Box Vox

packaging as content

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November 1, 2011

Food Stamp Beer Photos

FoodStampBeer

While looking for Ballantine XXX Ale bottles for a post last month, I found the illicit-looking photo in the upper right corner.

From a series of photographs by Brayden Olson for Vice Magazine. I like the paparazzi flash and intestinal-pink* backgrounds of these photos, but I have some misgivings about the article it illustrates. Apparently it’s possible at certain bodegas in NYC to get around the regulations prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase alcoholic beverages.

“… since receipts at most bodegas in Brooklyn aren’t itemized and products in the store are never scanned (most likely because they are thieves), there is no way to tell what you actually bought.”

“Food Stamp Beer Reviews” Vice

I cringe to think of this article being used to punch more holes in the already tenuous social safety net. With unemployment so high, the demographic of food stamp recipients has clearly changed.

Food policy experts and human resource administrators are quick to point out that the overwhelming majority of the record 38 million Americans now using food stamps are their traditional recipients: the working poor, the elderly and single parents on welfare.

But they also note that recent changes made to the program as part of last year’s stimulus package, which relaxed the restrictions on able-bodied adults without dependents to collect food stamps, have made some young singles around the country eligible for the first time.

Hipsters on food stamps, by Jennifer Bleyer
Salon, March 15, 2010

If “unemployment” can somehow still be viewed as a character defect in the minds of those who have recently characterized the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “unemployed, uneducated and uninformed” — this bodega beer thing may eventually wind up on Fox News as a way of discrediting these new, younger food stamp recipients and food assistance programs in general.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

A footnoted digression: *The color “intensinal pink” is not my own invention. My father coined this term to describe the color of my grandmother’s house on Long Island.

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