The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Questions Nobody Is Asking
- “What if America Had a Queen?”–headline, Washington Post, June 2
- “What Do China and the Banjo Have in Common?”–headline, NPR.org, June 1
Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking
“Anchorage Residents Say No to New York City Soda Ban”–headline, KTVA-TV website (Anchorage, Alaska), June 1
The Food Stamp Journalist
If someone had bought Tracie McMillan a drink, you might not have gotten stuck paying for her meals. In an article for Gourmet magazine, McMillan, author of “The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table,” tells her tale:
I had gone out with friends in Detroit. . . . At the bar, I asked for a glass of water, and made up for my drink’s lack of intoxicants by tasting everyone else’s. The bartender, watching me pilfer a gulp of beer here, a sip of whiskey there, told me to buy my own.
“Dude, my cupboards are down to bare bones. I got no business buying a drink,” I said.
“Dude,” he said mockingly, “food stamps.”
Sure enough, she signed up for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program:
I have never won the lottery, but I doubt it can improve on the experience of learning, after a long winter with a monochromatic diet, that you have $1,000 to spend on summer produce. It was the dietary equivalent of opening a gray, dusty door and stepping, Dorothy-style, into Technicolor Oz.
Now, she boasts, she has “a best-selling book, and a taste for government cheese.” As Mickey Kaus dryly observes: “McMillan really may not be the best Real Person to argue against food stamp cuts.”
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
