The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy

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Grocery List of Items Purchased with Food Stamps (ca. 1980)

Cabot Extra Sharp Cheddar  
Prince Spaghetti 
Ragu Sauce 
Steak-umm 
Bumblebee Tuna (four one-serving cans)  
Olive Oil 
Local Unpasteurized Whole Milk  
Tropicana Orange Juice 
Eggs 
Quaker Oatmeal

P.S.

My babysitter’s husband tells my mother it’s crazy to buy in such small quantities—it’s not cost-effective, for example, to buy one-serving cans of tuna. That’s all she can eat, she says. Later— in my teens and twenties—I start to feel the specific anger of others about welfare recipients’ buying brand name food and doing other wasteful things like subscribing to cable tv. The general anger has always been there, but now it feels more targeted and precise—the lists of things that are wrong with us. When I’m in college, Mitt Romney—running for governor in Massachusetts—proposes conditioning food subsidies on not purchasing cable. The belief that poor people don’t deserve autonomy: now a rallying call.

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