Newark mayor spends a week on a food stamp budget
Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is taking a week to "walk a mile in someone else's shoes," so to speak. After being inspired by a Twitter spat, Booker decided to spend a week trying to get by on a food budget of $30, which is the average per-person allotment by the SNAP (a.k.a. food stamps) program.
What Booker has found so far is that - surprise, surprise - it is possible to live on $30 a week, but it isn't easy. Booker has already experienced hunger pangs after eating lunch. And one night he had to make the (oh so familiar to many people) choice to either eat the last sweet potato, or go to bed hungry. (He chose to go to bed hungry and save the sweet potato for the next day).
Booker began his week by making a trip to the grocery store. As you can see from the picture he Instagrammed (above), he shopped with the best of intentions, buying a lot of fresh produce as well as canned beans and vegetables, and a bottle of healthy olive oil.
What Booker has since discovered is something that every low-income American already knows: vegetables are great for you, but they are not very filling. His lunch one day was "a can of peas and corn mixed together," which caused him to reflect that he should have spent more of his money on eggs (one of the most affordable sources of protein) and coffee (I guess Booker's office doesn't have a big coffee urn in the break room?).
Naturally, Booker's efforts are being Monday-morning quarterbacked all to hell and gone. I have seen a lot of people huffily exclaiming that "Booker is doing it wrong, where's his brown rice?" or "When I was in college I ate like a king on only $5 a week!" I can understand why people take this topic as an opportunity to brag or look smart, but trust me, this is not the time.
The point isn't that people CAN live on $30/week. Obviously they can, because millions of Americans are doing it. The point is that it's HARD. And that maybe it shouldn't be.
Booker made some bad shopping decisions, and now he's paying for them. That's not much of a safety net, if you ask me. If someone buys a bag of salad when they should have bought eggs, and later in the week they suffer for this choice, that's a pretty lousy safety net.