Today’s edition of Stretch Your Food Dollar is about to depart from the usual format. I’m not offering shopping tips or recipes this week. Instead, I want to ask our readers a question that was spurred by an IM conversation I was having yesterday with a friend. My friend is a grad student who is slaving away for less than pennies to finish up her dissertation. When I asked her how she was doing, she said “OK, just struggling to put food on the table.” She admitted that she went to the food bank earlier in the week to get groceries, but then said she felt there were people who were more deserving of the assistance. I told her she was a starving student who is woefully overworked and woefully underpaid. If she’s not one of the “deserving poor,” then who is?

Our culture is permeated with a Puritan work ethic that deems the poor to be “lazy” and “undeserving.” But here’s the rub – people are loosing their jobs by the thousands and home foreclosure rates continue to rise. Our homeless shelters are over capacity, and it’s not because people are on the street due to laziness. They’re full because people have lost their homes, despite their best efforts to keep a roof over their head. Anyone who has been following Alex’s Financial Implosion series probably has a good idea that a lot of people are on the brink of homelessness due to forces entirely out of their hands.

So here’s my question for Queercents’ readers. If you’re having a hard time stretching your food dollar, are you willing to go to the local food bank for assistance? Or do you feel like other people are more “deserving” of aid? How “poor” do you have to be in order to be “worthy” of a helping hand?