Completely off-topic note, but I actually lived on food stamps for a while in 2009, and, yes, it's extremely easy to stay under-budget if you have access to a w

Completely off-topic note, but I actually lived on food stamps for a while in 2009, and, yes, it's extremely easy to stay under-budget if you have access to a well-stocked kitchen, and you know how to cook and plan meals for yourself and your family (not a difficult skill, but not a trivial one either). Fortunately, I'm a decent cook, but for a couple months I lived in illegally-run housing where you had five units sharing a tiny unventilated kitchen and an old fridge. The landlord would go through and unplug the communal appliances (including the fridge) regularly to reduce energy consumption. I thought it was odd that the fridge was empty, except for sodas, when I got there, but I found out why pretty fast. Food would get stolen, I was regularly harassed (not "oh, that guy hit on me and I didn't like it" harassment, but huge dudes with mental illnesses, prison records, and nothing better to do threatened to beat me up, and yelled at me over imaginary things they suspected me of, one guy threw a block of my cheese out the nearby bathroom window -- as a single female, I was an easy target), there was just a single bathroom for everyone, connected to the kitchen, and I watched people empty soda bottles of urine into the kitchen sink (yeah, super gross). The oven was so dirty the unventilated kitchen filled with smoke when you turned it on, and you had to stay there to make sure no one fucked with your food. Towards the end, everything I ate basically had to be shelf stable and require no preparation. Also, there were mice, so if you don't like mice in your tiny bedroom, keeping large amounts of food around is a problem. Anyway, I was fortunate to have the resources to get out of that situation extremely quickly, but a huge problem for many people on food stamps is that they just don't have the ability to reasonably store and prepare food. Having your own kitchen (or a kitchen with responsible people you trust), buying appliances, providing electricity, and maintaining everything is expensive. My own kitchen, big-ticket appliances aside, probably has thousands of dollars worth of gadgets, dishes, and cutlery in it right now -- I certainly don't take that for granted anymore! We often assume that people have access to a kitchen where they feel safe, AND the knowledge to cook and plan meals. The next place I was at, I could get six meals out of a roast chicken and a few potatoes and was under-budget every month. But the first apartment was awful. I ate terribly, felt exhausted, and was struggling at the end of the month, with the exact same budget and skill set. Preparing "food stamp menus" in a text file demonstrates very little about the program one way or another. There are much larger issues around food supplement programs that people don't often understand.