The most popular story on Yahoo! News this morning is a Reuters dispatch about food stamps. From the article:
In some parts of the country, shoppers using food stamps have almost become the norm. In May 2011, a third of all people in Alabama were on food stamps -- though part of that was because of emergency assistance after communities were destroyed by a series of destructive tornadoes. Washington D.C., Mississippi, New Mexico, Oregon and Tennessee all had about a fifth of their population on food stamps that month.
The article mentions a supervisor at Walmart and a part-time cashier at Target who are on food stamps.
The article has a left-wing bias — nearly everyone quoted in it is pro-food-stamp. One sentence says, "Millions of Americans whose unemployment benefits have expired have to exist only on food stamps and other government aid, such as Medicaid healthcare support," as if finding or creating a job is not an alternative. But it nonetheless includes enough facts to provide useful overview of the situation. Earlier coverage of food stamps at FutureOfCapitalism is here.