This is the reason why I call BS on a good number of celebrities who claim to tip their toes in what it’s like to be poor. I found out that Mario Batali is going a food challenge, which is setting a goal of $29 a week for a person to live off of. Unlike other challenges I’ve seen on the web, he has made the stipulation you can’t factor in food you already have or food donated by others. I think this is a noble attempt to illustrate to people what a struggle it is to live on a fixed income, but as usual there are celebrities who essentially claim to be down with the cause who have no clue how regular people live. In trying to link with their fan base, they end up hurting the cause because so many people who struggle with making ends meet every day can make better choices that the celebrities. I know their hearts are in the right place but celebrities open themselves up to ridicule because they haven’t a clue how to buy things like regular folks. It’s like when politicians try to show how much they are like the common voter but fail miserably.

Gwyneth Paltrow decided to take the challenge and posted the meager items she was able to buy with $29. While a few critics I saw went with the standard diss and said she got her food from the notoriously expensive Whole Foods, I did a zoom in of the picture and saw she got the food from Safeway. Still, I’m have a hard time understanding how she bought the food she did at $29. By coincidence, I went to my local grocery store less than an hour before stumbling over this article, and I bought a lot of items she had in the photo because I was making guacamole. The things I bought came up to under $7 and they weren’t on sale. I got the cilantro, lime, tomatoes (not a single tomato), onion (three brown and one bunch of the green), 3 avocados (not one) and four corn on the cob (not one) for under $7. I know the lettuce, any variety, was under $1 and the tortillas were around $3. Rounding up, the beans, peas and rice would have been about $2 each, and that’s not the more economical stuff. Instead of brown, you could have gotten white rice for under $1. Canned peas and beans could have been had for under $0.75. Eggs would come in at $2.50 at the high end. By using my local grocery store as an example isn’t even the cheapest place in the area where I could have bought food for the challenge. There is a discount food store a few blocks from my local store that had lettuce for around $0.50 a bunch. I know because I was there a few days ago and picked up a good number of items, some that were in the picture, for less than $23.

The issue I have with celebrities jumping on causes is they don’t do the research or due diligence to really understand the issue. They think by having a concern and going out at their normal places they can alert the world to a crisis. What normally happens is critics can tear their weak arguments apart and the celebrity help tends to hurt the cause more than help. With $29, I could have gone to a dollar store and gotten a lot of food that would have lasted over a week. Why? Because I know what it is to struggle for food and could hit a place where some essential items are inexpensive. Just going to the store up the street from me I was able to find items far less that Gwyneth got. Gwyneth will be initially praised for shedding a light on the subject of surviving on a meager budget, but those on the right hand side of the political spectrum will have more than enough fodder to shoot down her efforts.

The truth is you can find food for $29 but is the food going to be nutritious? For $29 a week I could hit McDonalds for a week and have money to spare, but is that a healthy diet? Those are the questions we should be asking ourselves. Unlike Gwyneth Paltrow, many of us aren’t surviving on $29 a week as a challenge. That is what we have to do every day. It is admirable they want to shed a light on a complex issue in our society, but being intellectually false in revealing the true nature of the issue can give fodder for those who want to demonize hard working Americans. Anyone who has spent time in a grocery store knows how much BS is being blown about that being the representation of what you can get on $29 a week.