I was well into adulthood before I realized that what I had always considered a special treat my mother sometimes provided for my brothers and me growing up was anything but.
Every once in a while my mother, who was raising four boys on her own, would serve a simple dinner that today sounds more like an entrée invented by a second grader.
It consisted of a slice of white bread soaked in margarine melted in a skillet and then coated with a layer of white sugar.
Let me assure you I didn’t have a terrible mother or an ignorant one. Just the opposite. But my mother was poor even though she worked full time in small-town, low-wage jobs to provide for us. My father died before I was old enough to remember him.
Social Security survivors benefits were the only government assistance my mother received. And if there wasn’t any other food in the house to feed four growing boys, she had to get creative with what she had.
Food stamps weren’t created until the 1960s and President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It has been one of the most successful continuing programs started during that extremely short-lived conflict from which the U.S. withdrew faster than from any other war in its history.
Food stamps continued because they had strong bipartisan support. In those days, both political parties included decent people who believed children shouldn’t go to bed hungry in the richest nation on earth.
It also turned out to be smart economics. During hard times, when more people were out of work and needed help not only could they eat, but farmers continued selling their products and the nation’s food distribution system kept functioning and providing jobs.
All of those benefits of food stamps still exist, but the Republican Party has taken an ugly turn. Republicans can no longer stand the idea of poor people getting government assistance to eat and to feed their children.
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Policing Poor People’s Diets
The recent debate in the state Assembly over proposed Republican restrictions on what poor people should be allowed to eat in Wisconsin was so absurd it would have been comical if it weren’t so mean-spirited and hateful.
Republicans are caught between two of their favorite ugly misrepresentations of people less fortunate than themselves. One is that poor people need to be treated like children who don’t know how to feed themselves. The other is that poor people are devious criminals out to take advantage of taxpayers.
Republicans believe they’re superior beings to poor people because they aren’t poor. They believe it’s their responsibility to pass laws controlling what poor people should be allowed to eat so they don’t waste government assistance on cheap junk food.
Wisconsin Republicans are carefully drafting a law to force the poor to eat better than they would if they lived in a free country. They’re conflicted, however, because Republicans also don’t want the poor eating quite as well as their own constituents.
That’s why the law specifically prohibits poor people from using food assistance to buy what they call luxury food items such as lobster, crab, shrimp or other shellfish.
Republicans, a devout lot, may be drawing upon the Old Testament for divine guidance. Leviticus declares: “Everything in the waters that has not fins and scales is detestable.”
Republican politicians themselves have never had any problem consuming shellfish at fundraiser tables piled high with shrimp and lobster. But, then, they’re all going to Hell anyway.
It’s an awkward time for Republicans to twist themselves into knots writing laws to force the poor to eat better while also preventing them from eating anything Republicans consider too good for poor people to eat.
That’s because they frequently sit around bountiful, tax-deductible business luncheons railing against that uppity First Lady Michelle Obama for trying to combat childhood obesity by getting Americans to eat better.
But the first lady doesn’t just want to make poor people eat more nutritious, healthy food. She wants everybody to eat better, including Republicans. By God, that’s socialism!
The Obama administration probably won’t even approve what Republicans call “common sense” reforms requiring poor people to spend two-thirds of food assistance on nutritious food while prohibiting them from eating any luxury food items. And, oh yeah, the poor should get drug tested if they want to eat, too.
There’s already a problem getting grocery stores to publicly identify which of their food items are healthy and nutritious and which ones aren’t. Eliminating worthless, non-nutritious, empty calories would devastate the profit margins of the food industry.
Also people who have never lived in poverty don’t have any idea what a luxury food item is to someone with hungry kids and not enough to eat.
Sometimes it can just be a slice of bread soaked in margarine and covered with sugar.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
