PS:  I live in the Sunshine State of Florida in South Florida where we have great weather 11 months out of the year.

Thanks again for ALL the great things you do.

I know that Cuba is the Devil, but the city of Havana produces 90 percent of its fruit and vegetables within the confines of the city on over 7,000 plots. Also, a lot of people grow food on their balconies.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-good-life-in-havana-cubas-green-revolution-410930.html 

Urban agriculture isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, and if it can work on a little island that was put on a harsh low-petrol diet after the collapse of the Soviet Union, maybe it can work elsewhere.

An out-of-work, practically disabled person I know was going to apply for SNAP. She, if she qualified, would be able to get 3-months' allotment, $176 a month. That's it. Three months is better than nothing, but she might not qualify because her car may exceed the $8500 limit.

The requirements and application process tend to be designed to winnow out those who are technologically impaired or don't have a ton of info available.

All that for 3 months of food assistance (that eliminates you from getting it for the next 5 years!)? Food stamps sounds like a good safety net until you look into the details.

Change.org's Education blogger Clay has been writing a little bit about the reautorization of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP).

http://education.change.org/blog/view/fatcats_for_fat_kids_the_school_lunch_lobby

While changes are certainly needed to the NSLP, it has the opportunity to provide low-income children with access to healthy food they would not necessarily have at home.  This obviously isn't a cure-all for hunger (especially since it concentrates only on children), but it does help families with limited income sleep better at night knowing their children are well fed (with healthy food) at school. 

Hyperlocavore is here to help you form a yardhsharing group with people in your neighborhood.

What is a 'hyperlocavore'?

A hyperlocavore is a person who tries to eat as much food as locally as possible. Growing your own is as local as it gets!

What is 'yardsharing'?

Yardsharing is an arrangement between people to share skills and gardening resources in order to grow food as locally as possible! The group can be friends, family or neighbors (or any combination!)

http://hyperlocavore.ning.com

This, the cost of good, honest, HEALTHY food vs. the government's delusional ideas of what it costs to live and shop is one of the most important places where government policies impacts those in or near poverty.

I live in Washington.  I'm disabled due to a combination of medical conditions that finally kicked my, well you can figure out what they kicked.  I live on SSDI.  I get "really good" SSDI of over $1100/mo, but I'm married and my husband who's also disabled can't get ANYTHING because my SSDI is "too much" for him to qualify and they're saying it should be "plenty" to cover our expenses with the minimal help we get (we get a bit over $120/mo in food stamps, free electricity - thank goodness Seattle has such great electric rates with Seattle City Light, and since someone at Washington's Dept. of Social and Health Services decided we're two families of one for the purpose of medical assistance, my spouse gets Medicaid and the state pays my Medicare Part B premiums but expects us to pay all of my coinsurance payments).  All this with us BELOW the federal poverty line and living in a city where our roach motel of a studio apartment - without parking - is "miraculously cheap" (not that rent in most of the rest of the state is much better).  Oh, and we had to quibble with the Dept. of Social and Health Services to convince them the value of our car was below $2000 - that's the cap for a family without children.  So how is someone supposed to honestly even subsist at this rate, even if we manage to convince all my medical providers to write off my coinsurance payments as charity care?

Back to the subject of food...  Living below the poverty line, getting about $120/mo in food stamps, survival says pasta, mac & cheese (generic, of course) and LOTS of ramen.  The sorts of foods that college students all swear never to eat again on the day of their graduation.  Even if I contribute quite a bit to my food stamps, it costs quite a bit more than the USDA's estimates to buy their suggested menu items for budgeting purposes.  I've priced those things at local markets and the prices run 1.5-2 times what the USDA says they do - or at least they do here.  If I want to eat what's now called HEALTHY food (like lean meats, vegetables, fruits), I'd be lucky for us to eat one meal per day and make it every day to through the month.

And they wonder why poor people eat junk.  It's because it's cheaper to buy imitation Wonder Bread, store brand pasturized process cheese food slices, margarine, mac & cheese, lots of TV dinners when on sale for $1/ea, etc than to buy "real" food.  I, like others who are poor, have to buy what I can AFFORD, not what I SHOULD eat.  It's an argument I have almost monthly with at least one of our doctors too.  Between us, we should be eating low fat, low sodium, low glycemic index (but avoiding both common artificial sugars due to neurological reasons), low fiber for one of us, high fiber for the other and no wheat.  Yeah, like that's going to happen in poverty with food stamps.

If the government wants to cut the costs of our health care (in other words Medicaid and Medicare), a good start would be taking an HONEST look at the cost of living, the Federal Poverty Line (how to figure it and then how to apply it to programs like medical assistance and food stamps), and at what HEALTHY food costs (so they can figure out what a realistic value of food stamps should be).  If people can't afford to eat correctly, how can we who can't afford to eat correctly be blamed for living on the few foods we can afford and getting any health conditions that might trace back to that diet or its consequences like changes in weight or blood pressure?

The cost of garbage food versus healthy food is the main reason poor people are more likely to be obese than richer people. I have heard people in higher income groups speak disparagingly about how "people on welfare sure seem to eat well", and it reflects ignorance on their part. Ramen noodles and cheap, fatty burger, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, leads to depression, which adds up to a very unhealthy lifestyle. Of course my busy lifestyle may not be much better. Processed, quick meals, fast food, never time for the gym, no wonder I'm fat!

You don't even have to be sedentary on a garbage food diet to be fat. Many of the foods contain ingredients (like types of sugars, starches or fats) or proportions of fats etc. that will trick your body into metabolic mutiny such as beginning the primrose path toward metabolic syndrome.  If your body develops conditions like metabolic syndrome, it often doesn't matter how much you exercise because your body will refuse to lose weight until the metabolic condition is brought under control.  Unfortunately for you - the patient - doctors (and most particularly those who work with the poor) tend to default to the "eat less and get off your lazy butt" lecture without even asking the patient anything about WHY they might be overweight - i.e. do you exercise or how/what do you eat - or doing any testing to see about whether or not the patient might have conditions like metabolic syndrome or its close cousins like PCOS and Type 2 Diabetes that can cause weight problems and resistance to weight loss.  All the "eat less and get off your lazy butt" lecture will do to people with such conditions is add the risk of an eating disorder or of giving up on trying to control their weight to their list of health problems and the risks they carry.

This is something I know all too well from personal experience.  It's a typical routine of doctors in outlets like IHS and Public Health.  At the time it happened to me, because of my exact situation, I was getting max foodstamps benefits because they counted me homeless (my husband and I were couch surfing) so we ate well.  I exercised as I always do.  I have PCOS and diabetes.  I knew that because it had been diagnosed before I landed in that city.  The doctors at public health reduced my metformin dose (the medication for both conditions) and only kept prescribing it to placate me and went into the lecture so many times that by the time I got a new doc the only thing that spared me a diagnosis of anorexia was my BMI.  When I got to an endocrinologist (thanks to finally having Medicaid) he was just floored by how out of line the Public Health docs had let my sugars, lipids and hormones get.  All things not able to be controlled by any amount of exercising and only minimally controllable by eating correctly once they develop (and to be brutally honest - if you've got the genes, eating correctly and staying active only reduces your risk of them kicking into gear and becoming active).

My husband and I recently became homeless. Burned out, not evicted. This left us without a way to prepare meals from scratch, as we ususually do. And it gave me new perspective on the enormous challenges of eating healthfully while homeless. To some extent, these also apply to anyone trying to manage on food stamp benefits.

The high cost of a healthful diet--especially fresh fruits, vegetables and fish--is certainly one reason poverty is linked to obesity. But there are other reasons as well. One is lack of ready access to sources of a variety of nutritious foods.

I've written about my experience and the poverty-obesity issue on my blog--povertyandpolicy.wordpress.com.

I'll be writing more about the latter and would like to hear from anyone who's got insights about the issues and/or experience with solutions.