People think welfare, food stamps, etc. are untold riches. You’d be very surprised at the reality.

One thing I want to say (and this comes from a very low income family with a very small food budget) I do not understand why people say that buying fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive. Maybe it is the area I am in and the things available to me but it is much less expensive to buy some oranges, tomatoes, etc than a box of wheat thins! I cant imagine trying to give my kids snacks that weren’t fruits and veggies. I wouldnt be able to afford it.

I will agree that free range organic meats are near impossible to find or afford here in my area, I do at least have the option of purchasing locally raised meats instead of tyson. Instead of putting such a large portion of our budget to meat I try to find other healthy and delcious ways to get high quailty protiens. It can be done but you have to be adventurous and open minded.

Good luck with your challenge.

so what would you do? i have no options, thanks to my location & income, but avoiding chemicals and animal cruelty is important to me. in the summer i can garden, but summer is short. we eat mostly beans & rice with canned tomatoes and frozen corn… it’s boring but cheap. what would you do/ change?

I am kind of shocked by some of the comments on this blog– clearly by people who have no idea what it is to be poor.

Just because you are poor, you don’t suddenly start drinking soda and eating boxes of mac and cheese.

We buy beans and rice through a farm (for cheap, and organic– but doesn’t take EBT) or through a co-op grocery that does that EBT. We boy 25 lbs. whole wheat flour, and make all our bread/pancakes, etc. We buy a 25 bag of oatmeal for 11 bucks.

We grow a lot of our own food–and you can buy seeds with EBT (at least in my state). We have chickens, but still get more eggs from the store since it is a cheap protein.

We buy a whole chicken, and save the bones/skin for broth.

We don’t eat a lot of meat, because it is just too expensive.

Some veggies we buy organic or transitional farm produce, some just pesticide free/local. We are lucky to live in a city that is very close to farms and has a strong love of food.

But all of this takes a huge amount of work for both me and my husband. Let me tell you, we bust our rear-ends being poor. with the addition of being thought of “lazy” and immoral because we are poor.

But unlike a tourist, when we wake up in the morning, we are still poor. And it isn’t a cute experiment we are doing.

It is our life, and ultimately that will allow us to bring about more change in the face of food stability challenges then anything else.

As a food activist I was interested in your experiment, but people still make comments like :

“I have to say too that most people are not educated at all when it comes to food and nutrition. They do what is easy. You have to take into consideration the circumstances of the people living with this assistance as well. Not all of them are emotionally, physically, spiritually, or financially able to spend the time in the kitchen and are buying convenience foods. When you are in hard times, it is more than just the physical ability to do something that factors in.”

Which makes me think that they have little connection to the people using EBT and WIC. It is generalizations like this that just muddles the water.

WIC doesn’t exist to help the poor people, it exists to keep a oversupply of dairy products off the market, to drive prices up.

Food stamps exist to keep America from realizing how poor she really is.

I’m not sure I understand your comment.  Are you disagreeing wtih me? Or with another commenter on this thread?  Perhaps I was unclear when I wrote, “I still maintain that it is possible to eat healthfully on a food stamp budget.”  Please clarify.

Thanks!

- Jenny

If I were to rely solely on our FS budget of $425 for the month, I don’t know how we could eat much more than cheap ground beef (with who knows WHAT in there) and the most basic of vegetables.

We have developed a culture that doesn’t know how to cook beyond opening packages. And all those conveniences like pre-cut vegetables and individually frozen pieces of chicken (where you lose the yummy bones) cost more. How do we educate our neighbors to stretch their dollars by getting whole foods? How do we teach a new generation how to cook again?

You see your menu isn’t typical for most of us who really DO eat on a very limited budget. We eat pizza, tacos, chicken fingers and fries. Our kids eat mac n cheese and spaghetti O’s. We can’t afford to eat oranges and pineapples for snacks. I’ve been behind the woman at the grocery store with Coke, Kraft, Doritos, Jiff, and Trix in her cart as she hands over her EBT card. When you’re told over and over that that’s all you can do, that’s all you can afford, that’s all you get, then you believe it. There is no one out there saying different or showing how.

Not everyone likes to cook and in this day and age we really don’t have to, we can buy it already done for us. That’s what you’re up against. The way you achieve what you’re trying to do is to limit variety. We just don’t eat a lot of different things. Our snacks are homemade crackers with carrots, raisins, cheese, or olives. Breakfast is homemade bagels with eggs, or oatmeal rasin bars. Our fruit consists mainly of apples and bananas with the occasionl splurge of frozen strawberries. I buy chicken and beef. Sometimes pork and maybe once a month (if on sale) fish. I buy only leaf lettuce. I add sunflower seeds to it and maybe some raisins or carrots, but that’s about it.

Eighty percent of what I buy is organic. My fruit, meat, milk, and eggs I will not bend on. My wheat (natural, gmo free) I soak , so that leaves a few odds and ends that are usually 50/50 on whether or not their organic (veggies, cheese, carrots, etc…)depends on price, sale, and budget.

I have adapted many recipes that we love to be healthier for us yet still affordable. I make our mac n cheese from scratch same with the spaghetti o’s…My kids eat lots of apples and carrots and drink a lot of raw milk…I make hamburger buns for our burgers and bake up oven fries…I fry all our fried foods in coconut oil.

You get the picture. Anyway, I hope that maybe for all those comments I saw of people who want to help, and for you, that while you can take on the system, it’s more important to re-educate people. Empower them. This isn’t impossible. It just takes work.

I commend you for taking on this challenge unnecessarily. It certainly won’t happen for you in a month, it’s taken me many to get our menu and budget in sync. But keep it up and I look forward to your next post!