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The $21/week Food Stamp Challenge
Schrodinger
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Some of you already might have heard about this:
I guess there's also a blog: http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/
So here's the challenge. You have $21. Plan out one full week's worth of groceries for one person.
If you want to buy a long term staple, then try to consider how much the item costs, and then consider how many weeks you can make it last. e.g., "I'm going to spend $5 on Olive oil, which should last me about 2 months." So that's roughly 60 cents a week."
What can you come up with? The healthier and tastier your plan, the fewer the number of stores you need to visit, the better.
Ryan and three other members of Congress have pledged to live for one week on $21 worth of food, the amount the average food stamp recipient receives in federal assistance. That's $3 a day or $1 a meal. They started yesterday.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), co-chairmen of the House Hunger Caucus, called on lawmakers to take the "Food Stamp Challenge" to raise awareness of hunger and what they say are inadequate benefits for food stamp recipients. Only two others, Ryan and Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.), took them up on it.
I guess there's also a blog: http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/
So here's the challenge. You have $21. Plan out one full week's worth of groceries for one person.
If you want to buy a long term staple, then try to consider how much the item costs, and then consider how many weeks you can make it last. e.g., "I'm going to spend $5 on Olive oil, which should last me about 2 months." So that's roughly 60 cents a week."
What can you come up with? The healthier and tastier your plan, the fewer the number of stores you need to visit, the better.
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It's not hard, as I had to live off that for three weeks. But it's also not fun. Actually, the fact I no working computer to take my mind off the lack of decent food is what drove me nuts. Well...watching Food Network didn't help.
I have no idea how long one can live off that, but the point is to, eventually, get a job and buy real food, yes?
Isn't that the point of welfare? Giving you the necessities without removing the incentive to go out and earn yourself a proper living? I don't see what the deal is, here.
With such a small food budget, you'd likely have to alternate your diet to "rotate in" necessary things. Meat one week...maybe veggies the next.
Most fruit juices are high in sugar, and not so much with the nutritional content.
So vitamins and nutrients don't qualify as a necessity?
The problem is, I'd guess, that most people aren't good enough at planning to remain remotely healthy on that $21 a week. And that there are a number of people, like the disabled, who'll never be able to get off the payment.
Nowadays I wouldn't mind spending that entire weeks amount on a good breakfast... :oops:
With 200 billion dollars being requested by the President for Iraq for 2008 alone... "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." - Eisenhower
Maybe Food Stamps and such should come with a list of recommended diets/budgets that are generally cheap at the major grocery chains?
But that's an issue for another thread.
Nutritional education should be a core school subject, far as I'm concerned. Food stamp programs also need to stop being subverted by lobbyists into becoming clearinghouses for surplus food products. That's why a lot of them are so bad; they'll let you buy all sorts of horrible unhealthy stuff and pretty much railroad poor people onto the get-diabetes-in-under-a-year diet.
Quaker Hot Cereal Oatmeal Regular - 42 Oz: $2.50 (Sale price, normally $4.49).
Safeway/Vons Peanut Butter Reduced Fat Chunky - 18 Oz: $1.85 (Normally $2.05)
Safeway/Vons Round Top Enriched Wheat Bread - 24 Oz: $1.79 (Normally $2.09)
5.50 LB Safeway Chicken Thighs Extreme Value - $4.35
Bananas: $0.40/each
Tropicana Premium Pure Orange Juice - 64 Fl. Oz.: $3.00 (Normally $4.69)
So without the bananas, that's somewhere between $13.49 - 17.67, depending on whether or not the stuff happens to be on sale. Also, I seriously doubt that a single loaf of bread can last a single person through a week, if he's constantly eating peanut butter sandwiches as a main source of nutrition. Oh, and do you want anything on your oatmeal, like brown sugar or cinnamon? Or are you content with eating it plain?
One banana a day would be $2.80, two bananas a day would be $5.40. And bananas aren't even that nutritionally dense, as far as fruit goes.
And we still don't have any vegetables.
And I agree. But my point is that there really isn't any reason to expect these people on welfare to eat healthy when it's just more satisfying to eat whatever the fuck you want.
Maybe not, but it's a pretty common store that a lot of poor people will shop at. If you have to drive 30 miles for a better price, then it's not a realistic scenario.
Anyway, it would also be interesting to hear this from a Canadian perspective. Would $21 go any further in Canada than it does in the US?
Burritos.
1lb=$3=10 mini-burritos=3000 calories
You'll be gassy as hell, but you can sure as heck survive on rather little.
There's a website somewhere where a woman feeds her entire family of four on $200 a month without feeding them utter filth.
I don't pay that much more, myself.
I've even read of someone getting a month of groceries at -organic- stores for like $270.
The only major issue here is the tendency for ignorance and/or stupidity/laziness being associated with joblessness.
Really, if you just dodge brand names and such, you're on a great start.
I really think that it would be a good idea for governments to produce some sort of "budget diet" guides, that got handed out with benefits like these... simple recipes that are almost universally affordable, perhaps with a small amount of extra cash available if someone is in a situation where they don't have even basic cooking utensils.
Apparently she does it buy buying huge quantities of food at a time, like 100-200 pounds worth, and vacuum sealing it.
Which requires somewhat of a hefty initial investment that most poor people can't afford. Not to mention the problems that will occur in the event of a blackout. Assuming that their freezer is even big enough.
It also requires that you have a personal garden for growing your own vegetables. Again, not practical for a lot of poor people.
But, again, there's the ignorance issue.
Safeway Lentil Beans - 16 Oz - $1.05
Carrots Prepacked - 2 Lb - $1.29
Safeway SELECT Verdi Extra Virgin Olive Oil - 17 Fl. Oz. - $4.49
Organic Celery - 1 Lb - $.99
All that and a bit of salt and pepper is enough to make a lentil soup that's reasonably healthy. Some tomatoes would make it better. If everything is used to make one batch, there should be enough for seven meals right there (assuming refrigeration is an option). The olive oil will last way more than a week, of course.
Quaker Hot Cereal Oatmeal Quick - 42 Oz - $2.50
Milk - Quart - $1.59
Plums - 1.5 Lb - $2.34
I dunno, something like that could work for breakfast, right? The oatmeal will also last way past a week.
Ovenjoy Bread Wheat Roundtop - 16 Oz - $0.89
Safeway/Vons Peanut Butter Creamy - 28 Oz - $2.50
Smuckers Concord Grape Jelly Value Pack - 48 Oz - $3.00
And there's lunch.
That brings me to a total of $20.64, but the longer uses of the olive oil, oatmeal, peanut butter, and jelly should count for something. Only $8.15 worth of goods will need to be replaced every week, which certainly leaves a decent amount of cash free for buying other items to supplement the diet like fruit juices, canned vegetables, fish or meat, etc. And, once that's being done, each meal type will be able to last that much longer.
It isn't a wonderful diet, but a person can live on it I think.
pasta - $0.77 / lb, 700 calories
rice - $0.65 / lb, 800 calories
beans - $0.60 / lb, 200 calories
eggs - $2.39 / dozen, 960 calories
potatoes - $0.53 / lb, 800 calories
Budgeting some permutation of these and some fruits and meats, you can eat at the rate of six or seven hundred calories per dollar. Alternatively, you could comfortably spend $0.75 / lb on dry dog food at as much as 1500 calories per pound. :P
What I am focusing on here is that not everyone on foodstamps is jobless. Sometimes the job doen't cover all the bills.
EDIT: Jobless? rather, Unemployed
There's really no upper limit to how much better/expensive food can get. Even if you could get everything you needed for a tasty/healthy diet on a food stamp budget, that doesn't mean you don't have an incentive to earn even more money so that you can eat something even tastier/healthier. Especially when you factor in the desire to go out every now and then. And the need for non-food related luxuries, like a better living space, or a nicer car.
As other people have pointed out, they can spend $21 for a decent breakfast. I doubt it's because you need to spend $21 for something tasty/healthy. So the incentive to earn more for better food is always there.
Edit: And Keamien brings up a good point. What happens to the children, who are too young to get a job? Should they be forced to suffer because their parents can't afford healthy foods?
Yeah, as I said, things like Olive oil should already be factored as a longterm expense.
Really, I don't even know why grape jelly is on this list. It's 14% of your budget, and it basically adds nothing but pure sugar. You could spend the same money on extra fruit or vegetables or something.
But anyway, thanks for making a solid effort, and participating in this thread.
4 Roast Chicken Ramen
1 Large Onion
1 6 Pack Dole Pineapple Juice
1 Bag Iceburg lettuce
2lbs Ground Hamburger
1/2 Galon Milk
1 Loaf of White Bread
1 Can Manwhich
1 Soft Taco kit
1 Pack Oscar Meyer Roast Turkey Breast
1 Ben & jerry's Karamel Sutra Ice Cream
1 Smoked Sausage Kielbasa
2 Large Potatoes
1 Box Nutrigrain bars
Grand Total - $29.38
Cutting out the Ice Cream and getting a cheaper brand of lunch meat and sausage, getting a head of lettuce instead of the premade and getting a large can of Pineapple juice instead of the 6 prepacked cans and Im right about at the $21 dollar mark.
Im a single 25yr old, so most of the meals I make will last me 2 days anyway. If I had it my way, people would be given 7 MRE's a week instead of food stamps. There are over 3000 calories per MRE and they cost roughly $3.50 a piece. If its good enough for us troops at war, why isnt it good enough for the people ?
That's an intriguing idea ... or at least have MREs make up the bulk, with some supplemental food stamps for some occasional obscurity. Are they meant to be consumed over long periods of time though? Nutritionally (vitamins etc) speaking? Or are they just calorie bags until you can get back to base?
EDIT: Everything I've ever heard about MRE's starting from about the Vietnam era and moving forwards suggests that if you can get something else, do so (which is why the Australians were well liked because for a while we had dehydrated food which was a lot better apparently).
I'm doing my ''shopping'' at Metro BTW and i'm taking whats in special this week
Yogurt - 8x100g - $2
Strawberries - 1lb - $2
Spagethini - 1,800g - $2
100% pure orange juice - 2L - $2
Italian sausages - 1kg - $4
Pita bread - 500g - $2
Apples - 4lb - $3
Diced Tomatoes - 2x540mL - $2
I'm right at $21 and I have something from every food group and no junk food. Obviously tough you're very dependant of what's in special that week, especially for meat.
1lb green beens, raw not canned from farmers market $2
3lbs bannanas $1
10lbs rice $7
2lbs beef (half ground half stir fry) $5
soya sauce $0.80 / week
"western family" juices usually about $1.80 for 2L so....$3 / week say
Cheap off brand puffed wheat or bran flakes and milk $2/week
So no lunches, barely enough meat, no butter, no bread.
Living on $21 a week is fucking rediculous. I would not feed myself or any kids I'd have on less than $50.