Five dollars a day for food. That’s what a group of elected officials, religious leader and other citizens in and around Philadelphia will be living on until next Monday.
Should be a piece of cake. Well … not cake, exactly. That’s off the budget. But in an age of tax cuts and budget reduction, it should certainly be easy it is to live on five bucks a day in the low-budget, low-maintenance hollow of Philadelphia.
The Jewish Federation and the Coalition Against Hunger issued the Greater Philadelphia Food Stamp Challenge, starting yesterday: Try to live on the average food stamp benefit of $5 a day for an entire week.
Well we’ll show them, won’t we. We’ll show those people who are disabled, who are untrained to work, whose job skills turned irrelevant in the digital age, who work jobs for dwindling wages and fall below the poverty line – those nearly 1 in 7 people in the greater Philadelphia region who rely on food stamps.
And next week, an asset test will disqualify thousands of them from food assistance. So let’s show ‘em all how to live on their 35 bones a week – or less, since they might lose even that:
Day 1
Rice and beans, which you cook yourself in a kitchen that you might not have.
Day 2
Gum. All day.
Day 3
Quinoa. I’m not quite sure how that’s pronounced or what the hell you do when you get ahold of it. Try putting it in water. I don’t know.
Day 4
Lentils. Child’s drawing of a chicken leg.
Day 5
Leftover lentils. Leftover quinoa. Leftover rice and beans. Leftover gum. You cannot reuse the drawing of the chicken leg, as it has already been looked at.
Day 6
Steak tartar with scalloped potatoes, garlic green beans, tri-colored salad and a dry chablis, at a medium-priced restaurant in Center City. Then run like hell.
Day 7
Dog.
And there. You’ve done it. Easy as pie. Well … not pie either. Easy as gum. Easy as dog. Easy. Save those high-income tax cuts!
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