Gwyneth Paltrow Blunders Backwards Into A Good Point About Food Stamps
Another day, another story about Gwyneth Paltrow pissing people off. Paltrow’s well known for her complex diet rules and overpriced holiday gift guides, but this time people are clutching their pearls (which are probably nowhere near as nice as Paltrow’s own set) over what groceries she purchased when holding herself to a weekly food budget of $29.
Celebrity chef Mario Batali is the spearhead of the NYC Food Bank Challenge, an initiative that invites New Yorkers to try and eat for a week under the SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) allotment of $29 per person for seven days. As with the ASL ice bucket challenge of last summer, the Food Bank Challenge is trending among celebrities. Paltrow joined in by posting a photo of her weekly grocery purchase on Twitter:
This is what $29 gets you at the grocery store””what families on SNAP (i.e. food stamps) have to live on for a week. pic.twitter.com/OZMPA3nxij
”” Gwyneth Paltrow (@GwynethPaltrow) April 9, 2015
Many media outlets are making fun of Paltrow’s purchases, saying the items she chose to buy are unrealistic purchases for someone receiving SNAP. But while many of her public statements show how woefully out of touch she is with the life of the average mother, maybe we should cut Gwyneth some slack on this one.
Whether she intended to or not, Paltrow’s photo raises an important issue. Most families who live on food stamps would likely choose different items that would last longer, like pasta or canned foods, instead of her peas and measly single bag of brown rice. Even then, having enough food to last the week would be a struggle. But Paltrow regularly eats a healthy diet, and it appears she didn’t want to stop doing that in order to take part in the NYC Food Bank Challenge. No family should have to sacrifice quality for quantity in their diet. It shouldn’t be that only the wealthy like Gwyneth have the privilege of eating a diet centered around produce and fresh, healthy ingredients.
The need for SNAP reform isn’t a new issue, it’s one that recipients of these benefits have been talking about for some time. It’s frustrating to see celebrities like Batali and Paltrow act as though they are discovering this new unjustice in the world. It would be refreshing to see a celebrity use their fame to point people towards those who live on SNAP everyday and allow them to be the mouthpieces of reform. But until that happens, we’ll have to take the raising of public awareness of the problems with SNAP were we can, even if Paltrow didn’t realize what message she was sending when she posted her photo.
(Photo credit: Jerome Favre /GettyImages)
