Brad's Tiny World

Food Stamp Diet

Posted on 05. Nov, 2009 by Brad in Economy | Twitter: @bradhart |

Sean Callebs's Food Stamp Diet is full of failures.

CNN correspondent Sean Callebs has tried a most interesting novel approach to living on a budget. He reports on a month long experiment on food stamp survival.  He seems to go into this project earnestly, by only spending what is allotted to a single person with zero income in his own city of New Orleans.

(CNN) — CNN correspondent Sean Callebs has just finished a long assignment: living on food stamps during all of February. He tracked his experiences on the American Morning blog.

This meant no eating out, no food on the run while covering stories and no enjoying king cake and other New Orleans specialties during Mardi Gras.

So how did he do?  He failed miserably.  Oh he succeeded in spending only his allotted amount of $176.00, but he fails in so many other ways.  Let me list you a few.

Sean Callebs’s Food Stamp Diet Failure:

• New Orleans is the wrong area to test.  A major metropolitan area will always have less expensive food in a greater selection.  New Orleans is even more so on this subject.
• He assumes adequate transportation.  One of the biggest problems with shopping for the poor is they often lack the ability to run to the store whenever something is on sale or carry large amounts of it back.  There is a huge disparagement is how much things cost depending on where you live and where you can get too.  For example, several years ago when my wife and I were first starting out we had to use food stamps.  We were living in a small one grocery store town out 20 minutes from a decent sized town.  If I bought milk in town it cost $4.69 a gallon, when a twenty minute car ride away it was often less than $1.49 a gallon.  If you stop into any inner city neighborhood grocery or quickie mart, the only places many poor have to purchase groceries, it isn’t uncommon to find milk at more than $5.00 a gallon now, don’t even think about what meat or fresh fruit and vegetables cost in these places.
• He fails to figure both cultural and educational differences in his reporting.  While a college educated well bred white boy from suburbia who has lived the life of a professional for decades knows something about budgeting, nutrition, and general home economics that isn’t so for most food stamp recipients.  It is one thing for someone who knows how to cook to slap together a few ingredients for decent meal.  It is very much a different thing to expect a twenty year old single mother of three who has always lived on convenience foods to do the same.
• He figures his budget based only on himself.  A forty something man doesn’t have the same grocery shopping needs as say a mother and her two or three kids.  His big concession was giving up diet soda and snacks.  In strict economic theory cutting all of that out your life is easy, you simply don’t buy it.  Of course in real world economics try telling your kids there are no snacks or putting a serving of plain canned green beans on their plate and telling them to deal with it.

In the end Sean Callebs’s Food Stamp experiment is a failure. I’m sure he has learned some lessons like generics aren’t always bad or where to get the best grocery deals and I applaud him for some humbling work and for attempting to understand the poor.  That said I am still calling him to task over this one.  He claims he feels good and will continue this lifestyle change.  If that is his journalistic conclusion, he shouldn’t have a problem telling us his meal plan and what he spent on it.  I will bet it is high in carbs, low in calories, and not nearly as affordable for most poor people.

Stumble! for WP

Originally posted 2009-03-09 12:25:38. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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