Bite this: A little satire among friends…

At last, a meaningful debate about feeding the hungry:

Should food stamp purchases be restricted to healthy stuff? Or, more accurately, should the rules keep stamp users from buying bad stuff, like junk food?

The New York Times has a series of bloggers weighing in on the question, here.

I personally feel it is high time that we clamp down on the growing problem of government-funded purchases of hot dogs.

Of COURSE, we, the taxpayers who make food stamps possible, should get to decide what poor people eat! (And, admit it, that would be sort of fun, right? No more standing next to some food-stamp slacker at Winco while she buys Cheese Doodles. Now she’s gotta buy… lentils. Yeah, the 10-pound sack!)

Poor people, as everyone knows, need guidance…and a lot of it. If they could handle big decisions on their own — like buying white bread instead of whole-grain — they wouldn’t be in whatever mess got them on the bread line in the first place, would they?

Aside from the nutritional case to be made for getting more people into a high-fiber zipcode, closer regulation of food stamps would put an end to the growing problem of poor people spending so much time sitting around dining tables, yukking it up over a fun meal. A serious, focused mindset is key to finding gainful employment and pulling oneself up out of poverty. Every hour lingering over high-fat, high-sodium chicken pot pies is an hour lost.

I could flog this point, but, oops!, there goes the oven timer! Got to go!