The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has posted several compelling narratives of Jewish leaders, including JCPA and JCRC leaders, Rabbi David Saperstein of the RAC, and Congressmen Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who’ve been participating in its Food Stamp Challenge on its new blog.

In the latest post, JCPA Director Steve Gutow says “To grow up on this over-starched way of being limits our humanity” of his experience spending only $21/day or $1/meal on food this week, to replicate the real lives of many food stamp recipients around the country.

“Hunger and poverty are not going to end because a couple of hundred people around the country are taking the challenge but because a few million people simply decide that the richest country in the history of the world must not tolerate the state of affairs in which tens of millions live in a nutritionally debased way and have no health insurance at all. That will take all of us including the press.”

An earlier post by a participant in CA alludes to one of the reasons why the obesity epidemic has taken root so strongly among low-income households: “I found calories to be affordable. I did not find the wide array of food that I had expected to find when I prepared my shopping list.”

Gutow has also posted a copy of the transcript from the press conference JCPA held in Washington yesterday.

Wednesday’s Washington Times included an op-ed blasting the Food Stamp Challenge as a useless publicity ploy–a gross overgeneralization that does highlight a genuine problem with the Challenge. While the Challenge can play a truly important role in bringing attention to the need for an increase to the abysmally low Food Stamp benefit, it is true that for most households, the Food Stamp program is mostly intended as an income transfer program to supplement a household’s income to spend on food, rather than to provide the whole food budget. Also, if the challenge does not generate enough press to turn the votes of Senators who wouldn’t already be voting for a Farm Bill that includes increased funding for food stamps, it will have little immediate effect. The JCPA rebuttal to the op-ed can be found here. Nevertheless, it is true that the benefits have not increased with inflation in decades, and legal immigrants are still required to wait 5 years before becoming eligible (among other significant problems with the program).

In his blog post, Gutow recognizes that the food stamp challenge is an exercise to bring awareness to the issue– a means to an end rather than the end itself:

“The challenge is for us to wake up every morning and ask ourselves ‘what can I do today?’ Gaining a little empathy is good; raising awareness about the problem is also important. But empathy and awareness-raising are means to the end of ACTING to end poverty in America.

Over at Jewschool, BZ has put in a plug for donating the money we would have spent on food during our Yom Kippur fast to those who don’t have the choice to fast or not through MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger.