To call attention to insufficient funding of food stamps, Eric Gioia, a city councilman fro Queens concluded a Food Stamp Challenge, during which he ate only what a New Yorker could typically afford on a week’s worth of food stamps, or the equivalent of twenty-eight dollars. “President Bush has threatened to cut the program by hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years, even though food-stamp provisions have not been properly adjusted for inflation since 1996”.
Here are the groceries that Gioia brought home from a Food Dynasty in Woodside: two loaves of white bread, six ears of corn, five oranges, six bananas, three cucumbers, three cans of tuna, four packets of ramen, five boxes of Ronzoni pasta, one jar of tomato sauce, one bag of carrots (organic), one stick of butter, processed-cheese slices, one tub of pre-mixed peanut butter and jelly (Smucker’s Goober). Total cost: $24.44.
He complains about feeling bloated and hungry from his carb-heavy diet.
For the record, food stamps are underfunded and are a necessary measure to keep families, especially children, from starvation.
However, I do like a challenge. As I have been sorting and minding Ian this afternoon, I’ve been thinking about what I could buy with $28. How could I stretch that dollar? A bag of rice. A bag of lentils for lentil soup. I could make enough soup for three days. Shoprite-brand frozen vegetables. Chopped beef on sale. No name cheerios or oatmeal. One loaf of brown bread.
Apt. 11d 
I’m struck, of course, how much all the Food-stamp challengers relied on peanut butter for protein. PB never strikes me as that cheap, but maybe that’s because I always buy natural PB because I can’t stand all the additives.
The key to cheap protein, as you point out, is dried beans. There’s a reason why rice and beans is a staple of the poverty diet. The sample diets are really short on protein, perhaps because middle/upper class Americans are used to thinking of meat as the primary protein source. I see he bought cheese, but it was processed slices, which aren’t that cheap and aren’t particularly good for you. You’re better off with a block of store brand cheddar, particularly if you get it on sale. It also looks like he bought random stuff, rather than thinking about this in terms of meals. And why organic carrots? They’re like twice as expensive as conventional carrots? Organic is, sadly, a luxury product.
The one-week aspect of this challenge also makes it hard to do another key dollar-maximizing strategy: buy bulk. The larger the package, the cheaper per unit cost. If it’s more than you can eat before it goes bad, divide and freeze. Of course, for many city dwellers, bulk-buying is a limited option due to small apartment freezers and limited kitchen storage space.
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Another issue is that the challenge ignores other sources of food funding. I was just looking up the WIC program (which is limited to mothers and children up to five), and saw that the program is actually designed to fill in the deficiencies of a carbohydrate-based diet. They say that there isn’t funding available for all who are eligible, but being on food stamps automatically qualifies you, and a four-person family is eligible for WIC all the way up to 36K in yearly income. I bet a lot of people are eligible for WIC without knowing it. It pays for formula and coverage starts during pregnancy.
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At the risk of creating yet another government program, how about “fresh fruit and veggie” stamps to go along with WIC’s emphasis on dairy products?
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There’s also free and reduced school lunch, as well as free breakfast programs in places like DC. If there are 21 meals a week, those school-based programs cover 10 meals or nearly half the meals a child eats every week (barring vacations).
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Of course, yet another complication in eating healthy on such a small amount of money is who is going to have all the cooking and storage implements needed to manage this? Especially if you’re part of the working poor, traveling long hours morning and night to a job where you can’t cook your lunch and you don’t have a way to store and transport your food easily, you end up either starving yourself or blowing some of your budget on those “value meals” at the fast food joints.
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There’s quite a list at dchunger.org/Anti-Hunger.html of food programs available in DC, including summer meals and after-school snacks for kids.
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I used to think food stamps were a good idea until I hung out a bit more with my parents’ friends. They sell their food stamp 2:1 for drugs, gas, and spending money. They will go to the store with you, and let you spend $40 in food stamps for $20 in cash or meth. And then the next week their kids are begging the neighbors for some food because they have none, and no more food stamps. Unfortunately there is just too much room for abuse for me to be able to support spending more on these kinds of programs.
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The economics of food are all messed up before you even deal with food stamps.
You can probably figure out a way to serve healthy meals with a WIC + food stamps allocation, IF you have the time, interest, and nutritional knowledge. Lacking any of these, “eat cheap” = “eat tons of carbs and fats” and the high incidence of obesity and related illnesses among Americans in general and the poor in particular are proof.
Did you see the NYTimes article last month on how the farm bill and food subsidies drive our eating options?
Here’s a quote, explaining why it’s cheaper to buy a Twinkie than fresh produce:
“Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year.”
I really hate the idea of subsidizing twinkies…
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I think some cities have programs where extended area farms sell produce in urban settings. I know my friends who have a HUD house see a Mennonite farmer come back regularly every summer.
*shrug* I’ve been buying groceries from $20-50/wk for the nearly 6 yrs of my marriage. I think Americans tend to spend a lot on packaging. I don’t buy any prepackaged meals or mixes. I don’t buy cereal…just rolled oats. I don’t buy snacks (except there’s been a sharp rise in cracker consumption now that I have a toddler). And when I really need to make it stretch I don’t buy bread…flour is super cheap. I buy my meat and cheese in bulk (from Costco) once a month and make it stretch. And I get produce at a discount place (but you have to eat it fast). And I manage to keep to this frugal plan even while finishing my shopping strategically at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, so that I can get quality food.
If you plan well, know your food, shop strategically, and have a little extra time for prep, eating on a very tight budget can happen. Unfortunately, the low income person is probably working 60+ hrs a week, has limited food knowledge, and can’t shop as strategically because by the time they’ve run around on public trans or used valuable gas in their car they haven’t saved much. It frustrates me to no end. More food stamps won’t necessarily solve the problem, but I think a better thought out nutritional strategy could help.
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Rebecca Blood is doing something similar: Eating Organically on a Food stamp budget.
She addresses many of the commenters observations (buying in bulk, etc).
She is easting pretty well. However, she has a lot of knowledge, resources, and other advantages. Still, this is the sort of thing schools could teach, and kids not just have to learn this if they are lucky enough to become vegetarians at a liberal arts college and have a friend with the right cookbook. I was never taught to cook in a thrifty manner, but picked it up quickly when I only made 18K a year. However, if you have no access to vegetables at all, things get a little harder.
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i was being a little sarcastic about the liberal arts college. In general, the way she is eating is not hard if you have resources. The problem is most people don’t have these resources and its not just money.
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Here’s how WIC works: http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004/06/i-was-welfare-queen-according-to-new.html. I was always quite sure that the milk lobby benefitted from that program. Yeah, I saw that article, Artemisia. I meant to blog about it.
Yes, we’re all pros. We know how to eat on $28 per week, but we’re smart, educated, older, not suffering from depression, drug addictions, or disabilities. You’ve all brought up the big problems. Let me add some smaller ones.
People are cobbling together meals based WIC, food stamps, free school lunches, and food pantries. (Our middle class town actually does a booming food pantry. A surprising number of people in town use it, including our former mayor.) Maybe these programs should be centralized. Maybe instead of getting vouchers to redeem at stores, packages of non-perishable food was mailed weekly to homes with vouchers just for milk and vegetables.
I like the idea of a life skills class in high school. Everything from balancing a checkbook to cooking cheap, healthy meals.
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My high school required a life skills class. The most commonly-taken option was called “Survival of Singles/SOS” I think. I got the requirement out of the way in a summer independent study, of which I remember only that one lesson included budgeting for all the expenses of buying a car (insurance, maintenance, etc) and of course the balancing of checkbooks was in there somewhere.
I’d be interested to know if anyone ever studied how useful those kind of courses were in the long run.
I know our local food bank does try hard to get donations of good food and to teach healthy cooking techniques.
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Maybe it’s gotten better across the city since I left, but when I lived in two different neighborhoods “in transition” there, not only was the produce at groceries worse than in the suburbs, there was less of it, and it was more expensive. Triple whammy for someone living there long-term.
And retail beyond groceries? Very problematic. There was a hardware store when I first moved to the neighborhood, but nightlife drove it out. And then all the Hecht’s (think that’s the right name) closed, assuming you had time to make the long trek by bus over to one anyway. So anything for the home was a complete pain in the keister to get.
Food’s just the beginning…
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Geez, comments like these always remind me of what a hothouse flower I am. Do all of you really know how to eat on $28 a week? I’m pretty sure I have no idea how to feed my family on $28 a day or even $28 a meal. I don’t even have to think twice about how hard it would be, ’cause I have no idea how to do it (hence, I think, no need to force myself to try in order to understand).
I respect people who try to force themselves to understand, though (though we do see the danger of thinking that you understand when you’re a healthy, educated, normally well-off person who is doing the food thing as an experiment, and not on top of an already complicated life).
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These days our family of 4 spends about $200 a week on groceries. I’ve more or less forgotten how to cook, but hope to remember how once I’m no longer afraid that one of the kids is going to climb in the oven.
As a single young Peace Corps Volunteer in Russia in the mid-90s, I tried to eat on $20 a month. (My living allowance was actually fairly generous, but I had other things to do with my money than eat it.) I lived largely on brown Russian bread (10 cents a loaf), rice, oatmeal, potatoes, excellent Korean instant noodles (40 cents per box), mandarin oranges, and the discounted eggs and chicken I got through my school. I tended to avoid most fresh stuff, not wanting to have to go to the trouble of giving produce a bath in chlorine solution. Russian friends supplied me with homemade jam and pickles and marvelous home-grown potatoes and occasionally fed me dinner. Volunteers in the same area a few years earlier had lived on the “white diet” of the first post-communist years.
I had chronic bronchitis during those two winters and didn’t have much stamina. On the other hand, I lost a lot of weight, probably because of the diet, lots of walking, and living in a 5th floor walkup. So a high-carbohydrate diet does not necessarily spell obesity, at least for someone enjoying the metabolism of a 20-year old.
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Geez, comments like these always remind me of what a hothouse flower I am. Do all of you really know how to eat on $28 a week? I’m pretty sure I have no idea how to feed my family on $28 a day or even $28 a meal.
Your food budget is $2500/month?
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Well, we can assume that lunches are eaten outside the home during the week. Breakfasts might be eaten at school, or in the form of a coffee and bagel from Starbucks. So you could be spending an average of over $28 per family meal without the total sum being astronomical, as long as the number of family meals is limited.
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If Misty’s still around, I wonder if all of the people who misuse tax deductions means that they should also be eliminated? Or if corruption in defense spending (Duke Cunningham, for starters) means that we should elminiate that?
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Hi. My name is Eugene Gershin. I’d like to welcome you to Obadiah Shoher’s blog, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict.
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Not $28/meal for every meal, OK? The kids do eat toast and cereal for breakfast, and the adults don’t eat breakfast. But, we certainly spend more than 28/meal (for 4)/dinner. So, let’s say somewhere between 800-1600. (good that someone else likes to do the math :-).
bj
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$28 was for an individual. A family of four earning no money can receive $506 per month: http://www.state.sc.us/dss/fi/food/foodstampcalc.htm?ElderlyDisabled=False&HouseholdSize=4&L1=0&L3=&L5e=&MedicalCostElderlyDisabled=&DChild1=N&DCare1=&DChild2=N&DCare2=&DChild3=N&DCare3=&DChild4=N&DCare4=&L7a=500&L7b=&L7c=100&B1=Calculate.
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Considering that many middle class families can’t live within their means, why do we self righteously tell the poor how to meet their budgets? Most of the Mexican immigrant families in the schools where my partner teaches do a better job managing their money than a lot a middle class families – they don’t have access to credit and they don’t trust public assistance, even when they qualify. Also on the subject of school lunches, don’t assume the kids eat them. At least here in San Francisco, the free lunches are often of such poor quality that the kids will fast rather than eat them. It causes a lot of behavioral problems when the kids haven’t eaten all day. My partner said she wouldn’t eat the food after seeing it either. Also, the kids see the boxes come in marked as “surplus – do not destroy, for schools or prisons” and comment on how they are eating prison food. Fasting followed by binging is linked to obesity, and may be the reason a lot of these kids are overweight.
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Kids can be awfully picky and wasteful with food. Little kids regularly wind up with as much food on them as inside them, which means twice the expense that their caloric needs would suggest. School-kids are less messy, but still prone to carefully picking out all the fresh bits of their lunch and leaving them. (As a young high school student, there was a regrettable period in which instead of buying school lunch with my lunch money, I was buying life savers candy and a juice box just to save time so I’d have the entire lunch break to use as I wanted to.) If today you offered me a tray with brownish cooked peas, a mound of mashed potatoes with gluey gravy and meat kibbles, a warm box of milk, and a brownie, I would probably walk away, but my younger self had different tastes.
I know I’ve heard that ag subsidies play an important part in the free lunch menu, and that the regulations state that the lunch must provide 50% of caloric need for the day, both of which push the lunch in a certain dietary direction.
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mk,
I’m pretty sure that when middle-class people criticize the food choices of the poor, first generation Mexican immigrants are not who they are primarily thinking about. (I’m thinking of a recent trip to central Texas, when the lady in front of me at the HEB checkstand had a large pile of pork ribs, sports drinks, Little Debbies, and other things of that sort, with not a fruit or vegetable in sight.) To the contrary, the produce section at the grocery store is an excellent indicator with regard to the number of Latin Americans in a neighborhood. I don’t know a lot about the various Latin American cultures, but I do remember that when I taught English to adult Latin Americans in Gaithersburg MD, my class unanimously decried the high prices of limes and other produce, which were staples in their diet but luxury items in ours.
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I’d start with plantains.
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Please pass the plaintains, too.
And “Eugene”‘s post above looks a lot like comment sp*m.
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Here are a couple of guesses about the SF kids skipping their free school lunches:
1. They’re hitting the vending machines.
2. There’s an eating disorder involved.
3. Peers have dictated that school lunch is uncool.
As the veteran of many genuinely horrifying meals (mostly abroad), I really don’t believe that there’s anything that a genuinely hungry person wouldn’t eat. No matter how bad the SF lunch, there’s got to be something in it that a genuinely hungry child would eat, unless there’s something else going on (#2 or #3).
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Here are a couple of guesses about the SF kids skipping their free school lunches:
1. They’re hitting the vending machines.
2. There’s an eating disorder involved.
3. Peers have dictated that school lunch is uncool.
As the veteran of many genuinely horrifying meals (mostly abroad), I really don’t believe that there’s anything that a genuinely hungry person wouldn’t eat. No matter how bad the SF lunch, there’s got to be something in it that a genuinely hungry child would eat, unless there’s something else going on (#2 or #3).
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When I’ve been on my tightest budgets but trying not to eat fattening all-Ramen-and-cereal-all-the-time, rice and beans have been crucial. Two bucks on rice and beans and two bucks on produce per day isn’t anything like my preferred diet (I’d rather be spending that much per day on coffee alone), but when my wife is overseas and I’m on a major work binge, there’s really only cheese and coffee between me and that diet.
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When I’m on a very tight budget, I take out my grandmother’s St. John’s Lutheran Church cookbook and make a hot dish. It costs, like, $3, and can feed a family of 4 dinner and lunch the next day. The whole book is designed for a farm family that can only make it to the store once a week — ironically, a state of affairs that turns out to be true once again these days, as we are too busy to make it to go grocery shopping often. And you can throw these recipes together in about 5 minutes.
Even though I am resolutely middle class and we essentially eat whatever we want, my family of four typically spends ~$80/week on groceries. I’m convinced it’s because we have a Mexican fruit market in the neighborhood, and because I have this farm background and thus know a few tricks.
We used to all know how to do this, and I think we can all learn again. Just like we’re going to have to learn how to save gasoline again.
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Amy P,
These are not “starving children” living in some country under famine, willing to eat any scrap. They know they will probably get something decent at home so they skip their lunches. If the lunch happens to be pizza, for example, most kids will eat it because the frozen pizza in the SF lunch is palatable. The mystery meat meals are rarely touched.
The problem is that children, unlike many adults, do not function well if they go long periods betwee meals. Anyone who has taken care of children can describe the behavioral changes that occur when kids get overly hungry. Put 25 hungry 10 year olds in a room and try to make them concentrate on math or history and you get pretty ugly results.
When I was studying to be a dietician one thing I learned about pediatric diatetics was the importance of palatability for meals for children. If the food is not palatable children will not eat it (unless you are talking about truly starving children in Darfur.) While the SF kids are not starving, there are definitely consequences to their eating habits, such as poorer learning, increased risk of obesity, greater risk of behavioral problems.
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I think institutional dining for kids is inherently very problematic. I’m told my four-year-old daughter mainly just picks the bread out of her school lunch and eats it, and I get the feeling she drinks the chocolate milk. At home, she generally eats a dish of instant oatmeal with just about every meal.
It seems to me that SF might do very well to offer kids the choice of breakfast cereal and milk for lunch.
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As I remember it, the policy aims of the food stamp program when established were to provide a market for food produced by USA farmers, to get food onto the tables of poor people, and to get food into the mouths of poor children. The program founders specifically didn’t want the benefits to be transmuted into vodka by parents in the first five days of the month. So they gave cash-like coupons which could be spent only for food, and tried to provide a little less than an amount which would pay for someone’s food needs for the month, in the idea that people would not trade off the coupons for things not beneficial to their children if they knew they would run out.
There is, obviously, some diversion, but the program seems to have been reasonably successful at satisfying the intents of its developers. Whether those are the proper intents, of course, is always open for discussion. But it was originally intended as a supplement for other money, not to by itself provide the entire food needs of its clients.
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Thanks, Dave s. Yeah, I have a problem with many of those assumptions.
First of all, I hate programs that have multiple goals. In this case, feeding the poor and helping out the farmers means that in many cases the poor end up with too much of one product. The WIC program forces poor people to take too many heavy gallons of milk before they can get formula for their kids. When the poor don’t have cars, this is a huge problem. It also means that poor often end up with starchy diet filled with corn products and wheat.
I don’t have a problem with vouchers to food products. If the food products get into the right hands, and corruption is relatively rare, then fine.
I also have a problem with programs that are intended to supplement other programs. It means multiple bureaucracies, inefficiency, redundancy that is burdensome on the poor and the tax payers.
Maybe the problem is that the needs and abilities of food stamp recipients is out dated. Instead of giving them vouchers for food ingredients, they need ready prepared meals. If we’re too busy to cook for ourselves and end up eating Trader Joe’s burritos once a week, why do we think that they have time? Maybe we should subsidize healthy, fast food restaurants. An alternative to Micky D’s. Put more money into school cafeterias.
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I am a newly single mother and my food budget for the month is $250 for me and my two children. I only make $30,000 a year which is not minimum wage but in New York City it might as well be. I only grocery shop twice a month. 125 bi-weekly. When I shop I make sure to buy 14 packs of meat that cost no more than five dollars per pack which takes up $75.00 dollars and the other $50 goes towards a huge bag of rice ($5.00), two bags of potatoes ($3), 4 boxes of generic non-sugar cereals ($15), 2 gallons of milk ($8) and frozen/canned generic vegetables ($10.00) . For fruit I have to either buy a bag of apples which come 10 in a bag or bananas which are really cheap and I can ration 1 a day. I seem somehow to make it stretch. Oh, and I never forget the multi-vitamin!!! This comes from my miscellaneous budget.
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