Pressure Cooker<\/em>, which wants to talk about such issues as the challenges the poor have using their food stamps to shop, and the pressures (some) middle class women perceive to put from-scratch meals on the table every night, but can\u2019t really pull this together into a coherent whole.\u00a0 The book bops back and forth from one family to the next, of the 9 women and their families which it profiles, mostly, but not all, poor women.<\/p>\nBut in light of my prior blogposts on food stamps, I wanted to look closer at these families.\u00a0 Some of these families are among the \u201cworking poor\u201d and would clearly meet the SNAP work requirement.\u00a0 In another instance, a grandmother cares for her preschool grandchildren, so she\u2019d qualify as a caregiver even if she\u2019s not old enough to be waived from work due to age.\u00a0 A husband has Parkinson\u2019s.\u00a0 And so on.<\/p>\n
But what about Latrell?<\/p>\n
Following one of the families as they are profiled through the book, he is Leanne\u2019s husband (the book uses pseudonyms throughout).\u00a0 Leanne is, in the summer of 2013, working part-time as a McDonald\u2019s cashier, and attends a technical college part-time as well.\u00a0 Latrell is unemployed, attributed to the 2007 recession.<\/p>\n
No, the stock photo above is not of Leanne and Latrell.\u00a0 But I bet Leanne wishes it were.<\/p>\n
Leanne, in addition to work and school, cooks for her family.\u00a0 She is the one who does the shopping, who goes to the food pantry when the food stamps run out, three kids in tow.\u00a0 She is the one who sometimes skips meals to ensure the kids and her husband have enough to eat.\u00a0 She puts up with her mother\u2019s harangues as the cost of getting rides to the grocery store, since only more-expensive corner stores are in walking distance.\u00a0 She manages the family finances, signs the school permission slip, supervises the homework, cuddles the youngest, a one year old.<\/p>\n
In another chapter (chapter 10), Leanne is hosting a July 4th cookout.\u00a0 We learn that her sons are seven and eight years old, and as the chapter begins, Leanne is on her way to the corner store to buy a treat for the oldest because Latrell took the middle one for a treat earlier, so it\u2019s only fair.\u00a0 When she returns from the story, having bought treats for both boys and the other tag-along children, she enlists Latrell in glazing the ribs.\u00a0 Then Latrell\u2019s brother calls; he wants him to go with him to a city an hour\u2019s drive away, but Leanne says no.\u00a0 Later the baby wakes up from her nap and Leanne changes her diaper.\u00a0 Latrell\u2019s brother calls again another time and, as the chapter ends, Latrell is still talking about making the trip with his brother.\u00a0 (What\u2019s in Rocky Mount?\u00a0 We never find out.)<\/p>\n
Later (chapter 18), we observe Leanne trying to manage grocery-shopping when the food stamps were not replenished as expected.\u00a0 Fortunately, it\u2019s payday, and Leanne\u2019s mother will take her to get her paycheck, then to the grocery store.\u00a0 (We\u2019re now told that she \u201cmanages Leanne\u2019s money\u201d \u2014 what this means is not clear.)\u00a0 Latrell \u201clooks on\u201d while the women make the plan, then his role is to install the car seat so that they can take the baby with them, though the boys stay at home with Latrell.<\/p>\n
They proceed with the shopping trip, then return home and Latrell helps unload the groceries, then he fumes that the Oodles of Noodles packages she got were shrimp rather than chicken-flavored.\u00a0 Then Leanne gets ready for her 5:00 work shift, when \u201cLatrell will be \u2018babysitting\u2019 again\u201d (the authors put \u201cbabysitting\u201d in quotation marks).<\/p>\n
In chapter 22, we follow Leanne, her mother, one of the boys and the baby to a trip to the food pantry, where they\u2019re also able to pick up clothes for the children.\u00a0 When they return home, Latrell is playing basketball (by himself? with the other boy?), but he stops to help unload the food pantry bags, but wanders off again before all the food is put away.\u00a0 Leanne complains to her mother about Latrell, and her mother says, \u201cYou a single parent, basically.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the last we hear of Latrell.<\/p>\n
So is he a good-for-nothing lout who does nothing to contribute to the welfare of his family, leaving Leanne to support the family on Food Stamps and a half-time McDonald\u2019s income?\u00a0 Would a full-enforced work requirement get him off his lazy a**?\u00a0 Did he have a \u201cregular\u201d job before the recession and his pride won\u2019t let him work at McDonalds, or are the authors charitably attributing his lack of work to the economy when he doesn\u2019t actually look for a job in the first place?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s plausible.<\/p>\n
But there are holes.\u00a0 The biggest of these is simply \u2013 who is taking care of the baby?\u00a0 (Sure, the baby is in fact a baby<\/em>, so that doesn\u2019t explain what he may have been doing before the baby was born, after the older boys had started school.)\u00a0 Is Latrell the baby\u2019s caregiver when Leanne is at work or school, or does she cobble together caregiving from a whole slew of friends and neighbors, or does she have the baby in a daycare program during daytime hours?\u00a0 (You\u2019d think the latter would get some sort of mention for its impact on the family budget, every bit as much as the conversation about whether using the paycheck on groceries instead of utility bills will cause problems causes a lament about the need families face to prioritize spending in one way or another, but, then again, in the whole exchange around using her paycheck for groceries, they don\u2019t talk about the need to pay rent, either.)<\/p>\nNow, again, this is a book about women, and in one respect it seems unreasonable to chide the authors for spending insufficient time talking about men that are not the topic of the book.\u00a0 But the men do actually matter.\u00a0 If Latrell is actually providing childcare, that\u2019s important to acknowledge.\u00a0 And if, as he\u2019s portrayed, he truly does nothing to contribute to the family\u2019s well-being other than instances of caregiving that are so infrequent and reluctantly taken-on as to be deemed \u201cbabysitting,\u201d then that also matters.\u00a0 This is not the way it should be.\u00a0 If a work requirement for food stamps can nudge him into doing something, even for just 20 hours a week, that\u2019s a win, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 And if it wouldn\u2019t work, if he\u2019d say, \u201cfine, cut off my food stamps, I\u2019ll just take from my wife and kids,\u201d that\u2019s a problem the answer to which isn\u2019t \u201cgive everyone food stamps (or rent or whatever) unconditionally.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So in the last two posts I\u2019ve mentioned the book Pressure Cooker, which wants to talk about such issues as the challenges the poor have using their food stamps to shop, and the pressures (some) middle class women perceive to put from-scratch meals on the table every night, but can\u2019t really pull this together into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[281,240],"class_list":["post-16266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-black-men","tag-food-stamps"],"yoast_head":"\n
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