I Stopped Doing the Food Stamp Challenge Before I Even Started
Perhaps for some people participating in this challenge—and you can find many of them on Twitter under #SNAPChallenge—the goal is to have a better idea of how hard it is to live without much money. But, well, I already know that. I know it not from the personal experience of depending on food stamps, but from the personal experience of not being stupid. Here’s what I know because I am not stupid: the things that would be hard for me to give up have nothing to do with what makes it hard to be living in poverty in the United States. I might have a hard time giving up coffee and getting lunch from Lil Muensters in DUMBO, but it would be temporary and it would also be the only element in my life where I would be lacking. What I’m trying to say is, I might not be drinking bourbon with my friends, but I would be going home at night to my warm apartment where I can afford the rent and don’t struggle to keep the gas bill paid and where I can sort through my mail without panicking at the sight of a letter from a collections agency.
The thought of finishing this challenge and writing a post where I patted myself on the back for making it through the week—and maybe even enjoying it like some cultural, faux-anthropologist parasite—made me recoil. This feeling was confirmed after reading Melisa Petro’s article on xoJane, titled “Why I’m Not Down With Food Stamp Challenges.” Petro speaks from the experience of having received food stamps both as a child and as an adult and thinks that, instead of doing the food stamp challenge, people can find out about what it’s like to live in poverty by “ask[ing] the 46 million Americans who do it every day, not as a ‘challenge’ or for publicity but because they can’t afford food.” Petro goes on to acknowledge that many of the people who are participating in the challenge are doing so with good intentions. But she points out, “even if you’re well intended, those intentions may fail. The best people to dispel stereotypes… are the people who are truly affected by them — not the people who try them on for a week.”
So, I opted out of the challenge. Because I didn’t want to feel like I had accomplished something simply by living for a week under similar constraints to what 46 million other people endure in this country week after week. I didn’t want to feel like I had won. I don’t want to feel like all those people have lost. And I don’t want to feel like their lives are a game to be played, a game that I can put away at the end of the week and not have to think about again.
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen