The challenge: Does seven days on food stamps make one weak?

Published: 2007-05-25

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- It's one thing to walk in somebody else's shoes. It's another thing to live in somebody else's pantry -- for an entire week. Yet that's just what four members of Congress did in mid-May. Reps. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and JoAnn Emerson, R-Mo., co-chairs of the Congressional Hunger Caucus, issued the "Food Stamp Challenge" to their colleagues in both the House and the Senate to do what millions of Americans are expected to do each week: live off the groceries purchased with food stamps. For a single person, that comes to $21 -- one dollar for each meal, each day. Only two members in the House, Reps. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., took up the challenge; McGovern and Emerson, having issued the challenge, did so as well. The challenge showed how far $21 of groceries go today. The answer: Not very. For Ryan, a Catholic, "the real lesson is not that you can't get food or not enough food, but it's the kind of food you eat," he told Catholic News Service. Ryan's menu for the week consisted largely of angel-hair pasta, spaghetti sauce, peanut butter and jelly, wheat bread, cornmeal and cottage cheese.

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