I get these anonymous notes in the mail from time to time from people very concerned about other people's eating habits.

I get these anonymous notes in the mail from time to time from people very concerned about other people's eating habits.



Specifically, poor people's eating habits.



Usually, there's a crumpled receipt from a cash register that shows someone has purchased a Diet Coke or a bag of Lay's potato chips with food stamps.



Last week, I got a very crumpled receipt from the Cumberland Farms store on Dartmouth Street that showed someone had purchased $12.70 worth of junk food through the contemporary version of food stamps — an EBT debit card.



The lucky food stamp recipient purchased "Funyuns" and "Hot Buffalo Bugles," and they bought a king-sized Hershey's PayDay candy bar and a Hershey's "Cookies and Cream" bar to boot.



To wash it all down, the happy buyer (and a companion?) bought two 16. oz. cans of Red Bull energy drinks.



A veritable feast.



The outraged writer said that he or she knows the person who bought the junk food on the taxpayer's dime and that it is "just plain wrong."



"This is one of the many reasons (he or she underlined 'many reasons') that our system doesn't work."



Indeed.



"Why is this allowed to happen and why aren't the guidelines stricter?" the heartburn-plagued reader wrote.



The writer, of course, is right.



People who receive government assistance should not waste their money on junk food, and the government should have a better way of policing them.



I'm no less frustrated than anybody else when I see folks buying junk food on an EBT card. I work hard for my own money and I've certainly drummed my fingers while standing in line behind an obese food stamper purchaser myself.



And yet, and yet .... in the end, I can never work up a lot of outrage for food stamp abusers.



I've worked in a local food pantry for many years and have seen the face of desperate poverty up close and it's not a happy face — whether or not once a month you get to purchase Funyuns and Red Bull, or stand in a line for free Cheerios.



The reality is that if you work for a living, thank your lucky stars that you do because there is honor and dignity in work, not to mention the ability to buy even more Funyuns and Red Bull than you can get on food stamps.



And the truth is that buying Funyuns on an EBT card is humiliating — no matter how much bravado the buyer standing in line in front of you for the goodies seems to have.



Think about it for a minute. Standing in line in a public place with an EBT card in your hand.



This whole issue reminds me a little of when I was growing up and would head for the cookie drawer in the middle of the afternoon.



My mother would inevitably tell me I was going to ruin my supper.



But my mother — God love her — didn't stop loving me when I hit the cookies early. And she didn't — thank God — even stop buying cookies, no matter how much I unwisely hit the drawer at 3 in the afternoon.



(Though when the cookie drawer in our house was empty for the week, it was empty for the week. And similarly, with food stamps — when you've blown ot all on Hershey's PayDays and Red Bull on the first of the month — there isn't any more money coming for another month, no matter how hungry you are.)



The problem, of course, is that food stamp recipients have other sources of food. Maybe they hit up their harder-working relatives or friends; maybe they go to the food pantries or the soup kitchens.



The poor seem to get by, one way or another.



It's true that lots of people shamelessly rip the government off for food stamps; or disability payments (when their bad back is now worse than yours or mine); or for Section 8 rental vouchers when they have plenty of money coming in under the table.



It's the way of the world.



Human beings are always looking for something for nothing.



Sort of like the way Wall Street investment houses rip you and me off for much, much more money than our taxes have ever paid in food stamps.



Yes, those upstanding bankers who gambled away our 401(k) retirement money and over-valued mortgages, they're like the food stamp scammers.



Except, the general feeling toward Wall Streeters is one of envy, as opposed to the outrage we feel for EBTers purchasing junk food. The Wall Streeters, after all, in their $1,500 suits, have figured out how to work the system a lot more successfully than the food stamp scam artists.



For the record, the Department of Agriculture says it would be more expensive to run a program in which the government hired people to give out only fresh meat, produce and grain to food stamp recipients.



Even evaluating which foods are totally junk food, and which foods have some nutritional value, would be a nightmare, says the agency's Food and Nutrition Service.



"The burden of identifying which products met federal standards would most likely fall on an expanded bureaucracy or on manufacturers and producers asked to certify that their products meet federal standards," the agency says.



Government spokesman also told me that the food stamp program is doing some interesting things with educational outreach and farmer's markets to steer the poor to better quality food.



But to be honest, poor people, like the rest of us, need a little junk food now and then.



You know, like that bit of dark chocolate you snuck into your grocery basket last week, or the salsa and chips you like to munch through when nobody's looking.



Being poor doesn't mean you've given up your right to be human. It just means that everybody else gets to judge you more harshly about it.



Contact Jack Spillane at jspillane@s-t.com