamps for organic food maybe an inefficient way to subsidize calories, but subsidizing organic food is basically leveling the playing field.
posted by costas at 11:37 AM on March 16, 2010 [16 favorites]

Also: I took the "Le Creuset" pot reference to be a riff on the "chicken in every pot" kind of utopian dream, only for hipsters. I did not think that it referenced a literal pot. It was only a metaphorical pot. Owned by a metaphorical hipster. Who was also a metaphorical Viking.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 11:40 AM on March 16, 2010

saulgoodman: "Maybe something to this, but food stamps are not targeted at eliminating generational poverty. They're targeted at feeding people who don't have enough money to afford to eat right now, regardless of their family history. Why? So people of all social classes having a hard time right now don't starve and so they aren't as likely to end up falling into that population of people stuck in generational poverty."

I am perfectly cool with the food stamp program, and I think that food stamps should go to whomever. You really didn't read the rest of my comment.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 11:41 AM on March 16, 2010

Tell your city planners you want decent walkability in your neighborhood, including access to food markets.

Hah! It was city planners who tore down the business district in the neighborhood to run a highway through so that suburbanites can get to football games faster.

That fucking sucks. In Portland, there's something happening called the Portland Plan, where the planners are going around holding meetings all over the city asking people what they want for Portland's future. Turn out, actually, has been insanely high. One of the most pressing needs Portlander's voice is the need for improved walkability in neighborhoods. So the Portland Plan has made it a priority that every neighborhood should have access to groceries within a 15 minute walk.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:43 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I know a lot of what many here would call "hipsters." I am old enough to be many of these folk's mother, and definitely old enough to tell the lot of them to get off of my lawn. Let me tell you about them: they work hard, and when they're not working, they're making art/volunteering/learning. They share, so they can afford more. They're willing to sacrifice today for something they want tomorrow. They live well (at least, compared to how I lived at their age) because they are more sophisticated than I was. They know how to get free stuff, cheap stuff and bargain for the expensive stuff. They know a sucker deal when they see one (i.e. car vs. bike) and don't bite. In other words, they are cool - you would PRAY that your kids would become hipsters.

Do we want these young adults to be forced to move to wherever this "mythical place with the jobs for everyone if they'd only look for it" exists? Do we want them out of our neighborhoods leaving behind the old and trapped while they take that great energy and vision somewhere else? Ask a thousand towns in the Midwest why their kids are gone - then look at SF and Seattle and Baltimore - check out their art scene, check out their environmental policies, look at the vibrancy of their cultures and remember that those kids came from somewhere and someone told them to "go where the jobs are." Imagine your city without those horrible "hipsters." They could go away - who will be left?
posted by The Light Fantastic at 11:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [22 favorites]

...do they receive other forms of monetary assistance...

Again, if they receive other forms of monetary assistance, which I suspect they probably do either in the form of either family support or freelance income not reported as income or under the table wages, and they did not report these other income streams at the time of their application for benefits they are committing welfare fraud. These other income streams, if they have them and reported them, would at least have altered the amount of benefits they were eligible for, if not disqualified them entirely. I would not be surprised to see dude get a call from his caseworker at the welfare department in the next couple days asking to take another look at his assets.
posted by The Straightener at 11:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Would anyone care if the people buying organic food were elderly? That would be all "Elderly people game the system FOR AWESOME! Granny's figured out the sekrit to GOOD EATIN'!"

Without endorsing any view, because I haven't as yet considered it sufficiently, I agree that Granny, a hipster, and a minority mother of 3 would be viewed very differently. I wonder if the differences in a perception of each's entitlement to receive benefits, and use them as she sees fit, is down to the economic value we assign people. Said differently, I wonder if we automatically assume that Granny has paid her dues into society and is entitled to withdraw, whereas we assume the hipster and the single mother have not. If any of those observations are true, I wonder whether they are useful. I certainly think we make distinctions between the 'deserving' poor and 'freeloaders' that conceivably are more often wrong than correct. I am thinking this through, only because of my own personal need to watch my thoughts on these subjects carefully. I know people who abuse benefits by engaging in fraud to qualify, as I said above, but I always endeavor to remember that the vast majority do not.
posted by bunnycup at 11:44 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Yep, you caught me, giving a link to a conservative shill website... Ending in ".gov", from a state with two RINO senators and some of the most progressive welfare policies in the country.

It's a conservative shill press release. Trust me, I know press releases: I write 'em for a living.

How about this: if you're going to quote statistics and an opinion, let them not be sourced from political propaganda, or someone who has a stake in persuading the reader to their point of view. Are there objective studies you can cite on the topic?
posted by zarq at 11:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

The icing on this particular article-cake would be one of these kids buying something with hempseed oil in it. Hipsters buying wacky tobacky on your dime? Find out, coming up at eleven.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:45 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Would anyone care if the people buying organic food were elderly?

Likewise, would anyone care if a Thai family was using their food stamps to buy "Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass" ?

I only know a couple hipsters who fits the trustafarian stereotype-- guys from the northeast from upper middle class families (one who went to an Ivy League college) who live downwardly mobile lifestyles trying to pursue careers in the arts while being bailed out by their parents from time to time. The rest -- the wide majority -- are typically people from the midwest from middle class or just-over-working-class families who used their education to come out to the cities to do something else with their lives other than work in the same dying rust-belt economies their families were in. A lot of the hipster hate comes from the people from those same towns spouting some lick-spittle resentment of, "they think they're too good to stay in their hometown like I did and settle down a buy a house here and instead had to get all hoity-toity and move to portland and eat bok-choy! well screw them!"

Would this article be generating the same sort of resentment if it was about now-unemployed ADM sales representatives in suburban Ohio who went on food stamps to keep their family fed with steak, meatloaf, and potatoes while collecting unemployment benefits and trying to find a new job? Is this about the food they're eating or about the fact that young whites are not living in the approved places, having the approved careers and eating the approved foods that are befitting of their station in life?
posted by deanc at 11:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Yep, you caught me, giving a link to a conservative shill website... Ending in ".gov", from a state with two RINO senators and some of the most progressive welfare policies in the country.

Ending in .gov =! stamp of authenticity, despite your boldface theatrics. Your link is a link to a set of talking points from a GOP Maine state senator with GOP base dog-whistle code about "ending the culture of dependency we have in Maine," whether it ends in .gov or .omgzzz.
posted by blucevalo at 11:46 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Can't really tell if you're snarking at me, EC, but I meant it honestly when I said it was only my experience and wasn't representative.

I was indeed talking to you -- but I hadn't intended it to be snark, and my apologies if it came across thus. It just sounded like you made a curious 180 from "I realize that not everyone has the same advantages/situations I have, so they may not be able to do what I do" to saying in the very next sentence, "but, wait, I can do blah blah blah, though, so why can't they?"

At least, that's what it sounded like YOU were saying, and I was pointing out the incongruity there. Case in point:

when I lived in a tiny shithole in Manhattan, my SO and I grew tomatoes in a hydro-box indoors.

I didn't have good luck with tomatoes on my windowsill. Or with the bok choy I tried the same year. A combination of bad light and a feline pest problem, though, in my case (my cat likes to chew the leaves off a lot of the plants I've tried growing in the past, and I'm not home enough to curb him of that habit). The rosemary and sage are very hale and hearty, though (and the cat doesn't like them).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:47 AM on March 16, 2010

If "benefits" are too cushy it leads to a moral hazard, in that people will choose to loll in the sun instead of being productive. The right wing commentariat will go ballistic with this tale of "food stamp foodies", declaring it important news, and signifying the weakness of the educated elite and the downfall of American gumption.

Feel free to ignore $50 Billion in accounting fraud that helped build the teetering tower of crap that were our financial institutions, and eventually required $1T+ of government money.

And reread your Holbo.
posted by dglynn at 11:47 AM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Duh, posted too soon -- my point in pointing out my bad luck with growing tomatoes was just to re-emphasize that you may have had good luck with a hydro-box -- but you also may have had better light, and not had my cat.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:48 AM on March 16, 2010

So the Portland Plan has made it a priority that every neighborhood should have access to groceries within a 15 minute walk.

Good point -- which is why I suspected that Portland was an exception, as it is in a lot of things.
posted by blucevalo at 11:48 AM on March 16, 2010

I want Metafilter to rewrite the article and submit to Salon. Maybe as a correction:

Correction: This Salon article was horrible: badly written, fundamentally flawed, and shallow. We apologize for the mistake. In partial recompense for wasting your time, we include the following article, written by a Ms. Meta Filter, from Dayton, Ohio. It includes data, facts, multiple viewpoints, further information about many of the people portrayed in the original article that rescue them from being one-dimensional caricatures. Thank you.
posted by feckless at 11:48 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

It is astonishing the extent to which this article generates outrage based on the barest sketch of actual details, largely because of the author's cynically-deployed use of the term "hipster" and our own overactive imaginations.

How is she identifying them as "hipsters" (do they self-identify, i.e., "Yes, I am a Hipster-American, please refer to me as such")? What is a hipster in this article, other than a convenient way to generate contempt that would not exist if this were framed as "underemployed 20-30 year olds with decent long-term prospects eat well by supplementing with government assistance" or "broke young people use food stamps but buy foods that are not the foods we commonly associate with the American poor?"

The response of the grocer at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco is incredibly telling: "I wouldn't say it's limited to hipster people, but I'm certainly surprised to see them with cards." This is the response of someone who has just been asked "So, you see a lot of !!!HIPSTERS!!! with food stamps these days?"

So the apparent scenario is:
1. Salon writer sees a young white person buying "rich-people food" with food stamps and thinks "Wha???"
2. Salon writer leaves HQ and travels 2 miles down Mission St to Rainbow Grocery and trolls for more examples.
3. Salon writer finds a few people in her extended network of contacts who fit a few stereotypes and asks them about food stamps.
4. employ $hated_stereotype
5. CULTURAL ZEITGEIST! GRAR!
posted by EL-O-ESS at 11:49 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

sorry guys that wasn't published in the Washington Post; it's from randblog.rightnet.omgzzz but it's totally trustworthy i swear
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:52 AM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Do we want these young adults to be forced to move to wherever this "mythical place with the jobs for everyone if they'd only look for it" exists? Do we want them out of our neighborhoods leaving behind the old and trapped while they take that great energy and vision somewhere else?

I don't care what they do, but honestly, I don't care if they leave. What energy? What vision? Their art? This generation has way too many self-styled visionaries with energy. While we need a source of energy in this country, the people we deem energetic visionaries because they call themselves artists, or they went to college and are fresh grads who know how to play a guitar or paint something resembling a hand, are not necessary in a real sense.

Maybe we can stick them all in a row of stationary bicycles and they can help power the grid.
posted by anniecat at 11:55 AM on March 16, 2010

rtha: "While I agree that we (as Americans) have an incredibly screwed up view of and relationship with class (financial, educational, social - pick one or all), I don't think that the solution to unscrewing it is to pit "the poor" against "the broke." How does that do any good? And where's the cut-off?"

I'm not pitting anyone against anyone. I have been broke and likely will be again. I just think it's jacked when people imply that social class is solely determined by the amount of money you have in your pocket and bank account at any given time.

The distinction is good because it keeps people from making weird and harmful judgments about poor people. Bootstraps; I did it, why can't they; etc. Of course it's complex, maybe I should just make an arbitrary distinction: if your parents went to college and expected you to go to college, you're not poor. That's simplistic and surely excludes some it should include, and vice versa, but why not. Any time I bring up this subject people tend to get defensive and try to prove that they are/were poor (!) as some sort of badge of honor or ego boost, like, "I made it by hard work! I clawed my way out of poverty!" Okay, fine, if you feel that way I give you an exemption.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 11:57 AM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

I think deanc makes a great point. In addition, I think bunnycup is voicing some good thoughts, too: "I certainly think we make distinctions between the 'deserving' poor and 'freeloaders' that conceivably are more often wrong than correct."

When I think about these things, I tell myself that the Puritan/Calvinist background of this country has made us strangely mean in some situations, where if a program gives assistance to 100 people, and 5 do not deserve it, we will end that program rather than provide assistance to the 95 that need it.

(Not to say that I would share bunnycup's irritation at friends who are committing fraud if I knew they really didn't deserve said benefits, and put in jeopardy the benefits of people that do deserve. But then we're back to the interesting discussion of who "deserves".)
posted by lillygog at 11:57 AM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Uh, blerg, "wouldn't share bunnycup's irritation", as in, I would.
posted by lillygog at 11:59 AM on March 16, 2010

To be fair, I know a lot of hipsters who don't have high-speed internet, iPhones, and live in houses with 15 people to afford the rent.

Hipsters, like every other demographic, are not subject to the stereotypes put upon them, generally.

I guess my point is this: the guidelines for who qualifies for food stamps are mainly based on assets and taxable income, and it's possible to meet those qualifications while still depending on others (most likely parents) to provide a lifestyle well above the poverty level. The Salon article seems to be insinuating this without coming out and saying it or providing any facts to back it up other than the backgrounds of the subjects.

Personally I think it's wrong to use government food stamps to subsidize an already subsidized lifestyle in that way, but it's not the end of the world if people do it and I'm not filled with hipster-hate or anything like that. I also honestly don't know how many people would be using food stamps that way, or how many people who would be considered hipsters have a support network that can provide them with more financial assistance than other food stamp recipients.
posted by burnmp3s at 11:59 AM on March 16, 2010

Effectively, encouraging the poor to use EBT or food stamps to purchase shit food is akin to calling for government support of Tyson or Monsanto. Those companies already get enough in subsidies and pork, imo.

Holy fuck. This. This a million times over.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:00 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

if they receive other forms of monetary assistance, which I suspect they probably do either in the form of either family support or freelance income not reported as income or under the table wages, and they did not report these other income streams at the time of their application for benefits they are committing welfare fraud.

Then every person who has ever been on government assistance is a criminal. That's how it works - you get a modicum of assistance from the government and you make it work. It's the "don't ask, don't tell" of unemployment and welfare. There are egregious cases, for sure, but in general, that's the only way to make it work. Maybe mom or grandma pays a cell phone bill, or the recipient does a little side work to afford Christmas presents. If everyone just lived on what the Government squeezes out, we'd have a HUGE problem.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 12:01 PM on March 16, 2010 [9 favorites]

While we need a source of energy in this country, the people we deem energetic visionaries because they call themselves artists, or they went to college and are fresh grads who know how to play a guitar or paint something resembling a hand, are not necessary in a real sense.

*raises eyebrow* I'm not clear at what you're getting at. Are you saying all art is unnecessary? or just bad art? And how can we tell the difference?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:02 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

While we need a source of energy in this country, the people we deem energetic visionaries because they call themselves artists, or they went to college and are fresh grads who know how to play a guitar or paint something resembling a hand, are not necessary in a real sense.

Yeah, because who the fuck needs art, am I right?
posted by brundlefly at 12:04 PM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

Are you saying all art is unnecessary? or just bad art? And how can we tell the difference?

You make a list.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:05 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

While we need a source of energy in this country, the people we deem energetic visionaries because they call themselves artists, or they went to college and are fresh grads who know how to play a guitar or paint something resembling a hand, are not necessary in a real sense.

In what sense, then, are they necessary? In an unreal sense?
posted by blucevalo at 12:05 PM on March 16, 2010

I am perfectly cool with the food stamp program, and I think that food stamps should go to whomever. You really didn't read the rest of my comment.

No, I did and I understand all that, I just don't agree that the differences between those living in generational poverty and those who are going through a rough spot are relevant in this context.

And I'm also not sure the differences are always as clear as you suggest. In fact, I'm not really sure how we make sense of class anymore at all, apart from simply looking at an individual's present economic circumstances. I mean, I get what you are saying: There are definitely individuals in the category you describe--individuals whose entire immediate families are poor and have been, more or less, for several generations. But you can't necessarily use family history as a criterion, nor can you arbitrarily assign people to socio-economic classes as a policy matter (without creating a much more horrible potential for institutional abuse), so I don't see any alternative but to let an individual's present needs dictate when it comes to basic social safety net stuff.

Sure, you might come from a recently wealthy family, but what if you're the black sheep and don't receive any material benefits from that birth-affiliation? Should that mean you "deserve" to starve, or that, in an ideal world, you should only be allowed to eat generic, flavorless government food-product so you don't get too comfortable in your poverty? What if you come from a poor extended family with a history of poverty, but your immediate family is nouveau riche? How could we possibly formulate a coherent system that takes all of these various factors into account without at the same time over-engineering things beyond all practicality?

So in other words, I just don't think there's any functional difference to be drawn between the merely short-term poor and the chronically poor in this case. It's an important distinction in other contexts, and you're right to point it out, but it doesn't seem to matter a whole lot in practice.

Of course it's complex, maybe I should just make an arbitrary distinction: if your parents went to college and expected you to go to college, you're not poor.

On the American side, I was the first member of my immediate and most of my extended family to graduate high school, but I was expected to go to college and my family were economically in the upper-middle to upper class for most of my pre-adult life. Now, I earn a solidly middle class income. So should someone like me be classified as poor?
posted by saulgoodman at 12:09 PM on March 16, 2010

i read the article and immediately applied for foodstamps. and i will be upgrading my diet from mac and cheese to fresh and organic. god bless the usa.
posted by Glibpaxman at 12:10 PM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

I don't care what they do, but honestly, I don't care if they leave. What energy? What vision? Their art? This generation has way too many self-styled visionaries with energy. While we need a source of energy in this country, the people we deem energetic visionaries because they call themselves artists, or they went to college and are fresh grads who know how to play a guitar or paint something resembling a hand, are not necessary in a real sense.

Maybe we can stick them all in a row of stationary bicycles and they can help power the grid.

anniecat, I'm sorry that this is my second comment in this post arguing with something you've said, and I'm not trying to be fighty, but REALLY?! Do you know any recent college grads? I am one, and I can assure you that my peers and I aren't sitting around strumming guitars and feeling entitled. Guess what, the job market is terrible for young people. My generation was reared by parents who told us that we could do what we loved, what we were passionate about, with a college education. So, most of us decided to follow our dreams, and now we have niches and passions and all that stuff that would be wonderful in a good economy.

The fact that the economy blows isn't our fault. The fact that we have to take uninspiring jobs in order to pay off the mountains of student loans we're laboring under isn't our fault. The fact that universities are slashing budgets for grad student tuition and stipend isn't our fault.

Maybe we should just start selling our bodies as alternative energy sources. At least then older people wouldn't complain about our existence.
posted by oinopaponton at 12:11 PM on March 16, 2010 [23 favorites]

The distinction is good because it keeps people from making weird and harmful judgments about poor people. Bootstraps; I did it, why can't they; etc.

This is a great point and it's very annoying when people do this, but:

Of course it's complex, maybe I should just make an arbitrary distinction: if your parents went to college and expected you to go to college, you're not poor. That's simplistic....

It's not just simplistic, it's weighted specifically against 20- and 30-somethings entering the workforce during a period of rising education costs and falling wages in all but the highest-paying jobs, many of whom will end up spending their careers in the same low-wage service jobs as those born into less-affluent families but will spend the first decade or two of those low-wage careers paying off college debt (which, yes, many of them had no business taking on, but I don't really think you can fault them for not figuring this out at 17).

It's also the case that there are plenty of lemongrass-loving hipsters out there who don't come from families where their parents went to college and expected them to do so as well, but I guess that's another argument.
posted by enn at 12:12 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I don't care what they do, but honestly, I don't care if they leave. What energy? What vision? Their art? This generation has way too many self-styled visionaries with energy. While we need a source of energy in this country, the people we deem energetic visionaries because they call themselves artists, or they went to college and are fresh grads who know how to play a guitar or paint something resembling a hand, are not necessary in a real sense.

If you'd ever lived in a place where EVERY young person with energy and vision had run the minute they got the chance, you'd know the answer. Sure, there's some pretentious little prigs in the mix, but without a sufficient pool of these people, you get stagnation and regression. I remember the first time I saw one of those silly little meme stickers that seemed to pop up overnight in San Francisco, and I was tickled. I've enjoyed tons of cool music and funky art shows, I've seen young people who care about issues (some of which I didn't particularly care about) and where thrilled that they cared enough about something to actually speak out. If you think that this energy is useless, and that no good can come of it, then I know a couple little cities in Michigan that you might enjoy.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 12:13 PM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

If you aren't pulling yourself up by your bootstraps you should be eating your boots.
posted by graventy at 12:16 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

i read the article and immediately applied for foodstamps. and i will be upgrading my diet from mac and cheese to fresh and organic. god bless the usa.

Let me put the point in terms even a conservative might be able to understand: Whether you're on food stamps or not, you need to stop being a lazy fat ass drain on society and start taking some responsibility for your food choices. Instead of clogging your arteries with cheap processed crap like mac and cheese that ends up costing us all when we have to subsidize your unpaid trips to the emergency room later in life, why don't you eat some goddamn fresh vegetables?
posted by saulgoodman at 12:18 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

grapefruitmoon : The "hipster" thing is total manufactured bullshit. Would anyone care if the people buying organic food were elderly?

I think the whole "hipster" thing, while quite probably a gross generalization, exists in this case to describe a certain mindset that wouldn't have a problem with such abuses.

Yes, I would feel just as outraged over grannies doing the same thing - But in general, we wouldn't hear about that because they don't do it. Many of our grandparents grew up in the great depression and have a way of thinking colored by that fact - My own grandmother, for example, actually has a pretty comfortable retirement savings, yet she always has and always will buy just about any food she can get cheap or free, whether she likes it or not, so that she never has to worry about going hungry again.

So sure, if you want to call hipsters a red herring here, I'll agree with you - Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.


blucevalo : Ending in .gov =! stamp of authenticity, despite your boldface theatrics.

Hmm, scrolling back up, I don't see you giving any cites so far, just assertions and mockery. Curious... I must have missed them, certainly?

whether it ends in .gov or .omgzzz.

Theatrics?

Optimus Chyme : sorry guys that wasn't published in the Washington Post; it's from randblog.rightnet.omgzzz but it's totally trustworthy i swear

Ahhh, Theatrics. Right.

But wait! You, now... You did give a few cites - Both links back to MeFi "supporting" your ad hominem attacks. Still 100% better than... none ... but sadly, I don't think we can consider MeFi the definitive reference of all things true, nor has argumentum ad homimem suddenly switched sides to a validating form.


C'mon guys, can we at least try to stay on topic here? You drop the personal attacks, I'll dial down the snark a notch, and we can discuss the actual FP (which already has more than enough inflammatory content to go around).
posted by pla at 12:19 PM on March 16, 2010

C'mon guys, can we at least try to stay on topic here?

We were right there on topic before your latest comment containing personal, OT arguments back about theatrics, pla. We could have stayed on topic, if you'd just hit the post button after typing 'flogging'.
posted by bunnycup at 12:23 PM on March 16, 2010

I choose not to engage in any arguements here. I would like to comment on a tv show I saw recently, in which a liberal economist noted that when they changed the welfare laws for our nation, many constraints were p[ut in place in order for folks to qualify. Why, then, the economist asked, are no serious constraints being put in place for those huge firms we bailed out that caused our melt down, were deemed To Big To Fail, got carried by us (taxes), and now reward
huge bonuses to employees?
posted by Postroad at 12:23 PM on March 16, 2010

Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

Sir, I do not buy your premise that healthy food should be considered a luxury. If healthy food is a luxury, then there is something broken with the system, and it has nothing to do with food stamps.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:25 PM on March 16, 2010 [27 favorites]

I realize that not everyone has the same advantages/situations I have, so they may not be able to do what I do" to saying in the very next sentence, "but, wait, I can do blah blah blah, though, so why can't they?

Well, I didn't mean it quite like that. I was trying to say something to the effect of, "I realize everyone's situation is different. Here's what I've done to address these problems. I encourage others to look for alternative solutions as well." Sorry if I didn't phrase it clearly. Obviously, not everyone can grow tomatoes in their apts in hydro boxes (it'a pain in the ass, for starters). I was just throwing it out there as something to consider. The world is full of options - and sometimes excuses are reasons, but sometimes they're just excuses.

I do what I can. I'm not perfect, but I try. That's all I expect from anyone. Do what you can. First, try not to make the problem worse. Next, try to contribute to a solution. There are certain things that cannot be changed about your solution, and there are certain things that can. I think this is pretty true across the board.
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:25 PM on March 16, 2010

Flog me then. I bought food with money I got from unemployment. And sometimes it was luxury food.
posted by josher71 at 12:25 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hmm, scrolling back up, I don't see you giving any cites so far, just assertions and mockery.

I didn't ask you to give a cite -- someone else did that. You, however, have not provided any evidence beyond a GOP talking point that refers to "liberals dying in the streets." As far as I can see, you've not engaged in any "discussing" this entire thread, so you're free to continue to "discuss" with yourself in your own echo chamber as long as you wish. As for mockery, you've done nothing but attack, patronize, and mock me the entire thread, so I'm just "returning the serve," as you put it.
posted by blucevalo at 12:26 PM on March 16, 2010

Can we snap the "hipster parents trust fund WAA WAA" portion of this thread off and throw it into a volcano? Everybody I hear this from appears to be part of some unpleasant new silent majority that thinks everybody but them is getting secret money.

One data point, but hey, I've lived in three major hipster cities with something like thirty hipster roommates and I've yet to meet one person getting a dime from their parents. I know a lot of people who participate in medical studies, though! And get gigs from temp agencies that last two weeks and happen three months apart. And work for less than minimum wage. The unemployment rate in Portland is what, a billion percent? My friends in NYC can't get full-time jobs, even the ones that wait tables.

A former roommate's mother covered one month of her (extremely low for NYC) rent for her once. It came in two checks because it had to be scraped together.

I used to be poor enough to qualify for this program. I spent several months living in a 5'x9' room in the middle of nowhere because it was all I could afford without credit or savings. Wish I'd known I could've received food stamps. I could have bought a beater instead of taking a two-hour bus ride to work at a call center. Not poor anymore, but damned if I'm going to spite anybody for taking what's given to them. Or for, god forbid, not eating Cheez Whiz for every meal.
posted by zvs at 12:27 PM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

Oh, and, not to belabor the point, but:

The distinction is good because it keeps people from making weird and harmful judgments about poor people. Bootstraps; I did it, why can't they; etc.

There are plenty of people who come from serious, no-kidding grinding generational poverty who are now in more fortunate positions and who make these same weird and harmful judgments about poor people. Ex-hipsters reminiscing about their grad school days have no monopoly on bullshit Horatio Alger extrapolation from their own limited experiences.
posted by enn at 12:28 PM on March 16, 2010

Many of our grandparents grew up in the great depression and have a way of thinking colored by that fact - My own grandmother, for example, actually has a pretty comfortable retirement savings, yet she always has and always will buy just about any food she can get cheap or free, whether she likes it or not, so that she never has to worry about going hungry again.

It's a good thing she isn't relying on social security income or any other product of the great depression, a situation where government assistance wasn't at all useful to anybody.
posted by Think_Long at 12:28 PM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

C'mon guys, can we at least try to stay on topic here?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!

*wipes eyes*

Oh my shit, but you are precious!

I was going to respond to this: buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging but I think I'll take the advice you're dolling out and not feed the undeserving.
posted by rtha at 12:30 PM on March 16, 2010

This is a really stupid and irresponsible article. Smarten up, Salon.
posted by orange swan at 12:32 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

So sure, if you want to call hipsters a red herring here, I'll agree with you - Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

...Okay, let's assume for the minute that what is going on is actually a case of people using luxury foods with public assistance money.

Okay. Let's look at the actual economics of this person. Let's call him "Sid."

In order to qualify for food stamps, Sid must be getting a diminished income. Let's say Sid makes $1000 a month.

Let's also say that Sid lives in an apartment that's....oh, $700 a month. That's not huge, but it's not shoebox either. That's actually pretty conservative by New York standards, in fact. Let's also say that it's another $150 for utilities. Plus another $80 for public transportation (Sid probably wouldn't qualify for food stamps if he had a car). Tack on another $50 for a phone.

So Sid is left with...oh, $100 left over for the whole month for EVERYTHING that isn't rent, utilities, or transporation. That's $25 a week. So that's how Sid qualified for food stamps.

Now -- assume he gets $150 a month in food stamps. And Sid goes to Petrossian the first week and splurges on luxury food:

$88 for caviar
$50 for a half pound of smoked salmon
$20 for a pound of coffee

....And in one shopping trip, he's used up his benefits. In fact, he had to dip into his cash to make up the difference.

And that caviar is only one serving, and a half pound of smoked salmon is only gonna last him a week. So Sid's benefits are used up within one week, and he is forced to get through the rest of the month by using $25 of his remaining $80 to buy bread and tuna fish, and living off that for three weeks.

In short: people who actually are buying "luxury goods" with public assistance are being flogged enough for making poor economic choices.

However -- by the same token, organic salmon from the supermarket is NOT "luxury goods." And if someone is using public assistance to buy organic foods from their supermarket, that just means that they are doing just what the rest of us do with our food dollars -- making economic choices. Just like Sid did (except Sid was kind of boneheaded at it; I mean, hell, you can get caviar at the supermarket for about five bucks).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:35 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Food stamps (ebt) are an entitlement program by law, which means that anyone who meets the qualifications ("entitled") gets them. Nobody loses ebt when a foodie hipster or whatever derogatory term you want to use signs up. The law also states that the purpose of food stamps is to supplement diets to help people eat healthier. Sounds good to me.

Want to know why more poor people don't use this program? Shame. Shaming people into eating what you want them to eat is bullshit. Snide comments like some of the ones here are exactly why some families eat less well instead of taking on the stigma of food stamps. When I've worked with at risk communities, (including young, poor people) I saw some who were screwed out of ebt randomly by bureaucracy and some that were too proud to do it and some that had no problems at all. A year later, my observation was that the ones who used ebt were significantly more able to be independent and moving forward.

I was young and on food stamps and it absolutely helped me be healthier and come out of the other side of that period in my life better off. Now I pay 3x more taxes at least and I work in a job where I can help others.
posted by Skwirl at 12:35 PM on March 16, 2010 [30 favorites]

The conflation you see in the US between class issues (as in, actual money) and high school issues (as in, why couldn't I have been as cool as Zoe in junior-year English?) has been clever enough and successful enough that I almost think there's an actual conspiracy behind it.
posted by furiousthought at 12:36 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I do what I can. I'm not perfect, but I try. That's all I expect from anyone. Do what you can.

Nah, I hear ya. I think I was just offering a gentle observation that I've found it's actually wiser -- and kinder -- to assume everyone is doing precisely that, even if it may not look that way to you from looking in your neighbor's shopping cart.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:39 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

anniecat, you went to school and received a degree and now have a well paying job. Did you value your education for any sake other than what it would prepare you to do in the job market? Liberal arts and fine arts studies persist for a reason.

Not everybody's brain is wired the same. I happen to have a fine arts degree, support myself mostly in another industry, and am proud of my education for the way it taught me to think and experience the world.

I like my young hipster peeps. Except when there are too many of them and they run into traffic and stuff, but whatever. I like their energy. I'm glad many of them know how to freaking feed themselves as best they can, because I don't want them to quit or crawl into a hole or whatever you want "them" to do - what do you suggest, everyone with a fine arts degree lay out more debt for trade school? They'll figure something out.
posted by rainbaby at 12:39 PM on March 16, 2010

God damn it can we please stop talking about organic salmon like it's actually a thing that food-conscious people should want to buy. Certified Organic salmon is farmed salmon.

Farmed salmon not only tastes bland and insipid, but, organic or no, also has the potential to be bad for both you and the world.

You (Salon writers, metafilter commenters) mean "wild salmon."

And if you don't, you should.
posted by Nothing... and like it at 12:40 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

God damn it can we please stop talking about organic salmon like it's actually a thing that food-conscious people should want to buy.

*shrug* Sorry, I was just confining myself to the topic of the article. As pla requested. (innocent look)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:42 PM on March 16, 2010

Since this article is pure shock journalism too dumb to even be worth discussing, anyone want to tell me what's the deal with these "Le Creuset" pots? Should I be asking for them for Christmas or something?
posted by graventy at 12:43 PM on March 16, 2010

Hmm. These people qualify for food stamps, they're not making much money. Legally they can't buy alcohol or cigarettes with the food stamps. So what's the problem here? Food stamps are for food, it's up to the person to spend them wisely or unwisely. This reeks of moronic ballyhoo against food stamps, which is completely nuts.
posted by peppito at 12:44 PM on March 16, 2010

Unfortunately wild salmon fishing practices are the reason there's so much farmed salmon. Eating pretty much any kind of salmon is bad for the world unfortunately. I don't think the Alaska fishery is any more sustainable than any other collapsed costal salmon fishery.

Apparently there are tank-farmed salmon which are considered OK by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program. But good luck finding it.

Also: STOP BEING SO COOL HIPSTERS. YOU AND YOUR "JAZZ".
posted by GuyZero at 12:45 PM on March 16, 2010

what's the deal with these "Le Creuset" pots? Should I be asking for them for Christmas or something?

You really want Emily Henry.
posted by GuyZero at 12:46 PM on March 16, 2010

graventy: yes, but only if you are not on food stamps.
posted by entropicamericana at 12:46 PM on March 16, 2010

anyone want to tell me what's the deal with these "Le Creuset" pots

They're overpriced, but they look awesome and are wonderful to cook in. But I'm on food stamps, so I probably shouldn't know that.
posted by Think_Long at 12:46 PM on March 16, 2010

Sorry, Emile Henry. typo.
posted by GuyZero at 12:46 PM on March 16, 2010

So sure, if you want to call hipsters a red herring here, I'll agree with you - Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

Make a list for us, pla. What do you consider "luxury food"?

Come on, this will be fun.
posted by muddgirl at 12:47 PM on March 16, 2010

One thing that strikes me as so misguided about the amount of outrage this general kind of crap generates is that anyone who's been employed for any significant length of time at any point in their lives has already paid into the system and has at least partly subsidized their own benefits. Most of us have already paid for whatever benefits we might receive or will have paid for them before we die (especially true for unemployment, social security and disability benefits, but pretty much all our social programs are payroll/income tax funded, if not indexed directly to our tax contributions).

So basically, for some reason, we feel a deep need to excoriate people for actually daring to use a system that, by design, requires them to put some of their own money aside for an emergency.

Why? Well it's probably at least partly because there are political interests who prefer to be free to siphon away as much of that money as possible to pursue their own economic interests. But stupidity is also likely a factor.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:47 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

STOP BEING SO COOL HIPSTERS. YOU AND YOUR "JAZZ"

It's called noise rock and you wouldn't understand it unless you've studied Japan!
posted by Think_Long at 12:47 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

No, see, if you accept any government money at all you should be required by law to not enjoy anything. Probably should be required to not be a hipster either.

I mean, Christ, even if they use their food stamps to buy only acceptable items (say, 50lb bags of MSG flavored prole chow) what's stopping them from then spending their OWN $150 on PBR and tattoos?! What do we do then?

In seriousness, I am ashamed of a culture that thinks decent food is too much of a luxury to be afforded to someone who is having a hard time. If people don't qualify to be on this (or any!) assistance, and are fraudulently receiving it, well, guess what, THAT'S ALREADY ILLEGAL. If someone is receiving assistance legally, but does not happen to maintain a level of misery that you think should be the station such a low person then, well, your problem is you.
posted by dirtdirt at 12:49 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

But then we're back to the interesting discussion of who "deserves".

"Deserves" is a value judgment. The only necessary metric that determines whether one receives foodstamps is if one "qualifies" for them, regardless of whether you or I think that they "deserve" them. That's the nice thing about getting help from the government: we don't have to run through a gauntlet of private benefactors looking over our shoulders evaluating our moral worthiness for their "gifts."

Hipster hate seems to come down to a resentment that someone is living in a cooler neighborhood than you are while not working nearly as hard, getting by in life flouting the fashion conventions that helped cultivate your social and professional life by adhering to, and having sex with a greater variety of different partners.

Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

No one would blink twice at me for buying fresh or canned tomatoes, canned chick peas, an apple, an onion, some garlic, and some lemon juice, or shame me for buying $1.99 bags of cumin and curry powder from the Indian food store in the maryland suburbs. Put them all together, however, and you have "OMG! LUXURY FOODS like hipster chickpea curry!!!!" And if I add chicken and yogurt, well, then anyone feeding their family with that on their food stamps better be ready for a public flogging. Seriously, dude, what's your problem?
posted by deanc at 12:49 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oh, also along with your list of luxury foods, provide evidence that buying those foods OMG WITH FOOD STAMPS in any way hurts you, ethically morally OR physically. Thanks.
posted by muddgirl at 12:50 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

So sure, if you want to call hipsters a red herring here, I'll agree with you

So far so good...

- Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

... aaaaannnnnnddddddddd you lost me.

(PS: How do you "assist" a flogging? Publicly? Do taxpayers help you whip yourself? Or is it an impersonal flogging paid for by the government? And wouldn't that be a waste of government funds that could be better spent on like, schools or some shit? What's a luxury food? What death panels decide who gets flogged?)
posted by grapefruitmoon at 12:51 PM on March 16, 2010

So basically, for some reason, we feel a deep need to excoriate people for actually daring to use a system that, by design, requires them to put some of their own money aside for an emergency. Why? Well it's probably at least partly because there are political interests who prefer to be free to siphon away as much of that money as possible to pursue their own economic interests

I think we criticize most those who we feel have not put in their dues - the mother of three we presume to have begun childbearing in her teens, the recent grad we presume never to have been gainfully employed, etc. I think those, moreso than assumptions of infirmity, are the root of distinctions we might make between the hypothetical Granny, single Mom and hipster I mentioned above. These are my own assumptions, however, and I'm open to other interpretations.
posted by bunnycup at 12:52 PM on March 16, 2010

Oh, also along with your list of luxury foods, provide evidence that buying those foods OMG WITH FOOD STAMPS in any way hurts you, ethically morally OR physically.

You'll find that sitting next to the evidence that gay marriage destroys heterosexual marriage.
posted by fallacy of the beard at 12:53 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

bunnycup, you keep using "we" when you enumerate your assumptions. Please leave the rest of us out of it.
posted by enn at 12:54 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

What do you consider "luxury food"?

Diamond encrusted Ahi. But only if the tuna is raised by Ed Begley Junior in a certified green wave pool off Golden Kohala Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. And the diamonds have to be mined by orphans that have been granted shares in a company financed by Kiva.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:55 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Oh no, I misfiled it under deathpanels and government-mandated abortions.
posted by bunnycup at 12:55 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

> Unfortunately wild salmon fishing practices are the reason there's so much farmed salmon. Eating pretty much any kind of salmon is bad for the world unfortunately. I don't think the Alaska fishery is any more sustainable than any other collapsed costal salmon fishery.

huh? I mean, you're entitled to your opinion, but as far as I know, as an adherent to the Seafood watch, my wild AK salmon is still one of the most sustainable protein sources.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 12:56 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Arugula? That's definitely a paddlin'.
posted by entropicamericana at 12:56 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

GuyZero sez: You really want Emile Henry.

Nah. I like cast iron.
posted by Floydd at 12:57 PM on March 16, 2010

enn, I missed the thread where we voted to outlaw plural pronouns.
posted by bunnycup at 12:57 PM on March 16, 2010

Yah, I know Seafood Watch still gives Alaskan Salmon the a-ok. I disagree with them on the generic basis that I've seen too many other fisheries collapse to really assume the best. Bluefin tuna used to be OK and now it's endangered so it's not like these things don't change.
posted by GuyZero at 1:00 PM on March 16, 2010

A good article using the same sources would have been to consider whether more highly educated young people forced to use food stamps for the first time in a down economy are making better, healthier decisions about what they eat that would be cost effective for food stamp users across the board. Perhaps these kids could model better ways for other less educated food stamp users to spend their stamps. Or, perhaps that's not the case, because other food stamp users for other reasons wouldn't be able to spend their stamps on the same items, because these items are actually too expensive. And if other food stamp users can't use the same healthier food plan these kids use, why not? Why can these kids feed themselves off their stamps but other families couldn't buying the same items? Do these kids have other income sources welfare doesn't know about? Are these more educated food stamp consumers just using their wits to scam the welfare system into giving them extra income they may not deserve to buy high end items they don't necessarily need?

Those are the questions an informed writer who knows anything about what a typical food stamp user would have asked.
posted by The Straightener at 1:00 PM on March 16, 2010 [16 favorites]

Rice with cheese, and some greens on the side: It's okay to eat this if you're on food stamps.

Risotto with sauteed chard on the side: You are undeserving of luxury foods and should die of hunger!
posted by rtha at 1:04 PM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

These are my own assumptions, however, and I'm open to other interpretations.

Well, if the problem is that these hipsters come from privileged backgrounds and aren't truly deserving of food assistance, then the criticism runs into a different problem. Odds are, those over-entitled hipsters of lore have held high-paying jobs at some point (or at least, their parents have) before they found themselves forced by economic need to seek out public assistance. In which case, they're probably only deriving benefits they (or their parents) have already paid for, so who cares how they spend it? What is the point of all this fuss if not to say "broke people should be forced to eat cheap, unhealthy food because that's all they deserve?"
posted by saulgoodman at 1:04 PM on March 16, 2010

Risotto with sauteed chard on the side: You are undeserving of luxury foods and should die of hunger!

As long as we still get to judge people's food choices. That's what's really important here.
posted by electroboy at 1:07 PM on March 16, 2010

This reminds me of that time Jesus divided the loaves and fishes between everyone and then the Metafites moaned that this was going to hurt the bread and fishery industries.
posted by mccarty.tim at 1:07 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

You would see them beaten in public?
posted by chrillsicka at 1:11 PM on March 16, 2010

I just checked out the rules for food stamps in NC and SC. It seems that a single person with no dependents could make $13,000 and qualify but $14,000 would be too much. You can't have over $2,000 in countable assets which includes some types of retirement accounts. Using the SNAP calculator a person making $13,000/ year could get up to $39/ month in SC. That's right, per MONTH. How much organic arugula does that buy? If you are single with no dependents and you want that windfall you will have to participate in a job training or workfare program too unless you work 20 hours a week or live in certain economically depressed counties.
posted by Tashtego at 1:12 PM on March 16, 2010

Threeblindmice,

It's a sad state of affairs, when I read about the way other countries treat their poor, and start to tear up because its so compassionate. I can't say I've done that with any US policy.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 1:13 PM on March 16, 2010

This reminds me of that time Jesus divided the loaves and fishes between everyone and then the Metafites moaned that this was going to hurt the bread and fishery industries.

He should have given them Wonder bread and fish sticks instead of that hoity-toity artisanal bread and wild salmon.
posted by Floydd at 1:15 PM on March 16, 2010

It's a good thing she isn't relying on social security income or any other product of the great depression, a situation where government assistance wasn't at all useful to anybody.

Yeah, because if she was relying on SSI it would be worse than what she would have had before the depression, which would have been nothing. Wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense at all. Did you forget the hamburger tag?
posted by doctor_negative at 1:15 PM on March 16, 2010

This reminds me of that time Jesus divided the loaves and fishes between everyone and then the Metafites moaned that this was going to hurt the bread and fishery industries.

Remember that if you hear the words "social justice" at your church, you should run screaming down the aisles and then shoot everyone.
posted by GuyZero at 1:15 PM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Is there a Federal Program where I could donate things I've half-eaten but do not want to finish to those in need?
posted by mazola at 1:18 PM on March 16, 2010

A good article using the same sources would have been to consider whether more highly educated young people forced to use food stamps for the first time in a down economy are making better, healthier decisions about what they eat that would be cost effective for food stamp users across the board.

Personally, I'd still have problems with this article. In the same way it's problematic to label "more expensive food" as a universally bad choice, it's problematic to label caloric dense food as a universally bad choice.
posted by muddgirl at 1:18 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, because if she was relying on SSI it would be worse than what she would have had before the depression, which would have been nothing. Wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense at all. Did you forget the hamburger tag?

I didn't think it was necessary, I make it a point to never use the 'hamburger tag'
posted by Think_Long at 1:20 PM on March 16, 2010

it's problematic to label caloric dense food as a universally bad choice.

I spent all my foodstamps on Humboldt Fog.

Is there a Federal Program where I could donate things I've half-eaten but do not want to finish to those in need?

No, but all AskMe "should I eat it?" questions must now specify whether the poster is on food stamps, in which case the answer is always "yes, you worthless sack of shit".
posted by GuyZero at 1:21 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Anyone, regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic strata, or preference of PC-vs-Mac, buying luxury foods with public assistance money deserves a publicly assisted flogging.

What food items would not count as 'luxury foods'? Please enumerate.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:22 PM on March 16, 2010

Threads like this are like watching a freight train pass by.
The article is fucking obnoxious.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:22 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Using the SNAP calculator a person making $13,000/ year could get up to $39/ month in SC.

Right, the fact is that Mak is getting a lot of food stamps, basically in line with what someone with a very low income and no assets would be eligible for. Which means he is somehow supplementing his food intake with soup kitchens and food banks and living in a homeless shelter or squatting or he's engaging in welfare fraud, reporting very little in terms of income in order to get the maximum amount of stamps that he in turns spends on items that are simply not going to get him through an entire month of eating three daily meals which he doesn't have to worry about because he has support from his family or unreported income.

Does anyone know this writer? Can we get Slate to answer these questions about why dude is getting the max amount of food stamps and spending it on roasted rabbit, because "I'm sort of a foodie, and I'm not going to do the 'living off ramen' thing"?
posted by The Straightener at 1:25 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Somewhat related is that the State of Maryland has fallen further behind after a judge ordered it to speed up delivery of food stamps.
posted by electroboy at 1:28 PM on March 16, 2010

Uh, Mak is in Baltimore which is not in SC, right? Presumably there are state-to-state differences in income requirement levels. Unless you don't mean to be completely literal in that reply, The Straightener, as I will certainly defer to you on the issue and anything to do with Baltimore.
posted by GuyZero at 1:29 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I live in Baltimore. The Trader Joe's - with it's free range chickens and organic produce, is generally cheaper than the supposedly more downscale Shoppers Food Warehouse. Whole Foods - not so much. And local farmers' markets are the best deal around. I don't see a conflict between eating well and eating frugally.
posted by jetsetsc at 1:32 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of that time Jesus divided the loaves and fishes between everyone and then the Metafites moaned that this was going to hurt the bread and fishery industries.

but not before conducting moral and means testing on each recipient.
posted by fallacy of the beard at 1:33 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

If anyone has the time or the inclination, here's the guidelines for food assistance in Maryland.
posted by electroboy at 1:33 PM on March 16, 2010

States are different but there are general similarities, like my average client in PA who has ZERO income and ZERO assets is eligible for considerably less than $200 in stamps per month so unless Maryland is running the greatest food stamp program in US history there's something waaaaay off about the Mak situation.
posted by The Straightener at 1:34 PM on March 16, 2010

I live in Baltimore. The Trader Joe's - with it's free range chickens and organic produce, is generally cheaper than the supposedly more downscale Shoppers Food Warehouse.

Except that there is no Trader Joe's in Baltimore.
posted by electroboy at 1:36 PM on March 16, 2010

josher71 : Flog me then. I bought food with money I got from unemployment. And sometimes it was luxury food.

Unnecessary. You paid for your unemployment insurance out of your own salary. If you had never worked, you wouldn't get UI. Put simply, you earned it honestly, spend it as you see fit.

That said, I consider all forms of insurance a total rip-off, and you could almost certainly have invested those (involuntary) premiums for a much better return than the pittance you'll now get back for your input... But having actually paid into it - Take advantage of every drop of your own blood you can squeeze back out of that stone.


dirtdirt : In seriousness, I am ashamed of a culture that thinks decent food is too much of a luxury to be afforded to someone who is having a hard time.

Again - Eating healthy does not mean spending more, unless talking about instant/pre-prepared food. Nor does eating "organic free range omega-3 Doritos" necessarily count as healthy.


muddgirl : Make a list for us, pla. What do you consider "luxury food"? Come on, this will be fun.

Forgive me if I have to suspect you of insincerity here, but I'll play along anyway. :)

Just about anything with the words "organic", or free-range, or grass-fed, or BGH-free, or any of a whole spectrum of similar terms on the label. Those amount to paying more for political buzzwords, with negligible effects on the actual contents.

Ice cream. All ice cream. And chips, and candy, and HoHos and pretty much any form of bagged snack-food or dessert. Personally I think we'd all improve our health drastically by doing away with such crap altogether, but no one needs a quart of fudge ripple, much less the Cadbury or Häagen-Dazs versions with 50% more foofyness.

Basically, anything you can buy that has identical nutritional value to the same product one shelf down at half the price. Simple as that.

Oh, also along with your list of luxury foods, provide evidence that buying those foods OMG WITH FOOD STAMPS in any way hurts you, ethically morally OR physically.

Why? I don't give the least damn about the first two categories. The third you know has little to no impact on me - I could argue that I could spend the same money stolen from me in the form of taxes to send antimalarials to a charity of my choice in Africa, thereby lessening my chances of someday getting Malaria, but won't bother for one simple reason: You deliberately left out the only relevant category - This affects me financially. The state has done nothing less than taken away my choice of how to spend my money, so others can choose to eat better than I do (I sure as hell can't afford to shop regularly at Whole Foods).

I certainly don't grudge those who legitimately need it. But, to repeat my very first post in this thread - Buying luxury foods pretty much cinches the deal that someone doesn't need the money.


Oh, one more for the list (to repeat mccarty.tim) - MetaFilter (food for the mind?). We all payed $5 for a link aggregator / blog just like countless other sites we could join for free. Right to whine about our hardships, zero.
posted by pla at 1:36 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

1 in 6 Oregonians are on food stamps
posted by wcfields at 1:40 PM on March 16, 2010

The Trader Joe's is fairly close in Towson, I suppose. But, yeah, that's not Baltimore.
posted by josher71 at 1:41 PM on March 16, 2010

Does anyone know this writer? Can we get Slate to answer these questions about why dude is getting the max amount of food stamps and spending it on roasted rabbit, because "I'm sort of a foodie, and I'm not going to do the 'living off ramen' thing"?

I doubt the writer's editor is necessarily interested in a more serious or thoughtful piece. What is Slate's target demographic? It's like the New York Times covering people cutting back in tough times by not buying a second home.

Except that there is no Trader Joe's in Baltimore.

Towson and Pikesville aren't too far away.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:42 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

If HoHos are a luxury good I don't want to be pampered.
posted by aspo at 1:42 PM on March 16, 2010

OMFG it's the libertarian argument.

The state has done nothing less than taken away my choice of how to spend my money, so others can choose to eat better than I do

Dude, if they liquidated the state you'd have a lot less choice on how to spend your money. Also, it's cheaper to give poor people food stamps than to hire extra police officers to stop crime and food riots. If they stopped food stamps do you really think there would be a net benefit to society?

Healthy food isn't luxury food. It's just food. Also, ice cream is a pretty good deal in calories per dollar. I mean, how is it any different from flavoured yogurt? It's 95% milk and sugar.

Your arguments amount to nothing less than decrying state interference in preference for personal interference. hardly the moral high ground.
posted by GuyZero at 1:43 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Just about anything with the words "organic", or free-range, or grass-fed, or BGH-free, or any of a whole spectrum of similar terms on the label. Those amount to paying more for political buzzwords, with negligible effects on the actual contents.

Please cite your sources for this claim, firstly.

Secondly, I'm still not understanding why, if someone has received a set amount of money, and is spending more in one area but making up for it by spending less in another area (they get the BGH-free milk, but they get the store-brand bread, say), this makes one whit of difference to any taxpayer. The recipient is going to be getting the same amount of money no matter what. The taxpayer will have paid the same amount of money no matter what. It's not like we all get a refund if Sid spends less on his food stamps; he's still going to get the same amount of money every month whether he gets cheap beef or good beef. So -- to what end would it serve shaming Sid into getting the cheap beef?

We all payed $5 for a link aggregator / blog just like countless other sites we could join for free.

But using your logic, if any of us got that five dollars as part of a loan from a friend, we shouldn't have used it to pay for Metafilter because there was something with "less foofyness" elsewhere on the web. The fact that we CHOSE to allot some of that loan to pay for Metafilter, and maybe went five dollars poorer somewhere else, shouldn't be a factor.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:43 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Nor does eating "organic free range omega-3 Doritos" necessarily count as healthy.

Sir, no one said that.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:43 PM on March 16, 2010

pla: "Nor does eating organic free range omega-3 Doritos" necessarily count as healthy."


"Forgive me if I have to suspect you of insincerity here..."
posted by applemeat at 1:44 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Just about anything with the words "organic", or free-range, or grass-fed, or BGH-free, or any of a whole spectrum of similar terms on the label. Those amount to paying more for political buzzwords, with negligible effects on the actual contents.

I've worked in an organic grocery store and can guarantee you that this is by and large totally untrue. rBGH is a factor in human health to the point where American milk treated with rBGH can not be sold in Europe, which bans the practice for health concerns. It's not awesome for the cow, either.

I'm not going to refute this point by point because I don't have the time or the energy to argue with the proverbial dining room table - I'm just going to point out that if you took some time to do research on the benefits of organic food rather than just assuming that because it "costs more" it's a "waste of money," you would find some rather gaping holes in your own argument.

Sure, there are a number of things where "organic" is a luxury. Organic produce, while it sometimes tastes better, mostly just means it's (literally) dirtier. If it's packaged and made from "organic" ingredients, then it's probably no better than a conventional equivalent since they can put "contains organic ingredients" on it if it's so much as looked at an organic ingredient. (Certified USDA organic is another matter, there are actual standards for that one.) But for meat and dairy? HELL YEAH there's a difference.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 1:44 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Yup, per the Department of Agriculture, $200 per month is the maximum benefit rate for an individual. So dude is reporting to the welfare department that he is basically living on the streets in order to get the max rate on food stamps, spends them on roasted rabbit and brags about it on Slate. Nice.
posted by The Straightener at 1:44 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

People spending their food stamps on healthy food is fine, desirable even.

An able-bodied 31-year-old with a degree from the University of Chicago and no kids to support living in job-market-desert Baltimore on food stamps is infuriating. He is either committing welfare fraud or intolerable self-indulgence at tax-payer expense. Probably both. Let him move to Dallas and show a few months of worn shoe-leather hustling to get one of the jobs guys with 12 words of English and a primary school education from Fujian or Michoacan are happy to have, and maybe there's a conversation to have about getting him on welfare.
posted by MattD at 1:44 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

States are different but there are general similarities, like my average client in PA who has ZERO income and ZERO assets is eligible for considerably less than $200 in stamps per month so unless Maryland is running the greatest food stamp program in US history there's something waaaaay off about the Mak situation.

Maybe, but it might be relevant that a lot of the urban "hipsters" I've known over the years saved tons of money on housing by living in big warehouses (literally) with anywhere from a dozen to two dozen other roommates splitting the tab. Or in low-cost communities like artist coops.

These are often surprisingly resourceful kids, believe it or not, who generally know how to scrimp on costs--whether it's by dumpster-diving to supplement their income, mooching off better situated friends, or pooling relatively small sums of money with lots of other kids to keep something roughly like a roof over their heads.

Seriously. A lot of the kids who get labeled "hipsters" know how to live really low to the ground.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:45 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Deserves" is a value judgment. The only necessary metric that determines whether one receives foodstamps is if one "qualifies" for them, regardless of whether you or I think that they "deserve" them. That's the nice thing about getting help from the government: we don't have to run through a gauntlet of private benefactors looking over our shoulders evaluating our moral worthiness for their "gifts."

Right, of course, but at the same time I think many people, if they're being honest with themselves, do make those kinds of value judgments. Of course I don't want my government making that judgment -- I hope that's clear -- but how I feel my affect how I vote, and the U.S. has a very punitive framework vis a vis government assistance. So if I myself feel as though I've internalized some of that punitive framework, how might I want to re-frame?

Living in the Northeast, I find it quite easy to get into the mindset of "oh, these rich kids get all the benefits". Particularly if you are involved in creative work, and see the immense benefits Art Gradaute A gets from being wealthy, versus Art School Graduate B who's not. (Cf, for example, angst towards indie bands that are started and supported by members with wealthy families.)

Now, this travesty of an article doesn't give even remotely enough factual information to have a rational discussion about the issues. But I think we need to confront the idea of "deserving", and even admit "yes, sometimes I feel that people get things they don't deserve", to allow ourselves to comfortably vote for government programs that may, every once in a while, give something to someone we personally don't feel "deserves" it. We have to say that it's okay if that happens, because you're never going to have a program stringent and punitive enough to satisfy our Puritan/Calvinist id.
posted by lillygog at 1:47 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

fact that we have to take uninspiring jobs in order to pay off the mountains of student loans we're laboring under isn't our fault.

Oh yeah, you're the very first class ever to graduate in a deep recession, right? Oh geem it turns out that I'm one of them, still paying my student loans off in a less than awesome job that isn't my dream job, but I'm glad I have the discipline to actually pay back my loans. So I'm not against anybody taking an uninspiring job to pay off debt. I think it's actually evidence of a mature person -- someone who has a job that they aren't crazy about, but are paying off debt, and still happy and proud of themselves to boot. I'm thinking it's really silly to not readjust what emotional expectations you have about what work is supposed to feel like when you owe a mountain of debt. So good for you for taking a boring job and meeting your loan obligation.

My generation was reared by parents who told us that we could do what we loved, what we were passionate about, with a college education. So, most of us decided to follow our dreams, and now we have niches and passions and all that stuff that would be wonderful in a good economy.

Are you really blaming your parents? Wake up, son. Your parents didn't mean it, they were all into building your self-esteem. You are not special. The fact that you thought you were proves you aren't. Your parents sold you a false bill of goods about what would happen after college so you wouldn't blame them for a bruised sense of possibility and you're upset with them but you liked what they said and want to believe it because unless you have a job you're passionate and in love with you think you've failed because your ego and self-esteem is all frustrated because it is all tied up in your work. So here we are where you're blaming me for calling you out on dreaming of sitting around party headquarters with a clipboard and whining when you should actually do something? Last time I checked, Whole Foods had openings and a lot of people who didn't have the benefit of a college degree (and some that do and aren't too proud to work as cashiers etc) busted their asses to get to this country are working there.
posted by anniecat at 1:48 PM on March 16, 2010

(Just in case it's not clear, I'm saying "we" and "our" in the larger sense of "these strains in U.S. politics to which I sometimes fall prey", rather than referring to any particular person in this thread.)
posted by lillygog at 1:52 PM on March 16, 2010

shakespeherian : What food items would not count as 'luxury foods'? Please enumerate.

Bread (preferable stale).
Water.

That about what you wanted to hear?

Look, take whatever stance you want on TFA, on food stamps, on the morality and ethics of telling people worse off than yourself what they should and shouldn't do. But do we really need to argue about whether or not "luxury" foods even exist?

Here, I'll make a deal with you... I'll buy you lunch at McDonalds (or Subway, for something a bit less nasty) tomorrow (Wednesday); then you can buy me lunch at a place of my choosing on Thursday. Then on Friday, I promise that I will take your opinion as good as gospel, as to whether or not you believe in "luxury" foods. ;)
posted by pla at 1:52 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Why? I don't give the least damn about the first two categories. The third you know has little to no impact on me - I could argue that I could spend the same money stolen from me in the form of taxes to send antimalarials to a charity of my choice in Africa, thereby lessening my chances of someday getting Malaria, but won't bother for one simple reason: You deliberately left out the only relevant category - This affects me financially. The state has done nothing less than taken away my choice of how to spend my money, so others can choose to eat better than I do (I sure as hell can't afford to shop regularly at Whole Foods).

Wow, Ayn Rand did actually get a MetaFilter account. Welcome, Ghost of Ayn Rand!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:53 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Let him move to Dallas and show a few months of worn shoe-leather hustling to get one of the jobs guys with 12 words of English and a primary school education from Fujian or Michoacan are happy to have

Hoaratio Alger Jr. meets Tom of Finland, ties him up with his bootstraps, and rawwr! Goddamn that's hot!
posted by applemeat at 1:54 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

If these guys were real hipsters, they'd use the food stamps to mail a watermelon to Cleveland. The irony that followed would nourish them for weeks.
posted by dr_dank at 1:56 PM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

If it were easy to bring about the kind of changes these young people are devoting years of their lives to while living, quite literally, well below the poverty line without any federal support, we wouldn't need Americorps volunteers at all.

I didn't see your earlier comment. You're pretty impressionable. So if Americorps PR machine tells you that you're creating all kinds of change, then you definitely must be (look at the GAO reports in the footnotes). And if it still exists, then there must be some measurable (verified by an objective, independent third party) change that we are seeing everyday, right? So for all the needy people they took off of food stamps, they replaced with Americorps volunteers? At any rate, it's probably a neglible amount and I don't think it matters, other than it's really ridiculous that they're called volunteers.
posted by anniecat at 1:57 PM on March 16, 2010

But do we really need to argue about whether or not "luxury" foods even exist?

I think you're maybe too sarcastic and witty for your own good. I wasn't being snarky; I was asking a goddam question. I'm not asking, as someone did above, what counts as 'luxury foods,' because that's far too easy to tick off your favorite political buzzword organic-just-means-more-expensive talking points. I am honestly, sincerely asking you: If you were on food stamps, what foods would you buy? What purchases should these people be making that will dispel your fears that they are bilking the system?
posted by shakespeherian at 1:57 PM on March 16, 2010

An able-bodied 31-year-old with a degree from the University of Chicago and no kids to support living in job-market-desert Baltimore on food stamps is infuriating. He is either committing welfare fraud or intolerable self-indulgence at tax-payer expense. Probably both. Let him move to Dallas and show a few months of worn shoe-leather hustling to get one of the jobs guys with 12 words of English and a primary school education from Fujian or Michoacan are happy to have, and maybe there's a conversation to have about getting him on welfare.

I guess I agree, except I pity him, rather than find it infuriating. Everyone has to make their own way with regard to maximizing economic opportunity, I suppose, and I've certainly chosen paths that consciously led to lower income at nearly every turn in my (still young) adult life. Whatever hoops you have to jump through to hide income or live off relatives just to get 200 extra bucks a month to spend on nice groceries seems like it's probably a bad deal compared to the nice situation an able bodied childless man with a top college degree could potentially put himself in. The rich cheat the system as well and maybe they're immoral and maybe that makes a bigger dent in the national pocketbook and I can find that infuriating. So though I'm sympathetic to the arguments of the Straightener, we can make a bigger pot for welfare by closing down the tax loopholes for the rich, so my moral outrage seems better directed there. This guy just seems irrational, and a little pathetic.
posted by Kwine at 2:00 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

But do we really need to argue about whether or not "luxury" foods even exist?

Sir, this is not what you originally said.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:00 PM on March 16, 2010

Towson and Pikesville aren't too far away.

Hey, that's only an hour away by bus! That's practically next door!
posted by electroboy at 2:01 PM on March 16, 2010

The state has done nothing less than taken away my choice of how to spend my money, so others can choose to fly jet fighters (I sure as hell can't afford to shop regularly at Northrop Grumman).
posted by Optimus Chyme at 2:01 PM on March 16, 2010 [16 favorites]

Wow, anniecat, thanks for your remarkably uninformed and bitter ad hominems against me. You've really opened my eyes about what a worthless, unaccomplished hamburger I am.
posted by oinopaponton at 2:01 PM on March 16, 2010

Let him move to Dallas and show a few months of worn shoe-leather hustling to get one of the jobs guys with 12 words of English and a primary school education from Fujian or Michoacan are happy to have, and maybe there's a conversation to have about getting him on welfare.

You do realize, right, that it costs money to move? You can't just magically teleport yourself and your belongings to a magical apartment that you are able to rent without a job or security deposit.
posted by craichead at 2:01 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Here, I'll make a deal with you... I'll buy you lunch at McDonalds (...) then you can buy me lunch at a place of my choosing on Thursday.

That's a deal, so long as we are spending the same amount. If you choose to spend your , say, $5 on a breath mint at Le Cirque while I choose to spend my $5 on a footlong sub, who loses?
posted by dirtdirt at 2:02 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

If you were on food stamps, what foods would you buy?

But Pla, himself, would be exempt - he may buy whatever he pleases, because he would just be wringing out every bloody drop of the tax money stolen from him by the government. Or something.
posted by bunnycup at 2:03 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

BTW, not only is ice cream not a "luxury", there's a lower duties under NAFTA for a mixture of milk and sugar vs the two ingredients separately. Between dairy, HFCS and favourable tariff treatments I actually think that ice cream may be the most heavily subsidized food available.
posted by GuyZero at 2:03 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

quoting pla: I could argue that I could spend the same money stolen from me in the form of taxes...

Pla is doing something that crops up a lot on the smarty-pants corners of the Internet: she's taken a maxim from the American founding fathers, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," and shortened it to instead read "Taxation is tyranny." One way to tell the two apart is to note that the former maxim is one of the fundamental and necessary ideas underlying representative democracy, whereas the latter is just dumb.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

there's something waaaaay off about the Mak situation.

[I haven't read the article yet]

Is it possible the $150 number comes from two people who are sharing food, and the other just isn't as high-profile in the article.
posted by anastasiav at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2010

OH LOOK WHAT A LOVELY SUNNY DAY IT IS
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Hey, that's only an hour away by bus! That's practically next door!

I lived in Baltimore for a few years. Towson is about a twenty-five minute ride from north of the train station. Not saying that it's next door, but it's in the general vicinity of Baltimore and certainly accessible from downtown.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:06 PM on March 16, 2010

The fact that universities are slashing budgets for grad student tuition and stipend isn't our fault.

Who said that was your fault? The expectation to get funding is more entitlement. The government and private foundations are saying, "We don't need another PhD in English Literature." So why are you going into that field? Is it that pesky passion again? There's funding in some places. But who says you need to go to grad school for anything anyway? Why aren't you getting an HVAC certification at the community college? Why is it grad school? I can't say I'm surprised that there's lack of funding for a Master's in Liberal Arts or a PhD in Classics. If you think higher education is supposed to be fair by virtue of it being "education" then you're in for a lot of surprises. If anything is your fault, it's that you aren't thinking about what is versus what you wish wish wish things were like.
posted by anniecat at 2:07 PM on March 16, 2010

Pla is doing something that crops up a lot on the smarty-pants corners of the Internet: she's taken

FYI, pla is a male. Just wanted to clarify.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 2:08 PM on March 16, 2010

Wow. It's like Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and Ronald Reagan all chipped in a buck and change for a Metafilter account.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:09 PM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

And if other food stamp users can't use the same healthier food plan these kids use, why not?

My sister is a hippie who wants to change the world for the better. This is only one of the many striking differences between us, but it stands for the whole. After college, I took my English degree and tried to find a way into the videogame industry with it; she moved from Boulder to San Francisco and finished a master's in health. Typical, really.

One of her five or six current employments is teaching nutrition classes at a minimum-security women's prison and an accompanying release-reentry program. Every week she has classes of women ranging from 18 to 50, to whom she teaches recipes, helps figure out budgets, and sets them up to create and maintain a monthly diet of low-cost, high-nutrition ingredients so that they can nourish themselves and their families with minimal expenditure. She does this because she believes that people who eat better have brains and bodies that work more effectively; that well-nourished people are smarter, better planners, better workers, less likely to recidivate out of desperation or need, less likely to turn back to drugs and alcohol, more self-empowered.

Virtually all of her students had no idea they could buy these ingredients cheaply; most of them never learned these kinds of recipes. Why don't other food stamp users create a similar healthy-food plan? A lot of them don't know how. It sounds ridiculous and stupid, but there it is.

So when I read this article, I mentally remove all the talk of hipsters and fancy pots and insert all the at-risk women my sister is teaching to eat well within limited means, who are learning how to live their lives better, and I just can't summon any outrage over that. Most of them will be on food stamps when they get out; hopefully, most of them will be buying the same kinds of ingredients these so-called hipsters are being castigated for buying; hopefully, most of them will find a way not to go back inside. So, yeah, not only do I not mind when people use their food stamps for good food, I actually prefer it. I don't know if my sister can change the world, but she's doing a bang-up job on my cynicism.
posted by Errant at 2:10 PM on March 16, 2010 [28 favorites]

You do realize, right, that it costs money to move?

Yea and you see Mexicans risking life and limb to cross the desert for those jobs. I think the larger point is maybe Americans in general do feal a lttle entitled, you see it in different demographics with all the job losses and the general anger thats going around.

But around most the rest of the world people dont have these opportunities and know they arent entitled to shit. Which I think is why so many tech markets are filling up with highly motivated, well educated foriegners while we just get more stupid all the time
posted by freshundz at 2:12 PM on March 16, 2010

Why don't other food stamp users create a similar healthy-food plan? A lot of them don't know how. It sounds ridiculous and stupid, but there it is.

Yeah, I kinda have like 45 clients currently on food stamps so I'm up on all that.
posted by The Straightener at 2:12 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think the larger point is maybe Americans in general do feal a lttle entitled, you see it in different demographics with all the job losses and the general anger thats going around.

....I'm not sure how this relates to the issue at hand.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:15 PM on March 16, 2010

Wow, anniecat, thanks for your remarkably uninformed and bitter ad hominems against me.

Bitter? You think I'm attacking you? I am trying to help open your eyes to the incredible world full of amazing opportunities and challenges. There is no shame to be had because no one cares what you for a living right out of college except for you. Wake up, it's a beautiful world out there and you should be proud that you're making ends meet because, unlike going to school for a silly degree, you are making ends meet! Anybody can get a college degree, but getting your stuff together financially, paying those bills off, being a happy, cheerful, giving and forgiving person to your friends and family while doing it? Doing what you have to do? That's success! That deserves loads of respect. You're the one who's having a tantrum over silly stuff like not landing a cushy job being passionate all day out of college and treating it like God singled your class out or something. If you find something you love, awesome. If you don't, don't get bitter and angry about it. Just go attend to your responsibilities and be proud that you can be.
posted by anniecat at 2:16 PM on March 16, 2010

perhaps not- scanning through in a hurry- very busy
posted by freshundz at 2:17 PM on March 16, 2010

Not saying that it's next door, but it's in the general vicinity of Baltimore and certainly accessible from downtown.

I suppose then you've missed the larger point that Trader Joe's generally locates in the frou-frou areas of cities and wealthy suburbs, so pointing to Trader Joe's as a source of cheap, healthy food comes across as sort of a tone deaf option. Further, Shopper's Food Warehouse generally has better produce than most of the standard grocery stores because they often serve a partly immigrant community.
posted by electroboy at 2:18 PM on March 16, 2010

it's really ridiculous that they're called volunteers.

And yet we pay salaries to our "all volunteer" army. Seriously, what's up with the Americorps-hate?

The expectation to get funding is more entitlement. The government and private foundations are saying, "We don't need another PhD in English Literature."

The nice thing about government programs, as I said, is that one must merely "qualify," not be forced to run the the gauntlet of moral worthiness. Living on a low-level stipend when you're already mid-way through something before funding got cut in an economy where there are few supplemental jobs available is punishment enough. If someone chooses to avail themselves of temporary food stamp assistance because they qualify for it, I'm not going to get all agitated about it. And if they manage to choose healthy foods rather than ramen and low-grade beef, I'm certainly not going to let that bother me.

(however I've never met or heard of a grad student on food stamps. I've heard of members of the military who've had to use the program, though)

Look, anniecat, I mock the ne'er-do-well lazy middle class kids without a career-oriented mindset as much as the next guy, but picking on members of Americorps? Do you kick puppies in your spare time, as well?
posted by deanc at 2:18 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

we just get more stupid all the time

I've been doing data entry of the results of an aptitude test for a while...there's a direct inverse correlation between average score and age.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 2:20 PM on March 16, 2010

Not saying that it's next door, but it's in the general vicinity of Baltimore and certainly accessible from downtown.

However; for someone who relies on public transporation, even though it's only 20 minutes, it's 20 minutes on a bus, which means that you are limited to only buying what you can carry back in however many bags you can carry in your two hands. Not QUITE as good a tradeoff, unfortunately...there's a Trader Joe's that's equally as close to me, but the ten-minute walk to the supermarket with my luggage cart means I can get things in bulk.

That's just a for instance.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:21 PM on March 16, 2010

Not too long ago, I was a single-working mother of three, I believe some people called my occupation "high school educator." There was a beautiful write up in our local paper about a young lady (coulda been a hipster) that bought Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with her food stamp card. That lady was me. I was buying ice cream for my son's second birthday my first week as a teacher. I had a lot to celebrate. I wish I could have read the write up had he caught my regular purchase of fresh fruit and vegetables (sometimes organic), whole grain breads, non processed cheese, local dairy whole milk, tofu, and rice. I would have loved to have been in the middle of that community debate.

Salon.com, I would rather dumpster dive than ever read this type of garbage again.
posted by psylosyren at 2:23 PM on March 16, 2010 [15 favorites]

GuyZero : OMFG it's the libertarian argument.

What, you mean Mefi doesn't automatically highlight my posts at this point to out me for believing in personal financial responsibility?

Your arguments amount to nothing less than decrying state interference in preference for personal interference. hardly the moral high ground.

Not quite - I argued that the state shouldn't deny me my preference in favor of yours.


EmpressCallipygos : Please cite your sources for this claim, firstly.

href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8174482.stm">Organic 'has no health benefits'.

Secondly, I'm still not understanding why, if someone has received a set amount of money, and is spending more in one area but making up for it by spending less in another area

Because if someone can spend enough less in one area to splurge in another, they could have spent less in both areas and not needed to do the second on the public's dime. Or to put another way - If I blow all my money on computer hardware, can I receive aid for my rent?

We all payed $5 for a link aggregator / blog just like countless other sites we could join for free.

Sorry (sincerely) - I meant that as a joke, more-or-less. Someone could collect cans to come up with five bucks. :)


dirtdirt : That's a deal, so long as we are spending the same amount.

How could we possibly spend different amounts? Luxury foods don't exist, so a basically-nutritious and filling meal anywhere must necessarily cost close to the same amount.


shakespeherian : I wasn't being snarky; I was asking a goddam question.

Then I apologize, I took your question as sort of driving that particular nail in further, since an honest answer would require a much longer list.

To seriously answer you (if you'll forgive the generalizing) - just about any basic cooking ingredients. And when I say "basic", I mean just that - white mushrooms, not wildcrafted shitakes; all-purpose-flour, not low-gluten pastry-grade flour milled by hand in the South of France; Olive oil (or even generic "vegetable" oil, depending on the use), not grapeseed oil.

I would also consider time a valuable resource for most people, and have no problem with most non-premium frozen prepared meals - Microwave burritos for $10/dozen, a frozen pizza will feed 3-4 people for $3-4, pre-cooked veggies at three for two bucks.

Things that feed you. Not things you crave or things in the more attractive packaging. As I mentioned, given a choice between two versions of the same product - The one on the lower shelf.
posted by pla at 2:24 PM on March 16, 2010

You know, it's not easy to get food stamps. You don't just go online and fill out an application and hey presto here is lots of free government money in your mailbox. No, unless it's changed dramatically since my seriously scary heavy duty broke days in the eighties and early nineties, you have to go to the social services office and plan on being there all day, filling out forms and talking to burnt out unhappy overworked people who do not want to talk to you and come off (quite successfully) as if they really do not want you to get these benefits if they can possibly deny them. However, the benefits are out there and if you qualify and dance through the hoops and fill out all your forms correctly, which, again, is not easy, you can get them. I've sat in offices in New York where social workers shouted at Asian women because their English was not good enough, so, no benefits for them, and I've sat in the office on North Avenue in Baltimore trying desperately to get my eight year old on medical assistance while a social worker snarled at me that eight was too old for family assistance and why the hell didn't she have her own account and what was wrong with me anyway that I needed this help? Lots of people give up at this point. I gave up in New York and I gave up on food stamps - for which I was entirely qualified - because of the relentless shaming. Many people do; perhaps they are not educated enough or savvy enough or mentally together enough for the shaming or the endless persistence that it takes to get benefits.

However. To the best of my knowledge, these benefits - food stamps - are guaranteed by law and they do not diminish for anyone even if extra people take advantage of them. These two people in Baltimore are not taking food out of other people's mouths. They're barely even taking a rivet off the wing of a federally funded bomber. So all this howling about how your precious tax dollars are being stolen by freeloaders is a bunch of total bullshit. Your taxes aren't being affected by hipster kids eating rabbit with a SNAP card. Really, no, they're not.
posted by mygothlaundry at 2:28 PM on March 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

Obviously pla is an entirely self-made man who hasn't benefited at all from the money stolen from him by the state. He hasn't used any of the federal or state infrastructure, hasn't benefited from public education (either directly, or through the benefit of living in an educated society), hasn't had his safety, health, or property protected by inspectors, emergency workers, or police. The state just takes, takes, takes what is rightfully his through his own sweat and toil and innate intelligence (and not at all affected by his privilege) and gives it to shiftless undeserving and ungrateful slobs who can't even be bothered to work or even have the decency to at least eat like poor people.
posted by rocket88 at 2:28 PM on March 16, 2010 [19 favorites]

Who said that was your fault? The expectation to get funding is more entitlement.

Providing equal access to economic opportunity has always been understood to be a part of the role of the Federal government under the auspices of the government's charge to "promote the general welfare" as described in the preamble to the constitution.

When whole employment categories disappear and none appear to take their place, that hardly makes a recipe for equality of opportunity or increased general prosperity.

When policy makers and business leaders deliberately pursue strategies that remove chairs from play in the all-important game of musical chairs that constitutes the employment system in America without at the same time taking adequate steps to ensure there will still be enough chairs left for everyone, someone, somewhere will inevitably find themselves left without a chair when the music stops. Whether those individuals hail from rich or poor families, whether they are college educated or not, whether they like to eat swiss chard or Cheetos, it's not really their fault. There simply aren't enough chairs for everyone.

As humans, we personalize and impose idiosyncratic value judgments on such scenarios because we are human beings and that's what we're wired to do. Our minds are so oriented toward personalizing the impersonal that we can't help but see a drawing of a circle, two dots and a curved line arranged in a particular way as anything but a happy face even when we try. This is just more of that: a manipulative appeal to personal prejudice to manufacture a controversy and foster greater skepticism around public support programs. Nothing else to see here, I'm afraid.
posted by saulgoodman at 2:30 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I suppose then you've missed the larger point that Trader Joe's generally locates in the frou-frou areas of cities and wealthy suburbs

Sir, I don't recall anyone making that point, and even if that were uniformly true, its relevance would be questionable, at best. You can certainly find Costco and WAL*MART groceries in or near wealthy suburbs.

pointing to Trader Joe's as a source of cheap, healthy food comes across as sort of a tone deaf option

Sir, from my personal experiences with shopping at Trader Joe's, I recall that, in fact, most of their wares are cheap. Exceedingly so. Their reputation for inexpensive groceries is hallmarked by selling what was once called, before inflation, a bottle of "two-buck chuck" wine. I recall that their produce and bread are particularly inexpensive, likely due to being sold close to date of spoilage. Their frozen fish is amazingly cheap for being wild-caught. If I had a very tight food budget, I would certainly shop there more frequently. It appears at least one other person in this thread can corroborate my experience with his or her own.

In any case, sir, there are at least two Trader Joe's within the vicinity of the greater Baltimore area, as Google Maps confirms.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:30 PM on March 16, 2010

Luxury foods don't exist

Sir, no one said this.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:31 PM on March 16, 2010

Because if someone can spend enough less in one area to splurge in another, they could have spent less in both areas and not needed to do the second on the public's dime. Or to put another way - If I blow all my money on computer hardware, can I receive aid for my rent?

But that's not how this works. Look back again at the links and information presented above - people with NO income and NO assets (much less enough for computer hardware) are receiving less than $200/month. Your examples show the flaw in the application to those who honestly qualify. Those who do not honestly qualify are committing fraud, whether they buy luxury, no-luxury, organic, ice cream, chips, whatever.

In my neck of the woods, a store brand/generic $6 frozen pizza feeds 2 but does not provide enough nutrients for basic subsistence. It provides primarily dough, fake cheese and fat.
posted by bunnycup at 2:33 PM on March 16, 2010

(And pla, if you want to foot the Medicaid or Medicare bill for all those people who live on frozen pizza and <$1 frozen burritos with your taxes, power to you. I am strongly of the opinion that healthy food for them is a more frugal use of my tax dollars than hypertension drugs and heart surgery.)
posted by bunnycup at 2:35 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Because if someone can spend enough less in one area to splurge in another, they could have spent less in both areas and not needed to do the second on the public's dime.

But....the difference between organic meat and non-organic meat is a matter of at most five dollars. That five dollars would not be sufficient for them to NOT still qualify for food stamps.

Or to put another way - If I blow all my money on computer hardware, can I receive aid for my rent?

This analogy doesn't work. It's more like, "I've already received the public aid. But I figured out a way to get a roommate, so I can take the extra money I would have had to spend on rent and use it for something else."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:36 PM on March 16, 2010

Governments need people more than people need governments. As much as I like JFK I honestly think the line "don't ask what your government can do for you, but what you can do for your government" is a bit bassackwards.

Yes, people should be productive and .. dare I say, have some measure of fulfillment. With all the fucking money we have poured into needless weapon systems and military endeavors since WWI we could be living in fucking utopia, and I mean that almost literally. world hunger, global clean water advanced energy sources.. hell we could be living on Mars*. The 20th century is one huge missed opportunity. But, nah, we end up squabbling about the temerity of people getting art degrees doing Americorp and being hipsters and all this low-grade absolute bullshit.




*because, lets face it, until we can be self sufficient living somewhere else other than this gorgeous rock we are doomed in the medium term.

"What're we here for? We're all here to go" WSB
posted by edgeways at 2:36 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

To seriously answer you (if you'll forgive the generalizing) - just about any basic cooking ingredients.

I appreciate your thoughtful response. Looking over your answer(s), it looks like the distinction you're making is one of price-- why pay more for a product that is, in general terms, the same? That makes a lot of sense.

However, what I don't think makes a lot of sense (and which, I think, you've sort of been ignoring in this thread, as I've seen it mentioned a few times) is that food stamps and EBT are given out sort of like a paycheck-- you only get a certain amount every month, and once you've spent it, you're out until the next time a deposit is made into your account. So, while obviously I understand any concern you'd have for these kids blowing all their stamps in the first week of the month on luxury foods, I don't really get why you think they take more money out of the system by buying more expensive things. I mean, they're getting the same amount out of the system whether they are buying the white mushrooms or the wildcrafted shitakes; it just won't go as far if they're getting the latter, and then woe be unto them when they get hungry later on. But why does that affect you? And why are you upset about it, unless it's for their own foolishness or wellbeing?
posted by shakespeherian at 2:37 PM on March 16, 2010

Because if someone can spend enough less in one area to splurge in another, they could have spent less in both areas and not needed to do the second on the public's dime. Or to put another way - If I blow all my money on computer hardware, can I receive aid for my rent?

But where does this end, then? Should we only allow people the amount of money that it would cost to feed themselves on ramen noodles three meals a day, every day?
posted by EmilyClimbs at 2:37 PM on March 16, 2010

Yea and you see Mexicans risking life and limb to cross the desert for those jobs.

Yeah, and they have probably been working and saving up money or borrowing from family members for the journey, because nobody, whether Mexican or hipster or anyone else, can move to a new place if they don't have resources. People with few resources also almost always move somewhere where they already know people, so they have a place to stay while they get on their feet. If a given hipster doesn't know anyone in Dallas, the hipster is not going to be able to move to Dallas unless he has money to live there for a while before he gets his first paycheck, even if he's guaranteed to find a job immediately, which he isn't.

I think the larger point is maybe Americans in general do feal a lttle entitled, you see it in different demographics with all the job losses and the general anger thats going around.

That's not "the larger point." It's changing the subject. The point is that it's idiotic to demand that broke people move places where the job prospects are better. It's an idea that is divorced from reality.
posted by craichead at 2:38 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

The problem is not what the people in question choose to eat, it's that they chose to spend their youth in a way that has now resulted in other people having to feed them, instead of learning something that might actually have sustained or created jobs.

You don't have to be a Randroid to agree with this. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs", anyone? Replace "abilities" with "whim" and you end up with Hipsters on Food Stamps.

There'll be much puzzlement followed by hunger if the Chinese credit ever runs out.
posted by Anything at 2:40 PM on March 16, 2010

Should we only allow people the amount of money that it would cost to feed themselves on ramen noodles three meals a day, every day?

Well, not even that, if the theory is that the best government assistance is government assistance that has been shrunk to the size that will fit in a bathtub to be drowned.
posted by blucevalo at 2:41 PM on March 16, 2010

"From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs"

Hm, Rand or Marx. Great choices there. False dichotomy: a lot or all the time?
posted by GuyZero at 2:42 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

its idiotic for people to move where job prospects are better? Is that what your saying? Perhaps time for a little review of American history.
posted by freshundz at 2:42 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I would also consider time a valuable resource for most people, and have no problem with most non-premium frozen prepared meals - Microwave burritos for $10/dozen, a frozen pizza will feed 3-4 people for $3-4, pre-cooked veggies at three for two bucks.

Microwave burritos have essentially the same nutrition as cardboard, and a frozen pizza *might* feed 3-4 kids, but adults? Two max. And again, nutritionally bankrupt.
posted by graventy at 2:42 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

And yet we pay salaries to our "all volunteer" army. Seriously, what's up with the Americorps-hate?

It's my fault. I brought AmeriCorps into it because of the guy in the article and I want to stop talking about it, if you don't mind because you're not going to change my opinion on it by bullying me and accusing me of kicking puppies for fun. Just accept that I don't care for it. But I do want to say this:

I know AmeriCorps likes to pretend that they are just like the military in terms of service to create some kind of espirit de corps among the unskilled people who join up, but I'm sure the military would disagree that what they do is "just the same" as what AmericCorps volunteers do from 10-6, seeing as the service men and women actually make huge sacrifices. They aren't volunteers. You do understand that, right? AmeriCorps doesn't require a sixteenth of the incredible amount of dedication, committment, hardship and training people in the military give and have to go through. Do you understand that? I sincerely hope you do, because it boggles my mind that you would argue that the military and AmeriCorps are the same just because the AmeriCorps PR people and branding want you to believe it is the same. It's not.
posted by anniecat at 2:44 PM on March 16, 2010

You don't have to be a Randroid to agree with this. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs", anyone? Replace "abilities" with "whim" and you end up with Hipsters on Food Stamps.

You are aware, I take it, that in Finland, according to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, "The aim of the social protection system and its social welfare component is to guarantee everyone the constitutional right to indispensable subsistence and care consistent with the dignity of human life"?
posted by blucevalo at 2:45 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

GuyZero, what then is the great philosophy that governs the sentiment that you can fuck around for years and then expect to live in comfort even when the factories start closing around you?
posted by Anything at 2:46 PM on March 16, 2010

seriously, what on earth are you talking about?
posted by shmegegge at 2:48 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

its idiotic for people to move where job prospects are better?

It is idiotic to assume that people with no resources are able to move to places where job prospects are better.

Perhaps time for a little review of American history.

I've taught college classes on American immigration history. The idea that people need resources to migrate is pretty elementary stuff.
posted by craichead at 2:49 PM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

GuyZero, what then is the great philosophy that governs the sentiment that you can fuck around for years and then expect to live in comfort even when the factories start closing around you?

The factories didn't close because of acts of god and we as the purported directors of our democratic society are not powerless to stop their closing, though no expense or effort has been spared in trying to convince us otherwise. The phrase is "industrial policy," I'm told it's nice to live somewhere that they've got one.
posted by enn at 2:50 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

GuyZero, what then is the great philosophy that governs the sentiment that you can fuck around for years and then expect to live in comfort even when the factories start closing around you?

I doubt that anything I can say will assuage your free-floating anger.

Honestly, I'm happy to pay lazy people a few thousand dollars a year to keep them from fomenting the next Revolution against the rest of us who live well by exploiting the poor and uneducated. You realize that 50 years ago these people would have been union organizers and people like that right? Food stamps are cheap at twice the price.
posted by GuyZero at 2:54 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

pla wrote: "
Yes. Yes, it should. If you can afford to live while still eating organic salmon, get the fuck off public assistance ASAP."

I don't know where your outrage comes from exactly, but the organic salmon at my local grocery store is not very expensive at all. (both not-canned, obviously)

Personally, I've known some people who refused for a long time to get on food stamps, even when they were making only a couple grand a year. In one particular instance, what did it was pointing out that if he'd get on fucking food stamps, we wouldn't all have to pay for his food ourselves, we'd get help from the rest of society also.

So he got food stamps, and bought mainly crap.

If people qualify for food stamps, I have no problem with them using it for whatever food they desire. At least in my state, you have to make next to nothing to qualify anyway, so if you're living frugally enough with the other $9,000 a year you make to supplement the food stamps and get some better, more healthy food, more power to you. Better than them buying shit to eat and wasting what they would be spending on healthier food on cable.
posted by wierdo at 2:54 PM on March 16, 2010

GuyZero, what then is the great philosophy that governs the sentiment that you can fuck around for years and then expect to live in comfort even when the factories start closing around you?

I find the assumption that people benefitting from our meagre economic safety net are living in comfort to be generally false.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:57 PM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

I've taught college classes on American immigration history

Well woopdeedoo for you. I guess Im an idiot then. Im just saying these hipsters could try repairing the old rig with some axle dope, loading up on some salt pork and hitting the dusty road.

But whatever
posted by freshundz at 2:59 PM on March 16, 2010

GuyZero, what then is the great philosophy that governs the sentiment that you can fuck around for years and then expect to live in comfort even when the factories start closing around you?

I love it -- a Finnish student (who undoubtedly at the very least knows someone who benefits from the largesse of the generous Finnish welfare system, including its generous unemployment compensation) arguing that American society should be more draconian and less compassionate than it already is.
posted by blucevalo at 3:00 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

The Finnish are compassionate a) because they're all genetically identical and b) because living in Finland is sufficient punishment by itself.
posted by GuyZero at 3:03 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

anniecat, I wasn't saying that serving in Americorps was equivalent to serving in the military. The specific offense you took was the use of the term "volunteer" because, horror of horrors, people who sign up for Americorps receive a pittance to feed themselves. And yet, there are other venues in which we pay people for their "volunteer" services, as well. Not that signing up for Americorps is the equivalent of military service, though I'm not one to esteem one over the other.
posted by deanc at 3:04 PM on March 16, 2010

I still wonder why Pia is getting herself into a tizzy over specifically this use of her tax dollars. It doesn't seem to be a monetary argument at all (since she's not concerned about the actual drains on her tax dollars). I'm wondering: would she be alright if there were an extensive apparatus in place to ensure food stamp recipients only bought cheap food, even i that apparatus cost more than the sum cost of the hypothetical hipster frauds?

Basically, is this an argument for saving money at all, or is it specifically an argument that government should spend money to punish perceived layabouts?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:11 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I used to be just like pla and Anything. Back when I was in my 20's I was a die-hard fiscal conservative. Hell, I worked hard to get good marks in school, get an engineering degree, a good job, and resented the people I knew didn't work as hard who just chose to party their life away and smoke dope all day and spend their (hell..."my") welfare money on booze and smokes and lottery tickets and their dirty offspring and half of them are cheats and probably richer than me and why the hell couldn't they be more like me?! If I had known about Rand back then (too busy studying to read novels) I would have been all over that shit.
I like to think I'm a little wiser now. I was thankfully exposed to, and understand, the principles of privilege, how much of my station in life is through circumstances of birth, good fortune, and a support system others just don't have. I know that I can never understand someone else's situation, their family dynamics, their psychologies, their experiences, so judging them by what I would do in their situation (so why can't they?) is pure folly and narcissism.
I hope pla and Anything, and anyone else who thinks poor people are their enemy get a chance to learn this too, and I think we at metafilter should ease up a little on the pile-ons and insults when conservative types voice their opinions around here and try a little gentle encouraging teaching instead. It worked for me.
posted by rocket88 at 3:12 PM on March 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

And reread your Holbo.

Wow, that was great.
posted by enn at 3:13 PM on March 16, 2010

GuyZero, what then is the great philosophy that governs the sentiment that you can fuck around for years and then expect to live in comfort even when the factories start closing around you?

Just out of curiosity, which of the people in the article would you characterize as having "fucked around for years"?
posted by threetoed at 3:14 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I find freshundz's 'Well woopdeedoo for you... But whatever' argument both compelling and persuasive.
posted by mazola at 3:14 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: It's probably a "big problem," but no one knows it's a problem so it's not a problem.
posted by Brak at 3:16 PM on March 16, 2010

Hand-outs should limited to surplus MREs and agricultural surpluses, no more paying people to *not* produce.

The military/Wall Street gravy train? Yeah, that needs to end, too.

Just out of curiosity, which of the people in the article would you characterize as having "fucked around for years"?

Not aimed at me but I'll bite. The art school grad? The former "toiler" in publishing who moved to a new city to be a...part-time blogger?
posted by codswallop at 3:18 PM on March 16, 2010

Wow, 400+ comments already. I should have jumped in earlier, but I have stuff to do to survive, and I can't believe I'm about to defend "hipsters" or what the fuck ever this Salon article is nattering on about. I really don't have time to read it, and I probably won't because it sounds like bullshit that's just going to piss me off.

Hi. I'm on food stamps. I have been for a while. I've even bought a small amount of smoked salmon, shopped with stamps at farmer's markets. Food stamps have probably saved my life.

I suffer from severe chronic depression and PTSD, related to childhood physical and emotional abuse. Beyond food stamps I've also recently qualified for "unemployable" general assistance in the state of Washington. This is good because I fucking need it, and I'm actively engaging the health care system here, which doesn't suck as much as it does elsewhere.

I've been unable - not unwilling, because I've tried - but unable to stay focused and coherent long enough to seek, land, and keep a job due to the depression and PTSD. And I've tried. I have mad skills, but they aren't enough in this economy and I can't seem to keep my shit together long enough to be functional and coherent.

Depression is terrible, terrible thing. Severe depression means I can't think straight. Severe depression means I'm fatigued almost always. I get winded climbing a flight of stairs. My entire body sometimes hurts like I was beaten to a pulp with a ball peen hammer. We're talking actual physical body pain like a strong flu.

If left untreated severe depression can lead to psychosis and dangerous mental breakdowns where shit just gets worse and worse and you want to kill yourself. And I've spent way, way too much time thinking about killing myself. It's not healthy. Your body actually reacts to this mental state and starts to break down and get sick more often, and the cycle perpetuates itself. I've had serious ideations of self harm and suicide within the last week and month. It's something I've struggled with for most of my life.

And trust me, I've tried all kinds of things to cure my own depression. I exercise, I walk everywhere, I try to take care of my mind and body, I try to eat well, etc. Some of it works. Some of it is just a sinecure and coping with it.

And I'm so far from a "trustafarian" that it's a polar opposite. My parents and family want to help but they cannot. They're broke. Both my mom and dad are about 60 and they're still working full time. They can't afford to buy me health insurance. My dad can barely afford to buy me a cheeseburger for lunch when I last saw him. They're both terrified I'm going to hurt myself and they probably feel hopeless and terrible they can't do more to help. (The abuse was from a step parent, FYI, not my divorced birth parents.)

I'm doing things to "better myself" and "situation". I'm trying to get into therapy and treatment. I've been trying for about a year now. In California they don't really have a program for mental health unless you're truly batshit crazy - the bar is really high, and it sucks. I tried for almost 6 months in California and I kept getting the run around.

I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of friends who love me and want to help, and they have. Some of them are here on MetaFilter. Others I've known since grade school. I'm so lucky and thankful to have anyone in my life at all who gives a shit. Many people don't have this at all.

Before I started using food stamps I've been chronically homeless and wandering. I've eaten food out of dumpsters. I learned how to dumpster dive particular businesses for higher quality food, but I've also eaten McDonald's, or discarded pizza and donuts and worse.

When I was about 18 I started out my "adult" life living in a field next to a freeway. I took showers from a bottle of sun-warmed water. I shaved with the cheapest of soap and razors in gas station bathrooms. I nearly died from scurvy and pneumonia in that field after 6 months of eating McDonald's out of a dumpster and drinking cheap malt liquor, or worse, home-made "hooch" brewed from dumpstered fruit mixed with sugar and yeast and left to ferment. I spent nearly two weeks with a fever over 104-105 or so, basically dying of scurvy.

Yes, I was an idiot. But this is all related to the depression, and the drinking is directly related to trying to self-medicate. Self-medication is a huge issue with depression. To discard the issue of self-medication is to dismiss the root problem out of hand, and it's bullshit.


So. Food stamps have saved my life and have given me a leg up on life and helped give me a little bit of slack so I can work on directly addressing the issues that are preventing me from being functional. Almost twenty years after "running away from home" and moving out before I was 18 I'm finally trying to get help thanks to food stamps and the very meager "socialist" health and human services that many states in our country provide. I now have limited health care, I have a support network and I'm actively engaging in the system.

Thanks to programs like food stamps I'm still here to tell my stories. I'm still here to write the things I write that people seem to like to read.

Yeah, I've bought "luxury" food. Sometimes I treat myself to ice cream. Sometimes I treat myself to something like a couple of ounces of lox or smoked salmon to crumble on my staples. Sometimes I buy avocados and fresh veggies. And being able to spend food stamps at a farmer's market is pretty much the best, most humanizing thing ever. It's healthy, it supports local businesses, it's environmentally friendly and good for you and it's good for me.

But what I mainly buy is good, cheap bread, cereals, rice, pasta and all those calorie-dense but affordable staples. But sometimes I buy affordable cookies, or junk food like store brand fruit pies.

The ends of the month are usually pretty lean and I end up with just rice and beans or a box of cereal. More than once just this year I've found myself having to choose between a loaf of bread or a bag of generic cereal. Way more than once this year I've had cereal with plain tap water on it.

If this pisses you off, you have no idea what it means to be so broke you can't even afford to eat, or what it means to not have health care at all, or what it means to have mental health issues that lead to severe dysfunction.

I don't want to be on food stamps. But I've paid for it, I need it and I should use it. In better years when I've had good jobs I've paid way more into just the Social Security system in a couple of years than I could get in 10 years of food stamps benefits.

If you want to get pissed off about government spending - you should be getting pissed off at the Halliburtons, Bechtels and Blackwaters that make social aid spending look like the chump change that it is. You should be pissed off at our government dropping hundreds of laser guided bombs that cost more per unit than the salary of a half a dozen teachers for a year.

You should be pissed off about so many more things than food stamps and public assistance. It's chump change.

Not only can we easily afford it - we can't afford to not do it. To deny this basic compassion for even the laziest welfare-abuser is to deny all the progress we've made as a human race and set the clocks back to the stone age where people died just for the lack of clean water and food.

Fuck. That.
posted by loquacious at 3:18 PM on March 16, 2010 [573 favorites]

As much as I like JFK I honestly think the line "don't ask what your government can do for you, but what you can do for your government" is a bit bassackwards.

Good news for your love of JFK: he never said that.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:18 PM on March 16, 2010 [34 favorites]

Which again, is why I'm not fond of this sort of yellow journalism. To start with, I'm having a hard time thinking kindly of anyone who is drawn into outrage at gourmet hipsters on food stamps based on such obvious axe-grinding. It's beyond gullibility at this point.

And secondly, even if we grant the possibility that someone, somewhere, is gaming the system to live large, that's not the experiences of most people who need and get benefits.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:24 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

This thread has got everything.
posted by mazola at 3:26 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

This thread has got everything.

Not yet, but check this out:

The real solution to all our problems is Voluntary Human Extinction
posted by wcfields at 3:34 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

lots of less-than signs and 3s arranged in the appropriate order to loquacious... thank you for bringing some perspective to this thread.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:35 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

bluecevalo, our economy is going down way faster than in the early 90s which was the last time we slashed the welfare system in panic mode.

Rocket88, I'm not talking about people who grew up poor but people from middle class families who had every opportunity to take initially boring but useful vocational or science education instead of being fashionistas.

And, yeah, I mostly shouldn't be blaming the individual people but the culture in general. To the extent that hipsterism has left people unprepared for this, it is/was a broken culture.
posted by Anything at 3:39 PM on March 16, 2010

Food stamps are good for the economy.

Duh.
posted by lunit at 3:39 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

dances_with_sneetches wrote: "They would deduct whatever extra you could budget for food from the amount of stamps you received."

Where I used to live, you'd get significantly more than the usual allotment because there was far more money budgeted for food stamps than people who were willing to take them, despite it being one of the poorest states in the nation.

Basically, as long as they are under budget, they don't cut people off due to the time limits, and if that's not enough to eat up the whole budget, everybody whose income qualifies them for food stamps at all gets more than they're supposed to, again to eat up the budget (the vast majority of which comes from the federal government)

Now that the economy is in the toilet, I'm sure everybody is getting the regular allotment again.
posted by wierdo at 3:43 PM on March 16, 2010

Oh - yeah.

Not quite - I argued that the state shouldn't deny me my preference in favor of yours.

Do you have any idea what "marginal utility" means? Why do people throwing around libertarian ideology so often seem like they never even took econ 101?
posted by GuyZero at 3:47 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Not aimed at me but I'll bite. The art school grad? The former "toiler" in publishing who moved to a new city to be a...part-time blogger?

Having done both a factory job and now working as a grad student helping to write papers, grants, etc. I can safely say that writing, especially well enough to get paid for it, is definitely the harder of the two. In blue collar work you can at least tune your mind out a bit, have your thoughts wander while you do the task at hand. Trying to do mental tasks when you really want to be doing or thinking about something else is excruciating.

It's probably slightly different for different people, but still, if I were in it for the money I sure as hell would take a physically demanding job over a even a fairly simple mental one.
posted by Zalzidrax at 3:53 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Straightener: Yup, per the Department of Agriculture, $200 per month is the maximum benefit rate for an individual. So dude is reporting to the welfare department that he is basically living on the streets in order to get the max rate on food stamps, spends them on roasted rabbit and brags about it on Slate.

This doesn't seem right, unless the calculation of food stamp benefits has changed dramatically in the last 3-4 years. I'm kind of surprised that you have clients with no income who are qualifying for relatively low benefits, but my hunch is that would occur if you have someone whose income is unearned (e.g., SSI or SSDI rather than wages) and who has very low housing costs or is homeless. The SNAP benefit calculation lets you disregard 20% of your earned income [so that a hypothetical Horatio Algers would only lose $0.24 in food stamps for each additional dollar he earns as he tugs those bootstraps] and also lets you disregard a big chunk of housing costs when those rise above 50% of your net income after all other deductions.

Examples:

A hipster living alone, who makes $1,000 per month at a low-wage job and pays $450 per month in rent, will qualify for a benefit of $140 per month.

A hipster living alone, who makes $750 per month at a low-wage job and pays $200 per month in rent, would qualify for the maximum benefit of $200 per month.

A homeless person with severe mental illness, who receives an $674 SSI payment monthly but no other income, would qualify for a benefit of $40 per month.


I think it's not absurd on its face to believe that a relatively young person working low-wage or odd jobs in Baltimore could both be making enough money to pay rent (which isn't that high) and yet low enough to qualify for the full SNAP benefit. Particularly if they're healthy, uninsured, and have no medical costs, which is what sucks up a huge portion of most low-income family's paychecks.
posted by iminurmefi at 3:57 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

bluecevalo, our economy is going down way faster than in the early 90s which was the last time we slashed the welfare system in panic mode.

I think your memory is a little skewed here.

The recession of the early 90s ran from about 1990-1991 (with negative GDP growth in '91). The "welfare reform" cuts under Clinton were implemented in 1996, a year in which GDP growth was about 3.75%.

Anyway, cutting spending "in panic mode" is not how the US government operates or has typically operated. Modern US fiscal policy since FDR is fundamentally Keynesian: when GDP growth drops, the government increases spending, typically by taking on debt.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:58 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Some would debate whether it's really Keynsian, since when GDP growth begins agin the government does little or nothing to put on the brakes and doesn't actually pay any of the debt off.
posted by GuyZero at 4:00 PM on March 16, 2010

I'm sorry, mr_roboto, I was referring of the Finnish system.
posted by Anything at 4:01 PM on March 16, 2010

Yeah, good point. But I think we can agree that cutting spending "in panic mode" during times of economic crisis is something the US government doesn't do. Hell, it has a damn hard time cutting spending ever.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:02 PM on March 16, 2010

Just out of curiosity, which of the people in the article would you characterize as having "fucked around for years"?

Not aimed at me but I'll bite. The art school grad?

Can I just say fuck you? I went to art school, graduated, and now am a self-employed small business owner. So are most of the other people I went to school with. To make a living as an artist and small business owner in this economy is no easy task. I get up every day and hustle for gigs, work long hours, invest every cent back into my business, and can't afford things like health insurance because I am too focused on paying the rent and feeding myself when inevitably half my clients decide that "invoice due within 30 days" is a suggestion and not a deadline.

Last year it was really slow I most definitely qualified for food stamps - and you know what? I should have done it, because PB&J and buttered noodles got old after a couple of months.

Maybe some trust fund "artists" sit around all day doing nothing, drinking PBRs in their Williamsburg lofts, but the people I know work harder than any weekly-paycheck-with-benefits person I've ever met. Sorry if me and the people in this article are younger, hipper, better cooks, and having more fun than you despite the meager paychecks we work hard for.
posted by bradbane at 4:02 PM on March 16, 2010 [22 favorites]

Oh, sorry. Thread has gotten too long to follow easily...
posted by mr_roboto at 4:02 PM on March 16, 2010

To the extent that hipsterism has left people unprepared for this, it is/was a broken culture.

Hipsterism is a made-up idea that's a handy hook for journalists to hang an article on that has been around for about twelve minutes. It hasn't had time to leave people unprepared for anything. How old are you? How much history have you studied? Do you actually know anything about so-called hipster enclaves like parts of San Francisco, Brooklyn, or Portland, OR?

Honestly, it sounds like you're talking out of your ass. You should stop.
posted by rtha at 4:05 PM on March 16, 2010 [12 favorites]

Dude, if they liquidated the state you'd have a lot less choice on how to spend your money. Also, it's cheaper to give poor people food stamps than to hire extra police officers to stop crime and food riots. If they stopped food stamps do you really think there would be a net benefit to society?

It's the Calvinist/Puritan mindset deeply ingrained in American culture that overestimates the risk of "moral hazard" and freeloaders/the undeserving taking what they're not entitled to, which leads to some irrational policy choices. Such as spending more on guard labor to combat freeloading than would be lost to freeloading.

One example that was in the news recently: the IRS sending two agents to collect $0.04 in back taxes.
posted by acb at 4:06 PM on March 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

You do realize, right, that it costs money to move? You can't just magically teleport yourself and your belongings to a magical apartment that you are able to rent without a job or security deposit.

How many possessions would a food stamp recipient have? The Federal Government should give them a cardboard box and an hour to pack and bundle them onto a coach for wherever labor is required. Any leftover possessions could be sold off to recover costs (they're not going to need a ukulele or fixed-gear bike when they're sewing mailbags in Alabama or whatever), or seized as evidence of welfare fraud (why the hell do they own a MacBook Pro or a Le Creuset pot?).
posted by acb at 4:13 PM on March 16, 2010

I was going to come up with something about this topic once I got home from work, but I just found out my application for Food Stamp benefits came to a total of $0.

They were kind enough to enclose an card in a separate envelope on the off chance my income goes down. Yes, they mailed me a Food Stamp card with a balance of zero dollars.

*bites card*
posted by Wuggie Norple at 4:15 PM on March 16, 2010

"How many possessions would a food stamp recipient have? The Federal Government should give them a cardboard box and an hour to pack and bundle them onto a coach for wherever labor is required. Any leftover possessions could be sold off to recover costs (they're not going to need a ukulele or fixed-gear bike when they're sewing mailbags in Alabama or whatever), or seized as evidence of welfare fraud (why the hell do they own a MacBook Pro or a Le Creuset pot?)."

For the Nth time, nobody in the article had a Le Creuset pot. It's just a silly turn of phrase.

But yeah, how dare they buy $40 bicycles (a useful economic tool if ever there was one). Let's just pile them onto buses against their will if they won't conduct themselves in an appropriately humble manner. It's all I can do not to trigger Godwin's law.

(Also, if you said "fixed-gear bike" at any time in this thread, the way you argue is stupid and reliant on lazy stereotypes, and you are probably not a great person.)
posted by zvs at 4:21 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Ack! My kingdom for an edit button! Typos in the rent amounts in my examples. Sigh.
A hipster living alone, who makes $1,000 per month at a low-wage job and pays $450 $800 per month in rent, will qualify for a benefit of $140 per month.
A hipster living alone, who makes $750 per month at a low-wage job and pays $200 $675 per month in rent, would qualify for the maximum benefit of $200 per month.

My point, which I was making incoherently with the bad maths: earned income + high rent = big SNAP benefit. The federal government helpfully assumes that homeless people have EVEN MORE money to spend on food, because after all, they're not stuck with big mortgage payments, right?
posted by iminurmefi at 4:24 PM on March 16, 2010

I'm pretty sure that acb was not being entirely sincere, zvs.

(acb, zvs: wtf is up with these usernames?)
posted by craichead at 4:26 PM on March 16, 2010

The offer I extended to Justinian to visit my parents and judgy judgy judge their lifestyle is open to pla, as well.

pla accused me of insincerity, but I'm being completely sincere. I believe my email is in my profile. I'll even buy him the ticket.

I bet he would get along with them, actually. They're not filthy liberal hippies like I am, or like the people "profiled" in this article that he is so riled up about.
posted by muddgirl at 4:27 PM on March 16, 2010

Damn hamburgers. Yeah, mods, feel free to kill that.
I have a good excuse, it's my name.
posted by zvs at 4:28 PM on March 16, 2010

I really don't understand the hate. Whatever they buy, the amount they get a month is fixed. They don't get more money for spending at Whole Foods. I also know someone in this article and they simply don't eat all that much and they eat well instead of engaging in other "luxuries" like going to the movies, getting haircuts, buying new clothes, etc.

Many of these exotic ingredients are also very cheap in NYC. Coconut milk is pricey in some areas, but can be had for pennies in Chinatown here.

Spending at Whole Foods, you probably run out of food stamps two weeks into the month and you have to use your own money to buy food for the rest of the month.

Food stamps are also agricultural subsidies. What kind of agriculture do you want to subsidize? Giant grain monocultures and factory farms? Or organic and local small farms?

Hint: The former already get plenty of money. I'm pretty happy to see my tax dollars go to something else.

I'm glad Food Stamps give people the freedom to chose. We don't know the situations of individuals. They could have any manner of diseases requiring a special diet. Or god forbid, they simply want to spend their money on food that tastes good.
posted by melissam at 4:30 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Also, The Straightener seems to be really worked up about the "$150/month in food stamps for one person who makes $2,000 a year with no other assistance" number.

I'm putting a $5 mefi account bounty for the first person who can provide evidence that any particular "fact" in that article is true, as presented. Surely there are records of these sorts of things.
posted by muddgirl at 4:31 PM on March 16, 2010

Can somebody please reassure me that not all old people are bitter against the young? "Look at those stupid kids, following their passion! Doing what you love makes you a loser and a bad American who steals my tax dollars and wastes them on wild salmon!"
posted by pecknpah at 4:32 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

the people I know work harder than any weekly-paycheck-with-benefits person I've ever met. Sorry if me and the people in this article are younger, hipper, better cooks, and having more fun than you despite the meager paychecks we work hard for.

Whatever helps you get up in the morning, but you do know that having benefits and less anxiety and a weekly paycheck doesn't equate to having a less awesome life, specially in the US where there's no universal healthcare. I'd take healthcare and a stable income
over the stress of being an artist or a small business owner any day of the week.
posted by anniecat at 4:33 PM on March 16, 2010

I'd take healthcare and a stable income over the stress of being an artist or a small business owner any day of the week.

Perfectly reasonable There's nothing wrong with that. It's simply a matter of your personal preference.

So why, in this thread, are you displaying irrational anger toward those who have chosen differently? What is it, exactly, that you fear?
posted by Nothing... and like it at 4:41 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

For the sake of my sanity, I going to choose to believe that acb forgot their hamburger tag.
posted by Space Kitty at 4:44 PM on March 16, 2010

Can somebody please reassure me that not all old people are bitter against the young?

I'm in my early thirties, so I'm not old. Are college students required to take reading comprehension anymore, or do they just start crying when someone suggests that being poor is not fun or good for you and that they should take precautions against falling into poverty by getting a job, paying their loan obligations, and developing in-demand skills rather than having zero work experience and defining what their passion is based on an unwillingness to do work they deem is beneath them.
posted by anniecat at 4:44 PM on March 16, 2010

rocket88 : Obviously pla is an entirely self-made man who hasn't benefited at all from the money stolen from him by the state.

One can object to blatant parasitism without needing to live on manna themselves.


wierdo : Better than them buying shit to eat and wasting what they would be spending on healthier food on cable.

Argh, no, no, no!

This seems like the key point that virtually everyone in this discussion doesn't get - Society doesn't owe you cable! It doesn't owe you high-quality food. It doesn't owe you internet access, or a sidewalk and white picket fence. It barely has an obligation to keep you alive - And even then, only because we optimistically (or in the case of TFA, naively) hope you will eventually become productive again.


GuyZero : Do you have any idea what "marginal utility" means? Why do people throwing around libertarian ideology so often seem like they never even took econ 101?

Why yes, yes I do. So tell me, Mr. Jevons (or does your knowledge of this topic stop with the Marxist fairy-tale?), how you would apply Gossen's law to the fact that people, particularly unskilled ones, essentially count as fungible resources of which we have a vast surplus?

Keep in mind, such ideas as applied to humans arose in an era where we very much needed human labor, including unskilled labor. The marginal utility of keeping someone alive for its own sake approaches zero in any post-industrial society, GuyZero. Therefore, in considering the problem of poverty while maximizing the marginal utility of all available resources (and conveniently avoiding the boogey-man of poverty-inspired crime), the most rational solution consists of society footing the bill for 255 grains of lead.

Which you will kindly note I did not, heartless as you may consider me, suggest as an option.


muddgirl : I bet he would get along with them, actually. They're not filthy liberal hippies like I am, or like the people "profiled" in this article that he is so riled up about.

I quite likely would. I tend to get along well with most people in person - Text does not seem to adequately convey how I mean things. I could have this same discussion with most of you in person, and we'd go away respecting each other's viewpoint rather than calling each other trolls.

I know no one will believe this, but I count as a fairly liberal person myself. Only in matters of finance do I lean to the right. I support public healthcare, I support assistance for those who need it, I support most of the social programs under discussion in this thread.

Then along come a bunch of hipsters flaunting their abuse of these very social safety nets. What do you want me to say, other than "WTF? You people defend this crap?"

If TFA has mischaracterized the situation for sensationalism - Then we should blame TFA, not each other.
posted by pla at 4:45 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Whatever helps you get up in the morning

Something tells me this isn't about what helps the young arty types get up in the morning.
posted by nanojath at 4:50 PM on March 16, 2010

I went to art school, graduated, and now am a self-employed small business owner...

I think the implicit argument from the anti-entitlement crowd, which is more insidious than the assumption that you are lazy, is that your mistake was going to art school in the first place. You should have, for example, gotten an MBA or an engineering degree and gotten a Real Job. Like ice cream, art is a "luxury" that can be done without.

Apart from the obvious insanity of insinuating an assessment of art as something without social value, this position in turn implies that a whole hierarchy of professions, some of which are righteous and necessary, and others which are indulgences for parasitic freeloaders living off the surplus of those righteous. Those building this hierarchy in their minds and in their speech imagine society as a machine. You are either a big important cog, a hearty worker greasing the gears of commerce with your blood, or you are just some free-floating obstruction, a wrench in the works, simply getting in the way.

Culture is not like this imaginary machine. In the real world, we need everybody.
posted by avianism at 4:51 PM on March 16, 2010 [37 favorites]

(acb, zvs: wtf is up with these usernames?)

It's my initials, and the fact that I was one of about half a dozen Andrews in a UNIX lab at university.

For the sake of my sanity, I going to choose to believe that acb forgot their hamburger tag.

I might have; or perhaps I should have just phrased it as modestly proposing a solution.
posted by acb at 4:52 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

melissam: "I also know someone in this article and they simply don't eat all that much and they eat well instead of engaging in other "luxuries" like going to the movies, getting haircuts, buying new clothes, etc. "

This is pretty much what I suspected. We've never been on food stamps or other gov't assistance, but when my husband was unemployed, food was really our only luxury. We didn't have cable, we rarely went out to eat, we didn't buy clothes, and we went to the $3 budget matinees if we went to the theater at all (for those of you following my twitter feed, the play tickets were a gift). But we did occasionally get salmon, and we had tiramisu for Valentine's Day. I'd get a case of frappucinos at Sam's Club for about $1/bottle and take them to work instead of stopping at Starbucks. (Yeah, boo hoo.) My point is that you cannot judge someone's situation based on what's in their grocery basket. You can't even judge them on what kind of car they drive; I have a nice car that we bought when we were both employed, before a hospitalization, and before a pay cut. Now I'm underwater on the thing so we can't sell it and buy anything cheaper, but if you saw it you might erroneously assume the contents of my bank account.
posted by desjardins at 4:53 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

So why, in this thread, are you displaying irrational anger toward those who have chosen differently? What is it, exactly, that you fear?

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound angry or irrationally angry. If some folks here want to bitch about how unfair it is that the university isn't funding their MFA in Interpretative Dance and take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans, fine. But then to later bitch about why there aren't any high paying jobs in their area of passion? If I sound angry, it's because this is really silly stuff and I don't get why someone would think that makes any sense.
posted by anniecat at 4:55 PM on March 16, 2010

If they qualify for food stamps and can figure out how to pay the rent and still be able to buy nice stuff, more power to them. I don't really see the problem here. We have an income qualification, which they meet, we give them food stamps and they buy whatever they want. There are limitations on what you can buy with food stamps, like no cigarettes or booze. No one's breaking the law, general happiness is increased, where's the harm? I'm kind of mad that I didn't think of it when I was a starving student.
posted by doctor_negative at 4:56 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Are college students required to take reading comprehension anymore, or do they just start crying when someone suggests that being poor is not fun or good for you and that they should take precautions against falling into poverty by getting a job, paying their loan obligations, and developing in-demand skills rather than having zero work experience and defining what their passion is based on an unwillingness to do work they deem is beneath them.

None of us are doing that.

Seriously. I have a well-paying job now, and I just got into a top-10 PhD program for my field, fully funded and with a generous stipend. I'm not in any debt. I'm not really comfortable revealing this stuff about me, because I know I am incredibly lucky-- everyone deserves the opportunities I've had. I've also worked my ass off to get this far, and plan to continue working my ass off, because I'm actually not an idiot, despite whatever weird image you've cooked up of me. So yeah, I do have a cushy job now, and I will be following my passion in the very near future, I don't think I'm entitled to anything without working for it, and I'm fully aware that it will be hard. Stop projecting whatever issues you have with young people on me and the other young MeFites; we're not as dumb as you think.
posted by oinopaponton at 4:59 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

The cognitive dissonance in this thread is amusing.

If you want social safety nets, then no, art school is not your gamble to make. While you might bear the brunt of your decision, it's a gamble that you made for all of us. Maybe the benefits of art culture are enough that we should take that gamble. But if we're all bearing the risk for your soul to fill enriched, we should all get a say in it.

That's part of the cost of social programs. That voters have a vested interest to sit down and decide whether or not you deserve that extra pint of ice cream, or organic greens as opposed to frozen burritos. To decide whether or not we should allow loans to be extended for people who want PhD's in underwater basket weaving or an MFA.

Luckily, there's an unlikely ally in Milton Friedman. He tells us that while it might be wasteful to spend 'lavishly' on one welfare recipient, when you could spend frugally on two welfare recipients (because let's face it, if Baltimore is running out of poor folks, I'm sure we can find some in Africa/Haiti who can beat out all our sob stories combined), it's typically even more wasteful to design a program that appropriately polices their behavior.
posted by politikitty at 5:03 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Does Godwin's law still apply if a person's comments are fascist?
posted by Tashtego at 5:05 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

One can object to blatant parasitism

Indeed one can. But it seems foolish to object to a thing that is not in evidence.
posted by rtha at 5:13 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Apart from the obvious insanity of insinuating an assessment of art as something without social value, this position in turn implies that a whole hierarchy of professions, some of which are righteous and necessary, and others which are indulgences for parasitic freeloaders living off the surplus of those righteous. Those building this hierarchy in their minds and in their speech imagine society as a machine. You are either a big important cog, a hearty worker greasing the gears of commerce with your blood, or you are just some free-floating obstruction, a wrench in the works, simply getting in the way.

Culture is not like this imaginary machine. In the real world, we need everybody.

Care to cast this attitude back in history and see how it would have fared, say, in the 1200s?

The vast bulk of human existence has not been in an insane time of plenty like we enjoy today. In all of those time, yes, there is and has always been a hierarchy of professions.
posted by rr at 5:14 PM on March 16, 2010

Ugh, I'm flagging my last post for the mods because this is the basically just the worst derail and it's ridiculous to even fight about this.

This shit is like Lord of the Flies. Is it SXSW's fault?
posted by oinopaponton at 5:16 PM on March 16, 2010

To decide whether or not we should allow loans to be extended for people who want PhD's in underwater basket weaving or an MFA.

There is something deliciously ironic in the fact that the all of the guys on Wall Street who played with our money (and lost it! thanks guys!) almost certainly had very...practical degrees in business and accounting and programming.

I'm thinking that a loan to someone going for a PhD in underwater basket weaving is a much better risk. I mean, even if they end up on food stamps or something for a while, it's not like they're going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, you know?
posted by rtha at 5:17 PM on March 16, 2010 [23 favorites]

I'm in my early thirties, so I'm not old. Are college students required to take reading comprehension anymore, or do they just start crying when someone suggests that being poor is not fun or good for you and that they should take precautions against falling into poverty by getting a job, paying their loan obligations, and developing in-demand skills rather than having zero work experience and defining what their passion is based on an unwillingness to do work they deem is beneath them.

Your retort might be a bit more convincing if you used correct punctuation. Moreover, I find it strange that you are absolutely unwilling to give hipsters or whatever you want to call them the benefit of the doubt. I highly doubt most of these people want to be on food stamps and without health insurance forever, and once they find a job they'll pay back more in taxes than they took out of the system.

Honestly, I expect to live without health insurance and probably on food stamps when I graduate. That doesn't make me a lazy person, a person without goals and the desire to live a normal, productive life. That makes me a person who will graduate at the wrong time and have to enter one of the worst job markets in years. I work hard, both at my paying job and at my studies, so that I will be one of the best candidates out there. Your assumption that all twenty-year-olds are too lazy or privileged to develop skills is incorrect, and, frankly, pretty insulting.

This Salon.com article is meant to offend. It is poorly written and researched. If you want to launch into a diatribe about kids these days, then find some actual data and lay off the stereotypes.
posted by pecknpah at 5:17 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Seriously, pla, what do you make in a year? How much of your money is the government stealing? If you don't qualify for food stamps, and you're not getting the EIC back when you do your taxes, you could probably afford to shop at Whole Foods some of the time. The trick is to avoid a lot of the fancy branded CPG, and stick to the produce and bulk sections. Even the meat section can be good if you understand that grass fed, dry aged New York strip is not an everyday food. If you know how to cook, and you know about food, Whole Foods has some pretty good options. I won't shop there because their current chairman is a dick, but you'd probably get along with him.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:24 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Care to cast this attitude back in history and see how it would have fared, say, in the 1200s?
The vast bulk of human existence has not been in an insane time of plenty like we enjoy today. In all of those time, yes, there is and has always been a hierarchy of professions.

And when we were cavemen everyone had to spend all their time looking for food and making babies. Man, art students would have sucked at that! What's your point?

That's now how it is now because, as you say, today we can afford a society where some people get to make art and some people get to do unprofitable things like make art. As someone who likes reading books and looking at art and listening to indie music I'm pretty happy about the situation.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 5:28 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

hah, sorry for the weird repetition about making art.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 5:28 PM on March 16, 2010

Suppose the hipsters in the article are shopping at thrift stores (another hipster adoption) or selling their clothes and CDs (now they use iPods) at resale shops.

Everyone should be forced to live on massive credit-card debt attained by buying all new consumer goods at full price, which they routinely throw out to clog landfills! That's the American way!

If they were pooling their stamps and buying vegetables and beans to make cheap and nutritionally healthy vegan stews for communal dining, they'd be dirty hippie socialists. You can't win.*

*note: I am a liberal, and I would like to live in Finland, but this is post-Bushian America, where, I grant you, the recipient of government benefits must always be a conveniently hatable Other.
posted by bad grammar at 5:29 PM on March 16, 2010

Care to cast this attitude back in history and see how it would have fared, say, in the 1200s?

Why would I want to develop an attitude or espouse a political position which would be appropriate to the 1200s?
posted by avianism at 5:29 PM on March 16, 2010 [19 favorites]

Oh, and politikitty, what does Milton Friedman say about spending billions of dollars to spread depleted uranium at high velocity around a desert somewhere?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:29 PM on March 16, 2010

If you want social safety nets, then no, art school is not your gamble to make. While you might bear the brunt of your decision, it's a gamble that you made for all of us. Maybe the benefits of art culture are enough that we should take that gamble. But if we're all bearing the risk for your soul to fill enriched, we should all get a say in it.

You can frame being an artist in whatever touchy-feely bullshit way you want, but I don't do this to enrich my soul or to contribute to culture. I provide a service to my clients that they value and pay for. I get up every day and sell sell sell. I am an entrepreneur. I create economic value out of thin air. I am more of a capitalist than the people in this thread advocating poor people eat porridge until they discover where their bootstraps are.

Yes, I love what I do, but I don't do it for the paycheck. I do it for the freedom of answering only to myself. The minor monetary stresses are a small price to pay for that, but to each their own. You are the one making value judgments about what kind of businesses and entrepeneurship deserve to have a safety net.
posted by bradbane at 5:30 PM on March 16, 2010 [12 favorites]

Stop projecting whatever issues you have with young people on me and the other young MeFites; we're not as dumb as you think.

The most important point I am making in anything I'm saying that I think you all really need to fully absorb and meditate on, is this:

I am NOT OLD goddammit.

(Good luck to all of you. I forgot to disengage earlier and should have because it doesn't really matter to me who uses their food stamps for what or whatever they decide they want their career to be. I hope you all do really well and are happy doing whatever you like and I really mean that. Just remember one important thing: anniecat is NOT OLD goddammit.)
posted by anniecat at 5:31 PM on March 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

That's it, I'm stopping eating. It's the only way to make everyone happy.
posted by The Whelk at 5:32 PM on March 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

the u.s. is just retarded. food is like healthcare in the u.s.! parts of it privatized, parts of it "socialized." obviously, when the system itself is fucked up and unfair to begin with, there will be extravagant spenders in the poor community, and frugal or even miserly hoarders in the rich community. either way, you learn to cheat the system to your own benefit...that's the beauty of america, right?
posted by crystalsparks at 5:32 PM on March 16, 2010

Why would I want to develop an attitude or espouse a political position which would be appropriate to the 1200s?

Your lack of support for the divine right of kings merely betrays your insufferable privilege!
posted by furiousthought at 5:33 PM on March 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Regarding John Waters: in his autobiography he mentions that he bought a tin of crab-meat for a cocktail party with food stamps, an action which met with collective outrage from the cashiers at his grocery store. This was probably around 40 years ago.

Since then, cultural research (artist) still remains a borderline poverty-level profession.
posted by ovvl at 5:39 PM on March 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Anything, I apologize for my earlier ad hominem statement. It was uncalled for.
posted by blucevalo at 5:42 PM on March 16, 2010

The Whelk, you can't stop until after you've eaten sausages and drunk beer at the meetup tomorrow night.

I have to warn you, though, that there might be hipsters at the place we're going to. Hipsters spending money. Supporting local businesses. It's awful, I know - but what can you do? It's San Francisco!
posted by rtha at 5:45 PM on March 16, 2010

Finally someone will cram a sausage in my mouth.
posted by The Whelk at 5:46 PM on March 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Cute, but that doesn't really get at the point.

If we collectively decide that people deserve our help when they're down on our luck, we also have a vested interest in making sure they don't end up down on their luck. So if that means we should also discourage people from being Wall Street investors, that's the same point framed differently.

If we have universal healthcare, we also have a vested interest that people don't become fat, or smokers, or whatever. I mean, isn't that the argument that people are making up here? That we're saving money by letting them eat a healthy meal?

When we create a safety net, we create a stake in every single individuals lives. We do it in part because we don't want to see them starve, but to save our pocket book (i.e. guarantee we can still afford to pay this benefit to future generations indefinitely), we also want to discourage as many people as possible to be in a position where they would need to sign up for food stamps. When you decide to take up smoking, there's a chance that I'm paying into that. When I decide I want to quit the gym, there's a chance you'll pick up the tab for that decision.

That means discerning the various reasons people end up using our various safety nets. If it's because some people are making collectively bad decisions in college, then we should look into discouraging that.

But as I said because the cost of complicated bureaucratic hoops is so high, the cost of the various unemployable art/social science/business majors has to be fairly high before it's worth creating an institutional barrier.
posted by politikitty at 5:49 PM on March 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

...and if I had a time machine, I would love to go back to one of John Waters' cocktail parties back in the good old days, when nobody had any money, and a tin of crab-meat would be greeted with enthusiasm...
posted by ovvl at 5:54 PM on March 16, 2010

> Are college students required to take reading comprehension anymore, or do they just start crying when someone suggests that being poor is not fun or good for you and that they should take precautions against falling into poverty by getting a job, paying their loan obligations, and developing in-demand skills rather than having zero work experience and defining what their passion is based on an unwillingness to do work they deem is beneath them.

Poverty isn't that easy to "fall in." Healthy people don't fall a class level very often. Sometimes, it is poor choices, but it's impossible to determine where the snowball began that rolled them under the poverty line. Personal or cultural illness is probably involved.

Myself, I had to work in order to go to college, and I did all manner of "low" work to get through. I'm sure I'm not unusual. These days I try to stick to a "NO MORE MOPPING!" rule, but it's just tongue in cheek. Anyway, point is: poor or working class folks probably do NOT get through college without marketable skills. I could drywall, run quickbooks, herd cattle, wait tables, all kinds of random blue collar/white collar things by the time I got my Film and Digital Media (With Honors!) BA.

Rich kids, whose folks bought them cars, paid their rent, gave them pocket money AND paid tuition, maybe they DO lack marketable skills upon graduation. But they also probably STILL have the family safety net they went into university with.

So the "falling into poverty right after graduation" fantasy is weirdly patronizing and ill-suited to both the privileged and the unprivileged.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 5:55 PM on March 16, 2010 [7 favorites]