AT never fails to amuse with the extremes.
Either everyone is a millionaire married to a supermodel and living the high life or they're living like a pauper. LOL.
One of the general trends with food is that it's hard to get good food for every meal without making some from ingredients. Many such ingredients are sufficiently cheap, even with rising costs, to make food stamp amounts we see seem reasonable for entire food budgets, or more. Eating frugally is not living like a pauper, but living like a financially responsible person.
IoW, it's not extreme at all, but rather, a common working class cultural value. It also is one part of a cultural schism, which this all really comes down to. We don't all have the same cultural values. That's not always a bad thing, but some cultures just have plain bad values and expectations.
If you work and put into the system, you expect that others work, as well. If or when they are taking reasonable efforts to live within their means, and cannot, they should be assisted. If or when you also cannot, you would expect such assistance. Then, when you no longer need it, you would instead be paying back into that system again. By welfare assistance being somewhat shameful to live off of, you have a cultural incentive to make it something you only even apply for if you're at the breaking point, and something you stay receiving for as little time as possible--it's a safety net, not a laz-e-boy. Part of living within one's means, consistently, is not overspending on food all the time.
With expectations that others owe you because you exist, or worse, because you made some babies to help keep the poverty streak going, the incentives to not spend every last dime go out the window, as does any incentive to work to be able to put into the system that is assisting you (including trying to make it so that your kids won't be receiving assistance, if at all possible). It is not being extreme, or living like a pauper, but a show of valuing the money spent on food, while seeing people spending some of your tax dollars on food
not valuing that money (and therefor not deserving of it), then complaining about it being cut by a wee little bit.
"Not being able to," afford food on such high food budgets, due to the kinds of foods chosen, and/or buying lavishly with welfare money, is a cultural affront--an implicit insult, by one's actions--to those that try their best not to ask for help if they don't truly need it.