Broke in the Slope?

I know we're all supposed to be over this whole great depress recesh of 2008, 2009, and 2010, but at my Food Coop shift last week, I couldn't help but notice that A LOT of people coming through were paying with food stamps, or EBT as those in the know call it. In fact, almost 40% of my sales were bought with food stamps (yep, I started tracking it). And most purchases were made by people who didn't look like the "welfare queens" of old. Are poor hipsters and unemployed journalists the new welfare queens? 

According to one interesting blog post... uh, yes.

"Hipsters on food stamps" are the new targets being scrutinized in the media for not looking and behaving enough like REAL poor people. Apparently, young people who were raised in privileged environments, and are now unemployed and living at or below the poverty level are not the "right kind of poor". I guess if you grew up wealthy you are magically immune to poverty? If you are a college graduate who cannot find a job in today's economy, you are just too lazy, right? 

This Daily News article says that the number of city residents on food stamps has reached epic proportions as food prices go up and up. Shit!

The majority of the state's cases are in the city, with nearly 2 million people enrolled at the end of 2010, up from 1.6 million in 2009.

Somebody do the math. That's a lot more people, right? (Okay, that's 11% more).

And then I read that 40% of the people eligible for food stamps in the city aren't getting them. Per Esquire:

In the last year, visits to Bread & Life grew 85 percent. The use of emergency food is the highest it's been in 40 years. One in five New Yorkers live in poverty. Forty percent of people who are eligible for food stamps don't get them. At a time when food-stamp applications are up by 600,000, the city is still driving down the welfare rolls and refusing to see any connection between the two. And Bloomberg's homeless chief says they're going to apply their "success" in welfare reform to homelessness. Among their brilliant managerial suggestions: charging the homeless to stay in shelters.

 Ok, well I'm officially depressed. 

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