$31.50 a Week
The last time that Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, tried to live on an average budget of food stamps for a week, it was 2007, and the allotment was $21. He ate a great deal of lentils, rice, onions, eggs — not such a hardship, since he’s a vegetarian — and a bag of cereal lasted as breakfast for the week. He could afford very little fresh fruit and vegetables, and he forgot to buy coffee.
Gutow says he’s not making that same mistake this year, as he joins the fourth annual campaign of faith leaders trying to persuade Congress not to cut the program now known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. This year, the allotment is $31.50. And this year, he plans to buy a small jar of instant coffee for the week.
Sure, it’s a gimmick, and he’s the first to admit it. After seven days, he can spend $4.50 on a cup of coffee instead of a day’s worth of food and drink. But that’s the central problem with our understanding of poverty and depravation. It is so removed from our ordinary lifestyle of abundance and choice that it takes a gimmick like this to enter, if only for a limited period of time, the world of the 45 million Americans who rely on food stamps, and Congress, to eat.
Hundreds of people have signed up for this latest challenge, which begins on October 27, including members of Congress and the faith leaders from JCPA, Catholic Charities and the National Council of Churches who argue that “God does not expect any of us to turn our backs on others in need.” As gimmicks go, this is a worthy one.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO