For everyone else, there's the Food Stamp Challenge, thrown down by anti-hunger activists in the industrial port city of Baltimore to lay bare the reality of living on the poverty line.

Participants each get $30 – the average food stamp benefit in the East Coast state – to buy groceries for a week, after which they are invited to blog about their experience.

"The purpose is to raise awareness on the issue of hunger, the importance of this (food stamp) program and how critical it is that we continue to fund it, because so many people rely on it now in Maryland," said Cathy Demeroto, director of Maryland Hunger Solutions, which organises the challenge.

Nearly one in six Americans draw food stamps from a scheme run by the Department of Agriculture that is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Progam, or SNAP.

Its history goes back to the early 1940s and the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which used real stamps which have since been replaced by an electronic bank card.

With the onset of recession, the ranks of beneficiaries have exploded from 28 million in 2008, and have leaped again by 10 pc since last year. The cost of the program has doubled since 2007 million to $68 billion.

The figures reflect those of the Census Bureau, another federal government agency, which found that 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 15.1 pc of the population –the highest level in 52 years.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011