surprise, surprise: politicians discover what any 10 year old knows – it’s impossible to eat well on $3.50 a day.

Hunger activists challenged New Yorkers yesterday to try spending only $3.50 on food, just for one day, to get a taste of what life is like for folks who actually have to rely on food stamps.

It’s the latest installment of Let’s Make a Meal, the “paltry pantry” game that started last month when the governors of Oregon and Utah took a “food stamp challenge” and tried to eat on a meager $3 a day, which the average food stamp recipient does by necessity, as opposed to novelty.

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Not that $3 a day goes very far, anyway; you’ve got to get the maximum calories for the minimum price, which means filling up on cheap fats and carbs like peanut butter and ramen noodles. Fresh fruits and vegetables? Might as well be caviar. We subsidize commodity crops like corn and soybeans, keeping the price of nutritionally bankrupt processed foods artificially low, while doing nothing for the “specialty crops,” which is what the USDA calls the fruits and vegetables it tells us we’re supposed to eat five to nine servings of each day. Isn’t that special?

and so, 40 million people in poverty continue to have higher incidence of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, while trying to count ketchup as a vegetable. that’s shameful.

good nutrition isn’t rocket science – but apparently funding it is.

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