Food stuff

This is a little disheartening, but in a country in which a major preisdential candidate declares health care a "right," it's certainly not surprising:

The $25 Challenge is over in Illinois, and we're sure the participants are thrilled about that. They agreed to spend no more than $25 on food for a week -- that's about $3.50 a day -- and blog about what they learned during the experience.

It was a real eye-opener for most. When you have so little money for food, you realize that "there is food all around you, all the time, but you can't eat it," wrote Frank Finnegan, who was planning yet another dinner of ham and beans. He added, "Forget nutrition. When shopping, the only thing that matters is price."

[. . .]

The food budget for the challenge wasn't selected randomly. The $25 a week is about what the average food stamp recipient is expected to survive on in Illinois. Many who took the challenge wrote eloquently about the deprivation they felt.

"Expected to survive on"? Since when? How quickly we go from government supplementing what the neediest can do for themselves to expecting that the government program is the be-all and end-all of existence.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as food stamps. There were government commodities, and my family was eligible -- wonderful things like powdered eggs and powdered milk and huge blocks of indigestible orange cheese. It never would have occurred to us that we were supposed to survive on that stuff and nothing else. Maybe we ought to go back to that, have people actually stand in line to get it. Maybe then it will occur to them that a back yard is the perfect location for a garden.