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Shortly after learning about the food stamp challenge, I passed the word along to my co-worker, Chris. Like me, he was a little hesitant–it feels a lot like going back to college, for some strange reason. Regardless, he’s signing on too, so we’ll be accountable if one of us shows up to work with a latte and a breakfast panini.
The first thing I started thinking about is the obvious: what am I going to eat? My grocery budget is pretty small most of the time, in large part because I eat out pretty frequently. Clearly, that is not going to work next week.
Not being able to use my existing food reserves is interesting too. I found myself wondering whether it would be ok to use small amounts of condiments that I already have, since they’re not something that need to be purchased too often. Or should I charge myself .02 for using a clove of garlic? How about siriracha sauce? I am solving this dilemma in my mind by starting out with a $1 deduction from my budget for seasonings. Down to $20. Ouch.
How about meals with others? A significant number of my evening meals are eaten with my boyfriend, and sometimes in the course of going about our daily lives, we get free food. I picture myself freeloading on cake and crackers on Sunday at Quaker meeting, and wonder if that might help me make it all the way to the end of the challenge. I think about opportunities to get free food and wish that it were a First Thursday week. I ask my boss to stop me if he sees me dumpster diving for food at any point.
Mid-afternoon, I realized I had a bagel (36 cents) and cream cheese (20 cents) in the fridge at work that would go to waste if I didn’t eat them today, before the challenge started. I ate them.
Chris is resigned to a week of ramen and PB&J. I’m concerned about nutrition. Tomorrow, I’ll be figuring out what I will buy to make it through the week.
The challenge hasn’t even started, and all I can think about is food.
Oregon Food Bank‘s April Advocacy Alert arrived in the mail at work today. It included an article entitled “Take the food stamp challenge,” which asked for volunteers to sign up to live on a $21 food budget per person for a week, the average food stamp subsidy in Oregon. Starting Sunday April 22, many Oregonians, including our governor, will be learning first hand what it’s like to live for a week on a food budget comparable to those of our state’s most poor and vulnerable.
I received food stamps while I was in college; since I received federal Work-Study funding, I was eligible for $145 a month in food stamps. Not all Oregonians receive the full allotment, which is now around $150/month, since household income levels are used to calculate the subsidy amount. Receiving even $604 a month in Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, which is barely enough to cover housing costs, let alone transportation to medical appointments, results in a disproportionate decrease in food stamp benefits–to the extent that some of the formerly homeless people we serve actually regret receiving SSDI, as they can no longer afford food once they have SSDI income used to calculate their portion of their housing expenses and counted against their food stamp benefits.
After reading the announcement, I picked up my phone and called Jeff Kleene at the OFB. I wanted to know how they had arrived at $21 as the entire food budget, when at that rate of subsidy, I know that the household contribution is expected to be about $10/week for food. Jeff told me that they had considered how expensive it is to be poor, and that the costs that participants would incur in pursuit of cheaper food would generally balance out the difference. Many poor people are forced to buy their groceries at the local corner store, which research has shown to be up to 50% more expensive than grocery store prices, or must travel greater distances to find reasonably priced, high-quality food. Participants also will not be worrying about being able to pay utilities, rent, health care, and other basic needs that low-income people are often not able to meet themselves and which daily threaten their ability to obtain food.
After satisfying myself that OFB’s food stamp challenge is based on reasonable assumptions about how low-income households use their money, I told Jeff that I’d do it.
Starting Sunday, I’m going to try to live for a week on a $21 food budget. No cupboard or freezer raids are allowed; what I eat during the week needs to be purchased out of that $21 budget or gotten for free. The one problem I anticipate is that my birthday is on the 30th, and some sort of celebration involving food is likely to happen next weekend. Regardless, I intend to do my best and report in daily.
Care to join? If so, email OFB to let them know, do a blog entry about the challenge to spread the word, and keep us posted on your progress. Any questions can be asked in the comments, and I’ll try to help. Good luck!
Oregon Food Bank Press Release
“Take the food stamp challenge” advocacy alert
Email OFB to let them know you’re participating: Contact
There’s been some buzz about this film lately in the various news blogs I read; it will be opening in select theaters throughout the US on November 13 and will also be screened by many community organizations, churches, universities, etc. The makers of the movie, Brave New Films (witty, isn’t it?) provide the following description on the film’s website.
WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price takes you behind the glitz and into the real lives of workers and their families, business owners and their communities, in an extraordinary journey that will challenge the way you think, feel… and shop.
Review from Salon
What makes the movie so powerful is the totality of the portrait, both in its details and its sweep. Most of these people are entirely unexceptional Americans from the working class or lower-middle class, believers in flag and country and God and capitalism, not left-wing activists or academics with some theoretical critique. Most of them believed in Wal-Mart, too, and were genuinely horrified to learn that its low prices depended on enforced poverty, whether theirs or somebody else’s.
To find a screening near you, visit the movie’s screenings website. Better yet, sign up to host a screening, find out why your college isn’t hosting one (yes, I mean you, Willamette and Pacific students/staff!), and get involved in getting the word out. Portland-area organizations have many screenings planned, and I definitely plan to attend.
Other sites to check out
Walmart Movie Blog
Watch the Trailer
Walmart Movie Flickr Site
Walmart Hunkers Down After Bad Publicity
Official Response to Movie
Walmart’s Press Release regarding employee benefits
Walmart’s actual policy regarding employee benefits
Partly in response to American media coverage of Katrina, partly in response to some comments I’ve seen around, and partly because I’m having one of those days, I’m going to launch into yet another discussion of New Orleans. I’ve been trying not to talk about it because everyone’s already overwhelmed with news coverage, but I think that there are some things we can learn about the US and its current state of affairs by examining this event and how it has been taken up in the discoursive communities around us.
Yesterday, when the head of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) made his statement regarding the responsibility of the people who remained in New Orleans for their own situations, I know I was not alone in being stunned at the extent of his inability to perceive reality. Certainly, some people remained in New Orleans by choice…but many, many remained because they had no options. They are poor, and as the media in other countries are pointing out constantly, African American. This double whammy of American problems that we don’t like to truly face, poverty and racism, must be talked about if it is to ever improve. Continue reading Katrina, the myth of the black rapist, and other assorted musings that people won’t want to read
Yesterday, the Oregon House of Representatives passed a bill which seeks to bar illegal immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses. [See AP story here] Rational objections from opponents included the argument that illegal immigrants will continue to drive, regardless, and under this law will also be unable to obtain insurance. This is exactly correct.
Last summer, during a public health outreach in migrant worker camps around Mt. Angel, several undocumented workers expressed their frustration with being unable to obtain insurance in Oregon because of prohibitive costs and also indicated their lack of familiarity with state laws. Like most of us, they don’t want to be ticketed, but for illegal immigrants, an additional concern is that they may be deported if picked up on any infraction. It is in the public’s interest to have educated, safe drivers on the road, you’d think. But that is not what our august lawmakers are interested in.
Proponents’ defense of the bill focused not on making the roads safe but on anti-terrorism. What if terrorists were able to obtain driver’s licenses? Just think of all the damage!
Seriously.
Obviously, terrorism is a threat to the wonderful US. However, terrorism accounts for a mere fraction of deaths that drunk driving does. In 2003 alone, over 17,000 people died in alcohol-related accidents. 17,000. [See CDC information here] In the interests of national security, driving should be banned completely. If terrorists found out how much more effective drinking and driving is at killing people than flying airplanes into buildings, imagine the destruction! We can’t let them do that.
Driving obviously presents a clear and present danger to the US. No one should be given licenses; that will make us safe by keeping everyone who could potentially cause an accident off the street.
Theology Tuesdays and Thursdays, as I now think of them, wind up being more reflective than the other five days in the week, as a rule. Between my Early Christianity class and Liberation Theology, I look for a place sit, read, write, reflect. Today, it is in a café down the street. Law students at the table behind me review for an exam on property laws, legislators from the capital discuss a bill being introduced by a party who “needs a lot of help,” and a WU employee eats breakfast with students from her office.
My notes on an Edward P. Jones story I am writing about grow; in a few days, I’m going to hear him read in person. Pulitzer prize winner. Macarthur “genius” grant. Reading his fiction, I am struck by the broad sweep of social issues that a few pages can encompass, his analysis more penetrating and “real” than a dozen volumes of non-fiction. That is why English appealed so much to me as a major; we are all studying the same thing, all of us who are interested in culture and society and politics and race and gender and poverty and oppression and beauty and art and what it means to be human. We simply look at it from different perspectives. Jones’s perspective happens to be particularly congenial for me.
A few moments outside, walking from café to library. The sounds of a flute float out the open window of a studio in the music building, filtering through the leaves of a cherry tree which only lately has started to show leaves under the blooms, bouncing off of rhododendrons and whispering joy to my spirit, whatever that may be.
I learn we have a new pope. Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger, has been virulently against liberation theology in the past and participated in church crackdowns on some of its great theologians…Boff, Gutierrez, etc.
The music of the flute is silenced and for a while, I grieve.
Yesterday, many students at Willamette participated in a day of silence in support of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transsexual etc. rights and equality. Last year, I hadn’t found out about it in time to participate, but I was struck by how much it impacted me, this having intelligent and articulate classmates not contributing to our class discussions.
This year, I threw my metaphorical hat in the ring. It was an interesting experience; I think that a lot of my classmates imagine me as on the verge of coming out in the first place, and for some of the younger classes, there’s an odd sense of prejudice that I picked up on, one that I’m not accustomed to encountering among my peers. It was a good to have this time of silent solidarity. I am so used to being among tolerant, justice-oriented people that it always stuns me to find bigotry in places where it shouldn’t be. Continue reading Toward better critical theories
Racism in modern-day Latin America is a topic that has not provoked a lot of discourse, either popular or academic. Changing this situation is one of my goals, since acknowledging that a problem exists is one of the first steps to change. My one piece of creative writing ever focused on tensions between educated mestizo Mexicans and indigenous peoples. In a culture in which the word “indio” is synonymous with “stupid” or “simple-minded,” racism so saturates society that it becomes, in effect, invisible. It seems natural to the people oppressing others that things should be so, and to the average tourist, they “all look the same.” Sure, some indigenous people are more picturesque, but they’re all Mexicans.
That is simply not true. The indigenous people of Mexico have been systematically and horrifically oppressed. Deprived of their land, forced to resettle in arid areas where they cannot farm, their children forbidden to speak their indigenous languages in schools, denied access to health care, discriminated against, and in the case of the indigenous groups who have revolted in southern Mexico, reviled as a danger and a threat to stability, they have a long tale of suffering that is only beginning to be told. Continue reading Another face of racism
The Pope is doing somewhat worse today. Terri Schiavo‘s body stopped functioning this morning. These are different people tied together by the same debate regarding the definition of life. This is at the heart of the argument that has been raging for decades now, and while it at times becomes irritating to see the same dead horse beaten over and over again, I am glad that people are free to retain their subjective beliefs on the matter.
Definitions of what life is form the assumptions behind any stance on abortion and euthanasia. Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut way to prove that a certain definition of what it means to be alive is correct. Does life begin at a certain point for a fetus? Is brain activity constitute an essential component of life? We want easy answers and definitions, scientific guidelines to follow, a test by a machine that can somehow absolve us of thinking for ourselves. I don’t know that there can be an absolute answer. That is, after all, the starting point for ethical debates: the possibility of multiple good answers and even more bad ones.
Do people who support abortion support murder or the detruction of life? I don’t believe they do in the least, since their stance is not about killing babies but rather about women being able to control their reproductive processes. If a fetus is not considered viable and human, then it is not being murdered.
Are people who oppose abortion irrational? In some cases, yes. But for the average ones, not the fringe lunatics that bomb clinics and kill people, it is their belief that the fetus is indeed alive and human that demands that they advocate life. To do otherwise would be a drastic violation of conscience. Continue reading On life, death, and ethical standpoints
On April 1, American vigilantes will begin patrolling US/Mexico border areas in an effort to stem the increasing wave of immigrants from Latin America, according to Newsweek. Despite massive funding and personnel increases for border patrol, the article reports, illegal immigration has risen sharply over the past few years. Disputes between the US and Mexico regarding the status of illegal workers frequently strain relations between the two, with the Mexican government fearing human rights violations (this is not without a bit of irony), and the US healthcare and legal systems overwhelmed by illegal residents, to say nothing of the xenophobic terror their presence causes for people with small brains.
My current reading includes Paul Farmer’s brilliant Pathologies of Power; his work explores systemic injustice and its effects on the poor, especially in terms of basic human rights. Farmer has lived and worked as a physician in Haiti among the poor for over twenty years, and his vision of Latin America is piercing. The dehumanization of neoliberal thought, which has been blamed by many in Latin America for the increase in suffering and poverty, is one of his many well-articulated insights.
Farmer shows how neoliberal thinking ultimately constructs society as a machine and people as simply component parts; they are assigned value based on their production and contribution to this system, and there is no place for the poor. Furthermore, the “bottom line” triumphs over ethical concerns. This portrait shows capitalism at its cruelest and most oppressive, utterly unconcerned over the effects of globalization on the poor. Continue reading Immigration and justice
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