Americans Get a Dose of Food Stamp Reality with the SNAP Challenge

Could you eat on $30 a week? That's about $4.50 a day for your breakfast, lunch and dinner.

That's what Feeding Illinois — an association of state food banks — recently challenged the public to do with the SNAP challenge. Its message: "More than 1.6 million people in our state live on $4.50 a day — can you?"

A number of bloggers and journalists have taken up the challenge, documenting their efforts to live on what they would get if they were food stamp recipients. But is this just another poverty simulation that gives the wealthy a reason to feel grateful for what they have and then go on their merry way?

Chicago Tribune reporter Monica Eng doesn't think so.

"I can see how some readers feel this is a voyeuristic, elitist exercise. I won't speak for the readers, but this has certainly been an eye opener for me," she writes.

Over the week, Eng documented her efforts to eat well on very little — buying beans, rice and lentils and shopping at a farmer's market that doubles the money of food stamp recipients. Emphasis on effort. One of the things Eng shares is the sheer amount of time, effort and space that it takes to make decent food on such a small amount of cash.

"I spent much of Saturday and Sunday making beef stock, boiling pots of barley, roasting kale, washing beet tops, stewing kale, baking bread, roasting beets and sweet potatoes, making banana oatmeal, soaking black beans, simmering pinto beans and cooking up a rice and lentil pilaf," writes Eng. "Then I spent as much time finding a place to store all of this cooked food."

All that work might be a little harder to do if you had the life of an actual family on food stamps — a tiny kitchen with an apartment-sized fridge, working a few jobs, energetic kids to manage. And not all of us have the know-how to do what Eng did in turning raw ingredients into an actual meal. Those skills seem to have largely died out with previous generations.

By the end of the week, Eng laments having to eat lentils and rice yet again. She doesn't always have time to make food at home and ends up eating out. The SNAP challenge, she says, has taught her a lot.

"I'm glad to have the luxury of not having to stick to it any longer," she writes. "It also made me realize that man cannot live on rice and lentils alone. Inevitably the body will call out for something more and [I] will never be judgmental about that again."

The week of the SNAP challenge is over, and many people have shared their experiences trying to eat on a food stamp budget. I myself didn't hear about the challenge until today, but I thought about Eng's experiences as I walked to the farmer's market in my neighborhood this morning.

My husband and I certainly aren't rich, although we do make more than a family who would qualify for food stamps. Local, sustainable food is one of our values, and we do a lot to make the effort to eat what we value. It does cost more than food from the local grocery store, but we've decided it's important to us to put our dollars where our heart is. But as I hauled my cart of local produce, dairy and bread home this morning, I thought about what it would be like to know that I was feeding my family food that I hated, but I had no choice. To know that the apple I was handing my little girl was laden with pesticides, but to go ahead and buy it anyway.

Although I think I would be hungry eating on $4.50 a day, I would also be a little heartbroken. I forget that even a little extra cash allows me to make choices, and that those choices are a way I express myself. And I think that's what it means to be truly poor — to not get to shape your own world in the way that so many of us are used to doing. Of course, it means all kinds of hardship — not having good health care, enough food, a decent place to stay, an environment free from pollution — but also the hardship of not being able to change any of that when you know you want something better for yourself and for your children.

Photo credit: malias