Hipster Defends Using Food Stamps

There's been quite the backlash against hipsters buying fancy organic fare with their food stamps, but one such hipster argues that “cheap food is the real extravagance.” Gerry Mak—a subject of the recent Salon article—points out that "a whole rabbit at Lexington Market is $10, feeds at least four people, and is healthier than factory-farmed chicken,” he writes on Salon. “Why is it such a travesty that food stamp recipients have access to quality, healthy food?”

Organic and local foods aren’t “luxury items,” he argues, and cheaper food is simply “the result of government subsidies.” In this financial crisis, we must realize that “even upper-middle-class people struggle to put food on the table,” he writes. “If traditionally secure people find themselves unable to keep their heads above water, you can either talk about our failures as human beings, or you can take it as yet another sign that our economy has some very shaky foundations.”