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[quote=Anonymous]I was on food stamps )before they called it SNAP) for many years. Very rarely bought any junk food and very few processed foods (mostly, when I did, processed meant dry cereal, tortilla chips and salsa, ice cream, bacon, bread) and sometimes a 2 liter of cola or root beer or a snack for my kid--didn't stockpile snacks.

But for several months I let a young woman I knew, who had lost her housing, stay with me along with her four kids. Some of my observations: she had minimal cooking skills. She had grown up poor, in a household where people would be sober for 2 weeks and then everyone drunk the next two. She told me about being little and she and her siblings eating spoonsful of dry milk powder when they were hungry. Once her mom got a winter squash in a food pantry basket and sent her over to my house to ask how to cook it. Her own cooking repertoire consisted of fried potatoes, boiled hot dogs, fry bread (she was Native American--so the squash thing seemed really ironic, but she came from ancestors who had been forced into Indian boarding schools and families split up and separated) and a really delicious hamburger soup[ made with hamburger meat, cabbage, onions, and tomato sauce.

The other thing was that, with no money for activities and entertainment for her kids, entertaining them mostly meant snacking on candy and cookies and sodas when the SNAP benefits came in, then on dry ramen noodles (something I had never heard of as a snack) when the initial stash of junk food was gone. Games on mobile phones (that didn't have minutes but were used as gaming devices) and watching YouTube cartoons on my TV. (She was mostly on her own regarding food, the housing was supposed to be short term but ended up much longer than intended, and she did have the SNAP benefits and some money in child support as well as SSI for one child who had learning disabilities and vision impairment).

So junk food seemed to be used a lot as recreation, and I suspect that is often the case, whether for one's kids or for adults themselves. [/quote]

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