Four U.S. Congresspersons are in the middle of the Food Stamp Challenge, in which they try to live on $21 worth of food stamps for a week.

Receipt

Why $21? Because that is the national average food stamp allotment per person, that’s $3 a day! The lawmakers that are crazy enough to try this are Rep. Jim McGovern (MA), Rep. Tim Ryan (OH), Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (MO), and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL). The goal “for this ‘food stamp challenge’ was to spark a real discussion about the real life difficulties that many in America face in trying to put food on their tables.”

Why? According to McGovern, because…

We’re trying to get this debate going. There are more working people today getting food stamps than six years ago. . . . There’s not a member of Congress that doesn’t have hunger in their district.

McGovern and Ryan are blogging about their experiences here and here, respectively.

Jan Schakowsky has also added a post to McGovern’s blog about her first few days on the Food Stamp Challenge, noting that…

Shopping was really hard. Here’s what I learned. It is much easier to afford pasta and bread than it is fruits and vegetables of any kind. It is hard to buy much of anything for $3 a day. It is impossible to get a Starbuck’s coffee or a Diet Pepsi if you don’t want to run out of money pretty quickly. I also learned how miserable it would be to live on food stamps for any length of time.

Mmmm, pasta and bread, and all the carbs your body can turn into fat. Here is Jan’s menu for her first few days:

Menu

For $1 per meal, it makes you wonder how these people stay alive. Not the congresspeople. The poor souls who don’t have the luxury of choice.

I’m not saying we should be pouring more money into Food Stamps necessarily, but certainly things like the U.S. Farm Bill that subsidizes (read: makes cheaper) ingredients like sugar and corn syrup and fat don’t help anyone, much less the poor that can’t afford healthy food because of it.

For some extra educational material, Micheal Pollan writes in the New York Times about this egregious government utilitarianism veering down the all-too-common path of unintended consequences…

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

(Read the rest of the article here. The New York Times website may require a login, which is easily obtainable from bugmenot.com)

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