(Trying to turn this into an op-ed about a SNAP fast-food ban kicking around AZ lege right now... as this is, it's probably too long.)
Since
they have been so successful putting it in people’s panty drawers and so many
other such places, I guess they want in our larders and our guts
When I
started this piece, I was building up to a lecture, probably because the
feelings that this topic brings up can be so uncomfortable. So, yes, the banned-foods-on-SNAP
conversation is about Free Will and Choice and how sometimes people who are struggling(which,
at different times, for different reasons, includes many of us) seek out
consolation prizes. There are things about the food system, too, and why things
that seem like junk can be cheaper and easier to get than things that are fresh
that more informed writers tackle every day, so, definitely find one of them
instead of me about that, and I’ll try not to speculate about what
mass-produced foodstuff excites Rep. Martinez’s own taste-buds, but most
Americans have at least one, in my experience.She eats it, too, I'd bet anything I had.
If I’m
honest, for me this conversation starts with marshmallow fluff. In college, my
roommate and I needed some for a recipe and didn’t have cash. None of that
seemed as hard as it might have later because we were Getting Our Educations in
the booming 1990s and everything would work out one way or another, even from
our wheelchairs.As everyone said, “We have the ADA now,” and it’s still fun and
novel to make things stretch and stuff. Just learning *so much* every day. So I make my purchase and talk to the clerk
about the weather or my weekend or whatever, which is fine, but I’m still
slower than most of the other people with one item so a knot of shoppers starts
to collect behind me.
If I’d
been a target of a group eye-roll before, I’d been too wrapped up in what I was
doing, possibly while talking, to notice fully, but that time, I still remember
how my skin burned under so many “Oh, man, here we go!” faces. I remember being torn between full-on shame
and the kind of defiance that made me want to blurt out something like “Okay,
you got me. I broke my brain eating
nothing but marshmallow fluff so you assholes would have to support me
FOREVER. That was my incredibly evil,
short-sighted plan.”(Evil laugh optional)
But, you
know, some people would laugh or feel chastened as I might want, but it would
only take one thinking “Wow, she just sits there and admits it,” to make me
regret that, even in an era right before “going viral” was for anything but
actual viruses.
I still
sometimes wonder what would have happened if I said it, because obviously,
as House Democrats discover every week,
keeping my powder dry did not lessen the pain at all. Nor was it supplanted by my eventual,
well-funded awesomeness.
