Outside the 'human interest' type of magazines, media describe them as unskilled job-seekers or as 'lazy bums'. So the notions of food in the writings of the unemployed pointed at the media are an attempt to disarticulate and rearticulate the image of the unemployed. There is one hegemonic discourse on the topic of identity in consumer culture. Identity is not something you are born with. It is something that everybody constructs, it is changeable and what is more, it is something you can buy in postmodern consumer society.
Pleasure follows purchase as well as identity.
I am not saying that talk about changing identities is just capitalist mishmash. In fact, it is relevant for the unemployed as well. If identity was understood as petrifying, not possible to change, it would be sad to live as an unemployed, carrying the burdens of Protestant work ethic and seeing getting a job as the only way for constructing a reasonable life. That is why talk about contextually changing postmodern identities is not out of picture here. What is the other side of postmodern consumer identity discourse is that the unemployed have no resources to buy their identity.