As a spin off from the Gwyneth Paltrow-does-foot-stamp-diet thread, an interesting question occurred to me – is it possible to fashion a nutritionally complete and relatively healthy diet on the food stamp budget (~$29 per week)? Anyone care to give it a try? Let’s assume you have access to a stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer, sink, and microwave.
I can (and certainly have) lived on an unhealthy diet for $29 a week without going hungry. A nutritionally complete diet that wasn’t made up of processed foods would be a little more difficult, but if one is assumed to have a full set of kitchenware and they’re allowed to use any spices or herbs they already have on hand I think it could certainly be done.
For the purposes of this thread, any spices and herbs should be included in the budget. I suppose it would be okay to do an entire month’s budget, since certain products (like seasoning) probably can’t be bought in weekly amounts.
Some grocery stores do have bulk bins of spices that are priced by the pound, so if you needed, say, half a tablespoon of rosemary for a recipe, you could measure that out and pay 10 cents for it as opposed to buying a full bottle. So not necessarily a dealbreaker there either, although it would necessitate close attention to detail in menu planning.
Where is $29 per week? I was on food stamps 2 years ago and I got $200 a month just for me. That’s certainly enough for a healthy diet – not that I lived on one.
I don’t want to shit on your thread, and I really hope it helps some people, but it is destined to fail.
Food prices in the US are way to variable to allow for a useful discussion. As I posted in the other thread, avocados and limes are extremely cheap in California–when they are in season. Last year there was a major shortage of limes and the price spiked, which would have made her list look really stupid. Now they are available and the price has come way down, making them a great source of nutrients and flavour.
The other problem is that the world of nutrition research has been lying to us for decades now, teaching us things like fats are bad. Fat has 9 calories per gram compared to only 4 for carbohydrates. If you try to get 3000 calories a day you need fats, which burn slower and make you feel fuller longer. Avocados just happen to be high in good fats, providing about 300+ calories.
Take a look at this article on Slate
Replace the romaine and fresh corn with dried, calorie-dense legumes. ETA: And maybe lard or another fat/oil.
I don’t know if discount warehouses count for purposes of this thread, but you could easily get a 25 lb sack of flour from Sam’s or Costco for about $7.50, a package of yeast for $1.50, some salt for a dollar or two and then do some sort of biga / poolish thing and bake all the fresh bread you could stand for that week, and you’d be around $10 in total expenditure.
I did this. But I also included what was easily accessible from other sources, such as churches, etc.
I got bags of rice, beans, cheese, day old bread, bags of potatoes, fruit etc. Also free lunches. (I only ate one of each, and explained what I was doing, but I was part of a Local Gov’t project . After I tried one free lunch, i just bought and made my own if i wanted it. The Church would press the day old bread on my tho, as much went unclaimed. But I gave a donation so…)
The free lunches were either: PB&J or Baloney sandwich or bean burrito, juice box or milk or coffee. Mostly vegetarian.
The diet was healthy, with plenty of calories, but boring.
If you can cook it, and store it, and are fine with a rather boring diet, you wont starve in America.
I remember when I first moved into my own place. After paying rent I had $120 a month to live on, so I was eating on less than $29 a week. I would go grocery shopping about once a week. I would buy a loaf of wheat bread, a jar each of peanut butter and jelly, a pound of cold-cuts, a half-pound of cheese, a jar of mustard, whatever fruit was cheap, instant oatmeal, and a box of tea bags.
Rosemary should be free. It is a hearty, evergreen, perennial that grows just about anywhere, including my apartment. They can easily be bought for about $2 per plant including the pot.
But more to the point, a recipe doesn’t NEED rosemary. No one should feel they need to buy it in the spice aisle of the grocery store.
It was added to dishes because it was free and plentiful in the region those dishes are from.
What’s funny about that list is that most of those items used to be almost free. Jelly was made when fruit was abundant and in season. Growing up we picked wild blueberries every summer and made jam. At the end of June strawberries were in season and extremely cheap if we picked them ourselves. During the winter strawberries were an unattainable luxury, but the cupboard was full of jam.
Cold cuts were made from unwanted parts of the pig, that were salted and cured for storage. Ham used to be a really low cost source of high quality protein. Cheese was a way to store milk long term. It is essentially just protein and fat packed into a tasty little package. Now both of those are expensive.
Mustard is a weed that grows all over Canada, but for some reason now mustard seeds cost way more than a jar of prepared mustard.
The $29/week is based on current benefit levels
It certainly doesn’t apply to every one on food stamps. In my household we’re getting $16/week per person. On the other hand, I am employed so in our case SNAP is a supplement to our food budget, a significant portion of which we’re expected to pay ourselves out of my paycheck. As I have also noted in other threads I grow some of our food and barter for some other items so I can’t honestly say we’re eating on $29/week at my house. More like around $35-40/week if you assigned a reasonable market price to what we’re either bartering or growing.
It’s still not a glamorous diet, but we get to eat a LOT of nutritious, organically grown vegetables… once I wash off the dirt, pick off the bugs, and cut away and bad spots. 
The “Food Stamp Challenge” is street theater.
The amount quoted is the average benefit. But SNAP benefits are means-tested – the amount you get is adjusted according to your income. You get the difference between the maximum amount and what the formula says you can allot for food from your income:
http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligibility
The base amount for a single person is $194/month. Six-and-half bucks (not the four bucks usually quoted) per day, per person, is very do-able, especially if you shop specials and cook from scratch.
Plus: SNAP-eligible chool-age children get free lunches (and sometimes breakfasts and school vacation meal programs). Pre-schoolers get additional WIC benefits. Sometimes there are commodities distributions (“brown bag”). There are a bunch of miscellaneous programs supplying things like vegetable garden seeds.
Only WIC restricts what foods can be purchased with benefits. SNAP is good for anything consumable, but not for paper goods or cleaning products (which a lot of people think are more a necessity than cake or bottled water, which you can get with food stamps).
SNAP recipients don’t pay sales or other taxes on food (about 15 states levy this).
Been there, done that. I got $189/month plus some free food, most of which was nutritious, if boring (whole grains, rice, beans, cereal, peanut butter). It’s doable, if monotonous.
Oopsie; blew off the OP’s actual question.
The food plan taught when I was in school was the “Basic Four” – grain-based foods (four servings per day), fruits and vegetables (four servings per day), dairy foods (two servings per day), and animal protein-type foods (two servings per day). I am including more than that minimum.
Based on regular prices at Aldi and on-sale or house-brand stuff at mainstream supermarkets, here’s an approximate week’s worth of very ordinary food for one person:
$3.00 two loaves of bread – 32 servings
$2.00 box of cereal – 12 servings
$1.50 12 oz can of frozen orange juice – 8 6-oz servings
$1.50 5# bag of potatoes – plenty every day
$5.00 four 1# bags of frozen vegetables – 16 servings
$3.00 half-a-dozen servings of fresh fruit
$3.00 gallon of milk – 16 8-oz servings
$6.00 two pounds of stuff like boneless chicken breasts or pork tenderloin
(3-4 canonical 100g. servings per pound)
$2.00 half-a-jar of peanut butter
$1.00 third-of-a-jar of jelly
$1.50 two sticks of butter (the real stuff)
$2.00 c. 7 oz ground coffee
$3.50 guesstimate for amortized share of kitchen staples like salt, sugar, seasonings, cooking oil
(These dollar amounts are actually a bit more than you’d pay at Aldi.)
So that’s $35, which leaves $10 out of $45 to play around with.
(food plan post uses the $45 actual, not the $29 street theater)
Additional thoughts: you could probably squeeze an amortized half-a-carton of eggs (less than a buck) out of my rounded up figures; condiments (ketchup, mayo, etc) come under “kitchen staples”. Maybe toss in some tuna or cheese for lunch sandwiches; another couple of bucks. It’s still do-able.
Whole chicken: $7
5 lbs potatoes: $3
6 packages frozen veggies: $7
2 lbs dried beans: $3
dozen eggs: $1.50
3 lbs onions: $2
butter (this should last more than a week) 2
a few bananas @.50 lb: $1.50
That’s $27. Should easily feed a person for a week, with a couple of dollars left over to save for:
20lb bag of rice, $16 a bag. That should last a few months. Seasonings cost a bit but typically last a while.
Additional thoughts:
My food plan post uses the $45 actual, not the $29 street theater.
You could probably squeeze an amortized half-a-carton of eggs (less than a buck) out of my rounded up figures; that would take care of the second protein serving.
Or toss in some tuna or cheese for lunch sandwiches; another couple of bucks. It’s still do-able.
Condiments (ketchup, mayo, etc) come under “kitchen staples”.
I think salads are a poor return nutritionally, but you can get a head of lettuce instead of one of the bags of frozen vegetables. Or whatever on-sale seasonal produce presents itself.
(am asking mods to delete my two previous posts incorporated in this one)