Walk a Mile in These Shoes: Congress Reps Living on Food Stamps

by jordan | May 21, 2007 at 09:24 am | 422 views | add comment | 0 recommendations

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US Congressional Representatives Tim Ryan and Jim McGovern have agreed to subsist on food stamps for one week: they will have only US$21 to spend on food to last them for seven days. This works out to a buck per meal, assuming three meals a day. Is that even possible?

[C]ongressman Tim Ryan blogs today:

"You aren’t going to believe this, but all I have left is cornmeal.

I was doing SO well! I had everything rationed out perfectly and knew that I was going to be able to stretch my food out until the end. That was of course, until the TSA decided to step in....

Sure enough the very nice TSA agent explained to me the 3-1-1 regulations for liquids. As a public service I’ve decided to link you to them. He politely put the peanut butter and jelly to the side, closed my bag and gave it back to me. I was too astonished to talk.

I took my bag and walked towards the gate thinking about the 4 or maybe 5 meals that she had taken from me. What am I going to do now? It’s not like I can just go to Safeway and grab another jar. I have .33 cents and a bag of cornmeal to last today and tomorrow."

Our own babblingdweeb sent me this link as well, regarding a governor who has undertaken a similar challenge:

[q
url="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/us/01stamps.html?ex=1335672000&en=0297b496d0f1e6e2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss"]Gov.
Theodore R. Kulongoski’s decision to live on $3 a day in grocery money
for a week, as he had been urged to do in an Oregon “food stamp
challenge,” could confound the surest cynic. At 66, he was just elected
to his second term, with a budget surplus surpassing $1 billion and a
legislature controlled by his fellow Democrats. So just what was there
to gain politically?

For a governor who has long pushed to reduce hunger and happens to
like eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, maybe that was not the
point.

As Wayne Scott, the leader of the House Republicans, put it:
“Obviously I’m in the opposite party, so it would be easy for me to
knock him for this. Now, I don’t know that I fully believe that he’s
eating on $21 a week, but I do think he’s trying to bring attention to
the food stamp issue. He’s a pretty straight shooter.”[/q]