Less Coffee, More Ramen: 2012 Food Stamp Challenge
[Co-authored by Renata Ballesteros and Rebecca Barker] February meant lean times for students on the Food Stamp Challenge, a self-imposed restriction of food spending to the levels permitted by government food assistance programs. Paradoxically, hunger is famous in this country for going unnoticed. But with a soaring rate of unemployment, an economic recession and 46 million Americans — that’s one in seven — on some kind of federal food assistance program, it is an undeniable social problem in the middle of the richest country in the world and in the middle of Anchorage itself. For instance, according to the 2010 Hunger in America Study, the Food Bank of Alaska (FBA) provides food for an estimated 41,200 different people annually in the city, of which 35% are children under 18 years old. In an attempt to reverse the ignorance, several students at UAA took on the Food Stamp Challenge: a self-imposed restriction on spending to the levels permitted by government food assistance programs.
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