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The Hunger Blog
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We completed the Food Stamp Challenge and actually had food left over, though it was all starches. My conclusions:
Milk alone could consume most of the budget during times when the children are home all day.
A Food Stamp budget is too tight to allow guests for meals. Working parents picking young children up from childcare after work would not have the time to do the cooking from scratch required to eat healthily on such a tight budget.
I began the Food Stamp Challenge yesterday, with mixed support from my family. My son and husband agreed to eat Challenge meals when they eat with me (dinners and weekend breakfasts) so I went shopping with that in mind, adding $18 to my $21 to cover their meals. As my son is a vegetarian and the rest of us are not, I worked hard at finding good deals so I could try to meet everyone’s needs. Taking Carol’s advice, I scoured the ads and shopped for different things at different stores, and bought dried goods and spices (I had to limit myslef to salt, chili powder and a pinch of nutmeg) at bulk food stores like the People’s Food Co-op. It took the better part of a day to stock my pantry for the week. It was frustrating that I couldn’t take advantage of the cost savings found in buying larger quantities. Also, coupons were no use for staple items. I held back $5 to cover unanticipated vital ingredients and so I could take advantage of some of next week’s specials. Milk was too expensive everywhere this week so I’m hoping it goes on sale next week. Otherwise, I guess I’ll look into powdered milk. I got a great deal on eggs from Busch’s- only $1/dozen and am planning on some quiche-type meals so I’ll need milk. The crust for my quiches will likely be either potato based (potatoes were 10 lbs for $2) or tortillas, much cheaper than pie crust, though I might opt to buy some bulk flour and make my own pie crust. I already sprang for butter (on sale for $2/lb!) and a large jar of oil, since I plan to make my own mayonnaise. My family’s tolerance for potatoes increases considerably when butter is involved. I was able to buy some fresh vegetables (a head of lettuce, an onion, a green pepper, a zuccini, a cucumber and some green beans and green onions) that were all on sale. Still it was about a third of the quantity I usually buy and I didn’t even consider the vegetables that were full price. Days 1 and 2 For breakfast yesterday I had oatmeal with a few sunflower seeds in it and a glass of water. I was hungry again by 10:00 but managed to stay busy and ignore it until 1:00 p.m. when I had a small slice from my chunk of cheese. As I cut it I fretted over whether I’d still be able to make palatable meals by the end of the week. Dinner was a “skillet dish” of fried potatoes layered with zuccini and a dusting of shredded cheese. To my dismay, one of the potatoes in my sack is largely rotten. I don’t dare throw it away yet. Later in the evening I had a piece of toast with peanut butter. Today’s breakfast was a fried egg with buttered toast and fried potatoes. It was filling longer that the oatmeal. “Lunch” was half a tablespoon of peanut butter eaten from the spoon, as I was reluctant to use another piece of bread. Dinner will be stir-fried tofu, green pepper and green onion with brown rice and a simple salad. The salad dressing will either be my homemade mayonnaise with a twist of lime juice or canola oil and cider vinegar. Observations- I find myself worrying about food throughout the day. I’m obsessive when cooking as I can’t afford to make a mistake and ruin any of my ingredients. Meal preparation takes substantially longer as everything has to be cooked from scratch. (I lost the option of make a bean dish today because I forgot to soak the beans last night.) I’m hungry most of the time but I’d rather that than risk not being able to feed my family at the end of the week. My husband started thinking about this problem and he proposed pre-packaged food stamp bundles at the grocery stores. The packages would contain meal ingredients, including spices and cooking instructions. Farmers would be told a year in advance what the government would be buying for these bundles, so they could plant accordingly. (He thinks this could be linked to farm subsidies.) Fresh vegetables and meat would be added to the bundles based on what was on sale that week. I'm concerned about meeting families’ varying needs. Susan Beckett ________ Day 5 Here we are on Day 5 of the challenge. We’ve been eating pretty well. Meals seem to be plentiful, filling, and I’ve got enough food to make them. I did find myself counting the slices of bread yesterday, however. I wanted to take a piece to work with some peanut butter for a snack mid-morning. But my menu had PBJs for our lunches, which will take 4 slices, we’re having eggs and toast a couple of mornings, that’s another 4 or more. We’ve got 9 slices left. I didn’t think about buying a loaf that had lots of slices in it. Same with number of tortillas - we’re down to our last tortilla. The celery has to be reserved for the red beans and rice we’re having tomorrow night for dinner. These are things I’ve been using for snacks either mid-morning or after work when I’m STARVING. (Boy, does that sound whiney. I’m hardly starving, with 3 meals a day on the table and snacks available.) It’s interesting how my impulses are to reach for something to snack on at the slightest opportunity – even when I’m not really hungry. It’s a real habit, I think, one which it might be better for me to break! I will say I’ve lost about 3 lbs since Monday. Most of it’s water weight, I’m sure. But no alcohol, desserts, chocolate and crunchies has a great deal to do with it. I’m getting pretty tired of beans and rice. And lentils and rice. And bean burritos. Not much variety if you don’t have much income. One of my colleagues brought peaches into the office today, and I took one. I figured that people who were really on food stamps would not refuse free food. No, I won’t go to a lunch meeting at work, nor will I have cookies/fruit at the oneg at services tonight. But the peach sure tasted good!!! We’ll make it to the end of the week, without skipping a meal, and with good, nutritious food. Not much fruit (I bought 3 apples), no desserts. I have to say I’m very glad to have a garden. We’ve been eating fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, cabbage salad, and green beans. If it were winter, however, those luxuries wouldn’t be available unless I’d taken the time to can/freeze them when they were plentiful. To do this right is quite time consuming. You need time to figure out menus and shopping lists, time to shop, time to cook quantities of beans/rice etc ahead of time. I’m lucky I don’t have to work a 12 hour shift, I don’t have several young children to care for, or a husband who’s disabled. I think I probably wouldn’t bother with the planning – just grab what’s easy and cheap. And then there’s the stress of counting slices of bread, measuring portions so you’ll have enough left over for another meal, etc. I’ll write again Sunday night, at the end of our week, with my shopping list, menus, and a link to a couple of great recipes that I discovered during this journey. Carol Milstein So – we’ve taken the Food Stamp Challenge: For one week we will spend only $21 each ($42 for both the two of us) for food. We planned a menu and yesterday (7/28) Carol went shopping. It was an interesting experience, one which Carol's very grateful she does’t have to repeat. We mostly followed the rules from the Congressional Challenge, with a few exceptions noted here. Here's Carol's comments: It seems to me that the rule about not using anything you have already in your house is artificial. People don’t just drop into the food stamp program with empty cupboards. And what are considered “condiments” – yes, salt, pepper, spices. What about Mayonnaise, olive oil, flour, sugar? For example, I intended to bake bread. I had flour and yeast already in the house, but buying 5 lbs of flour for $1.99 and a strip of 3 packs of yeast for $1.89 was much more expensive than spending $1.89 on a loaf of bread. Also, what about my garden? If I were on food stamps, if possible I’d have a garden and harvest stuff to supplement whatever I bought in the store. I solved the problem for me by approximating the cost of a cucumber or tomatoes and included that cost in my total. Same for carrots – I already had 2 lbs of carrots in the house, and wasn’t going to buy more just for the food challenge. So 1 lb of carrots at the farmer’s market was $1 which I included in my total. Another thought. Food stamps are supposed to be a supplement to your income, not the total, just as Social Security is not supposed to be your entire income. Of course, it works out that way for some. And, of course, the $21 doesn’t count toilet paper, medicine, pet food, gas for the car. I started out yesterday planning a menu/shopping list with the help of the website “Hillbilly Housewife”. The woman who runs it has planned a week-long menu for a family of 4 for $45, which can be stretched to feed 6. She did use the “empty kitchen” concept for her menu. I didn’t use all her ideas, but did many. Basically, breakfast would alternate oatmeal, eggs/toast and rice/milk cereal using left over rice. Lunches would rely on peanut butter/jelly sandwiches and left-overs from earlier dinners. Dinners were mostly some variation on beans and rice – burritos, red beans and rice, lentil chili – and one night of tuna/pasta casserole. As you can see, it’s heavy on the carbs, light on meat. But it does provide protein. Not many fruits/veggies, and certainly no alcohol, sweets, ice cream, etc. Off to the farmer’s market, list and calculator in hand. Bought some tomatoes, eggs, onions for a total of $5.75. I added in $1.00 for carrots, although I already had them in the house. My recipes called for shredded cheese, which I already had in the house unopened, so I added $2.89 to the total. So I’d already spent $9.64 out of my total $42. We belong to a co-op farm which allows us to receive a box of produce weekly, having paid earlier in the year, the equivalent of around $20/week. I knew we would be getting a delivery on Tuesday of this week, so again I added the farmer’s market cost of the things which I would be using to the total - $2.50 for green beans, $2 for lettuce, $2 for cabbage. Now I was at $16.14 before I’d even started to buy beans and rice! OK, so I have $25.86 to spend at Meijer’s, assuming that they’re undoubtedly much cheaper than Busch’s where I usually shop. Celery is 77 cents (forget organic – that’s $1.49), green pepper is 99 cents/lb, and lemons are around 66 cents each. That’s the limit on fresh produce I can buy, so now it’s off to the beans/rice/pasta aisle. I find myself obsessing about the cost of everything. “What do you mean a jar of peanut butter is $2.69? And that’s the kind with the added sugar and oil! Guess I’ll look for “natural” peanut butter. Oh good. Meijer brand is $1.79. Jelly/jam is another $1.29 for the cheapest, smallest jar, but I have some in the house, so I’ll just figure in the cost. Wow! Tuna is on sale 10 cans for $10, so I’m buying 2 cans”. In many cases, the healthy choices were much more expensive than the unhealthy ones. Low sodium chicken broth even on sale for 79 cents/can was more expensive than the high sodium bullion by the time you bought enough broth to cook the recipe. Cans of beans were 74 cents each – what a deal. The total was adding up. All of a sudden I was at around $23 and I still hadn’t bought milk or flour to bake bread, or ground beef to make meatloaf. I had to start putting things back on the shelf. Back went the canned beans in favor of dried beans – a pound of red beans for $1.15, 2 lbs of brown rice for $1.25. But I didn’t know if I was going to use 2 lbs of rice this week, or the whole pound of beans. I knew I needed to have milk for several recipes, so that went into the cart ($2.19 for a half gallon). What about ground beef? Well, the cheapest way to buy it was in a 5 lb “family pack”. But I didn’t have the $5 in my budget to cover it. So I looked at the smaller packs. Hamburger was the cheapest – only around $2.50 for a package. But the fat content was so high that half of it would be lost in the cooking process, making it not so great a bargain. What about ground round then? That was $3.89. I put it in my basket. Check out the price of flour - $1.99 for 5 lbs, $1.89 for yeast. Guess not – a loaf of bread is cheaper. By this time, I was close to tears. How do people do this, week after week? It’s a real energy drain to constantly obsess over how much money you’re spending, whether what you’re buying is nutritious. It’s embarrassing to be working with a calculator, and putting things back on the shelves and feeling as if everyone knows you’re on a strict budget. I don’t have the money to buy coffee ($2.50 for the smallest amount), tea, even KoolAid although the envelopes are cheap, you need sugar to add (the already sweetened Crystal Light was almost $4/package!!) So we’ll be drinking lots of water this week. I put the ground beef back – I just can’t afford to buy it. I supposed I could have chosen this instead of the fresh veggies from my garden or the farmer’s market. There are lots of hard choices to be made here. I finished the shopping trip having spent $41.09. Realized when I got home that I hadn’t bought oatmeal – there goes 3 breakfasts. But – eureka! I can go to “By the Pound” and get just enough oatmeal to feed us for the three meals. Wish I had thought of that before. I might have been able to buy just one lb of brown rice, or 2 cups of beans, half a pound of flour. Here are a few things that I might do differently if I were to do this again. Maybe it will help those others who plan to do this challenge. Compare the sales at different grocery stores. I’m not sure I was always getting the best price at Meijer’s. It might be that Kroger was having a sale on ground beef, etc. 1. Check out “By the Pound”, a bulk food store at the South Main Market. You can buy smaller amounts of staples than may be at the grocery stores and you can buy just what you need for your recipes. 2. Clip coupons. I’m really glad I did this. It heightens my awareness of the frustration and real panic that millions of people go through every week, not just a week of their choice. Although our family is a big supporter of Food Gatherers, somehow there must be more we can do. I felt as if one person “going on food stamps” for a week is NOT going to solve the crisis. It’s preaching to the choir. The people who need to do this are people who probably never will. Even my sister-in-law’s reaction when we told her was “good luck – I can’t imagine how hard that would be”. So I don’t think it inspired her to do it, or to add to her donations to food banks, etc. I guess maybe if everybody gets angry enough, something will be done. I for one would like to find out if there are any education programs that teach low income people to cook nutritiously as well as frugally (the idea of “teach a man to fish and he’ll be able to feed his family). Or adopt a family for a week and shop/cook with them. I’ll probably have another entry when I finish the week. Let me know how you managed the challenge. Bob and Carol Milstein *Submit blog entries by emailing them to Devon Fitzig |
