There IS SO MUCH TO SAY HERE.
So let me start with a few experiences from my own life.
1. A family member of mine had just graduated from college and was working 2 jobs and still not making enough to buy sufficient food for herself and enrolled in the Food Stamp Program (SNAP).
With these food stamps, she didn't by "junk" she exchanged the food stamps for tokens at the local farmers' market and purchased HEALTHY food. This was a privilege though, as many places across the United States do not have this healthy option. These areas are known as "food deserts" as defined here "Food deserts are defined as parts of the country vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas. This is largely due to a lack of grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and healthy food providers." by the USDA (http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defines-food-deserts).
2. I also tried to get food stamps struggling with a full class schedule and only 15 hours a week of work and I was denied because I wasn't working enough hours.
3. While I spent my first year teaching after graduating from Ohio University and moving to Columbus, Ohio, I discovered SO much about our country's social programs. My students were refugees from Somalia (for those not familiar with geography, that's in eastern Africa), Bhutan, and Nepal (both located between China and India). They were often living in refugee camps in those countries where they suffered from maltreatment, hunger, illness, and abuse. Arriving in the U.S. these refugees knew literally no English and few knew how to write (as they lived on farms and had no need of schooling). Many of them were over the age of 40, and those from Somalia often had around 10 kids (which is NORMAL AND RESPECTED in their culture).
These lovely people were required by the government to attend 5 hours of English class every day in order to receive SNAP, section 8 housing, and financial assistance. Many of these students were in poor health and if they missed a day would have their benefits cut for three months. And sometimes their benefits would get cut for this period due to clerical errors by the said local government. Their small apartments were in poor condition, not through a fault of their own. These students also lived in a food desert. They did not have cars and had to walk to find food and the only places with food nearby were gas stations and convenience stores. They did not have the appropriate clothes or shoes (coming from very HOT climates) for the brutal winter in Columbus, Ohio. They could not speak English to express their needs for food or medical help. I acted as a teacher and as a social worker to help them fill out ridiculously long forms in English required by the government and I helped them make various appointments and learn their addresses in case they got lost. These were not undocumented immigrants "sneaking into the country to use the system" (which is an awful stereotype in itself). These were people forced to leave their homes due to war and by force with nowhere else to go. They had to learn everything from scratch. And ALL of these students were enrolled in these programs until they could get jobs-- often horrible jobs in chicken plants, underpaid, long hours, and horrific working conditions. And these are the people you want to send canned spinach to? WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM?!
And that is just one small part of the large group in this country suffering that ya'll can't seem to stop complaining about.
SNAP also already has very restrictive rules that apply. My lovely roommate passed along a thread from twitter that really sums it up better than I can:
"Food stamps are grossly inadequate for providing for families, and do not cover non-food essentials you would get in a grocery trip — and other programs don’t really, either. Do you all understand what hunger looks like in this country? Do you really? I’ve seen it. I don’t know if you have. Go work in a school that’s been written off as not good enough and you’ll see it real quick. Hunger in this country rarely looks like the charity commercials you see on TV. What we have here is food insecurity and a huge amount of malnutrition. Junk here is cheap, junk has calories — it’s just, that’s all it has.
You know what one of the cheapest things you can get if you’re trying to maximize calories? In the US, that is, because of how our subsidies work. Cake mix. In a cruel sort of twist, we really can let them eat cake. Cake mixes are generally under a dollar. Eggs are under a dollar. Oil is usually about sixty cents, in a medium-sized bottle. A cake is about 4,000 calories. If you have next to no money and need to, at least, have enough calories to live, you eat cake. And particularly in food deserts, or areas where Walmart has driven out all of the local grocery store options, the other cheapest things are soda and chips (a lot of that has to do with the corn lobby’s power). The result: the cheapest possible things to eat if you are at a desperate point have next to no nutritional value. Having been there, any time someone goes “BUT PRODUCE IS CHEAP!” I want to punch them in the face. The first priority as an animal is consuming enough calories to live — everything else becomes secondary until that requirement is fulfilled. So sure, you can buy a head of lettuce for, say, a dollar fifty, but that head of lettuce does almost nothing to give you enough base fuel to get by. When people scoff at poor people in this country, “oh, they’re not ‘really’ starving, look at how fat they are,” what you’re seeing is people trying to get enough calories from any source to survive, while simultaneously withering from malnutrition. Sometimes, going a significant amount of time between meals; meals with no nutritional value, for that matter. The body enters starvation mode and stores accordingly. This country’s approach to food and poverty is shameful. You cannot pretend a bag of chips and a bag of apples being the same price (often they’re not) and a person opting for chips is poor choice making. A bag of apples doesn’t have enough calories, and that’s the baseline. When you’re in a place where it’s ‘eat food that gives you no vitamins, no protein, no micronutrients, etc.,’ or eating food that doesn’t give you enough basic breakdown of glucose to get your body through another day, you don’t have the luxury to “be healthy”. We screw people over by design, and then lecture them when they take the options most available and pragmatic to them — and then cut their benefits because they aren’t conforming to our standards." FROM @hugwins via Twitter (edited)
What we really need to understand is that there is SEVERE food insecurity in this country that is not being addressed and THAT is the real problem.
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