My Week on (Fake) Food Stamps
By Betsy Mikel in Food on Oct 1, 2010 7:30PM
This is what I ate this week.
- Spend no more than $4.50 per day, including beverages.
- Don't use food already on hand unless you deduct the value from your weekly amount. Salt and pepper don't count, but all other seasonings, cooking oils, condiments, snacks and drinks do.
- Don't accept food from family, friends, coworkers and others.
- Try to include fresh produce and healthy protein each day.
The goal was to challenge people to eat as if they were on food stamps. To qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a person’s gross monthly income cannot be a penny above the 130 percent poverty level. For a family of four, that’s $2,389 a month. For a single person like me, it’s $1,174. And for residents who do qualify, the average amount of food assistance they receive is $4.50 a day.
Even though I only spent about $25 on a week’s groceries thanks to a couple coupons and the extremely low prices at Aldi, I had trouble following the challenge. I learned that yes, I can eat something on that amount. But no, I cannot eat a variety of flavorful good-for-you food on it. By Thursday, I had plowed through nearly a pound of peanut butter, was out of baby carrots, and was dreading eating yet another pretty nasty (but cheap!) apple. That was pretty much the extent of my fresh produce and healthy protein. I spent the rest of the week eating fake cheese foods, pasta, soup and chicken nuggets. In other words, I ate a lot of dextrose, carrageenan, locust bean gum and many other mystery food additives. In other words, thinking about what I ate makes me feel gross.
The hardest part for me was the “don’t accept free food” rule. The yoga studio was handing out free granola bars. Work had free pizza. The place where I volunteer has a giant vat of free chocolate. I accepted them all. I rationalized to myself “well people on food stamps can accept free food, so why can’t I?” But I do not live, work, or volunteer in a food desert, as many people who qualify for SNAP do. Throughout the week, I realized that my privileged life comes with a lot of free food for the taking. If I had such a low income that I qualified for SNAP, would I have coworkers generous - or wealthy - enough to buy me a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte?
What did I learn from this week? That eating this cheaply sucks? Well, yeah. But also I realized how limited your options are when you have so little money to spend. Eating on the cheap is not only nutrition-less, but flavorless. I accepted the free food offers not necessarily because I was hungry, but because I was craving some more flavor.
This week also made me think about what I’ll donate to food pantries in the future. Usually the annual holiday food drive motivates us to rummage around in the back of our cupboards and pull out whatever has been sitting there the longest. After this week, I think I’ll try harder when food drive comes around again. What would I want to eat? That’s probably what other people - ones that are getting SNAP assistance and ones that aren’t - like eating, too.