Hipster Foodies Turn to Food Stamps

Food stamps are for the poor, no matter if you’re a single mother or a destitute hipster. Salon checks in on the growing number of young, unemployed, college-educated foodies who qualify for stamps and use them for organic delicacies along with staples. One UChicago grad says he “used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese.” Not so. “You can get anything.”

This, of course, has spawned blowback in the blogosphere. “You're hosting dinner parties and buying cases of wine—on taxpayers' money!” one particularly irate commenter wrote to a blogger in on the trend. Of course, you can’t actually buy wine with food stamps. But hipsters can buy tons of other stuff, enabled by the stimulus package, which slackened rules on who could collect food stamps. “At first, I thought, 'Why should I be on food stamps?'" posits one young recipient. “Then I realized, I need them, too." (More hipster stories.)