Caryn Sweeney’s privileged position and her presumably easy to do exercise of living on food stamps for a month is laughable. She says that she researched farmer’s markets, checked sale fliers, made a spreadsheet of recipes, made stock to use later, made multiple stopis in a single grocery shopping trip, had marathon vegetable chopping sessions and packed away things for use during the week.

She then goes on to say that people on assistance are already “working hard for long hours at low-paying jobs”, so where exactly are they going to find time to do all those things she has the privilege and education to do.

She also says “Poor families for generations cooked from scratch after long hours in the fields, in the factories, or the mills, because they had no 7-11 or McDonalds’ on hand.” This completely ignores that in the past there was usually a woman or someone else (perhaps an elder or children that weren’t required to be in school) that stayed home during the day and was able to cook from scratch. It wasn’t the man coming home from the fields, factories or mills to cook from scratch.

I definitely think that it would be great if people on food stamps were able to eat more healthy yet inexpensive food but the plain and simple fact is that doing so requires a lot of time going from store to store (which either requires a lot of gas for your car or what could be several hours on public transportation) and then a lot of prep time.

It makes me frustrated when people come out and say how easy they think it would be for economically disadvantaged people to make changes but oftentimes it’s not that easy and to sit in a position of priviledge and power and make those claims is just ridiculous.