Food Stamp Challenge

Floor Speech

FOOD STAMP CHALLENGE -- (House of Representatives - May 22, 2007)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of January 4, 2007, the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) is recognized during morning-hour debate for 5 minutes.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Last week I accepted the Food Stamp Challenge, living for the past week on the average food stamp benefit of $1 per meal or $21 for the entire week.

I did it in order to draw attention to the persistent problem of hunger in America. I didn't realize just how hard it would be, but on my first shopping trip to Safeway, I quickly found out. It was hard enough to buy basic staples, but once I got to the produce section, it was impossible to buy much of anything. There was no way to eat a nutritious diet. Fruits and vegetables were simply out of my price range.

For me, it was a learning experience. For 26 million Americans and 1.2 million Illinoisans, it is a way of life. I wonder how parents on food stamps can stretch their budgets so their children have enough to eat or how seniors with chronic illness afford both eating nutritious meals and purchasing adequate medication. The answer for many is they simply can't.

In the richest country in the world, the fact that families face these sort of trade-offs is unjust and I would say it's immoral. The United States is spending merely $3 billion each week in Iraq, yet we expect hungry Americans to eat on $3 a day?

We need to pass Representatives JIM MCGOVERN's and JO ANN EMERSON's Feeding America's Families Act which would strengthen America's anti-hunger safety net programs, including food stamps, at a reasonable and affordable cost of about $4 billion per year. These are the kinds of provisions that ought to be part of the farm bill which includes the food stamp program.

I just ended this challenge yesterday. I am looking forward to a big salad for lunch where I include all kinds of vegetables at the salad bar that's in the cafeteria, adding whatever I want to that salad rather than having to carefully pick and choose what I had last week, which was one head of lettuce and one tomato and a few carrots, and that was about it. My snacks were water and, on a good moment, ice water.

It was an interesting and instructive week for me, but imagining my children and grandchildren having to live that way made it very, very clear to me that this really ought not to be a forced option for so many millions of Americans.

We can do better. This is a matter of priorities. We can change those priorities. We can make sure that with pride we say that no one in this country goes hungry, that everyone in this country at least has the opportunity to make healthy choices about the food that they eat and the food that they serve their children.

How can a child learn in school when they come without an adequate breakfast? How can they achieve in life without the nutrition that they need as their bones are growing and as their minds are growing? I am very hopeful that the experiment that I did with Congressmen MCGOVERN and EMERSON and TIM RYAN will prove to be helpful in making sure that we are able to pass more humane, and important to all Americans, legislation that will provide nutritious and affordable food for all of our residents in the United States.

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