Food prices are skyrocketing, but us poor food stamp shoppers won’t be seeing an increase in benefits until the fall.

Damn summer vacation.

Summers are always hard money wise. I can never be sure if I am going to work (and this year I am pretty sure that I won’t even be able to find temp work like I did last year) and I can’t count on the Kid getting 2 meals a day at school like I do the rest of the year, so grocery costs go up because I have 10 more meals a week to provide.

It used to be that food stamps got us through almost 3 weeks. And I can cover a week on my meager salary. But with the prices like they are, I’m lucky if they last 2 weeks. And that is during school, when I don’t have to think about breakfast and lunch. For the last 6 months or so, the end of the month has been scary. Even our staple poverty food, brown rice, has had the price shoot up drastically.

So when people start bitching about poor people eating crap, I want you all to remember this:

“The level of desperation is just frightening,” she said. “People are calling, saying they have no idea what they are going to do.”

But even as demand is rising, many food pantries nationwide have been forced to cut back on the amount of food give to individual families because higher fuel costs and commodity prices have sliced into private donations to the pantries.

For now, many of the needy, including many in Kladis’ store pushing carts laden with soda pop, bags of cookies and chips — much of it cheaper than healthier food — are doing what they can to stretch their shrinking buying power.

“The bottom line is, a mother trying to feed her kids is not really picky about what she puts in their bellies,” said Dan Gibbons, executive director of the Chicago Anti-Hunger Federation. “She just wants them full.”

ETA: Remember kids, the milquetoast Dems could have fixed this problem back when they were deciding on stimulus checks, but they lost their spines on the way to Capitol Hill