Please note, my math is off a bit above, but it should still come in under or around the $50 range - sorry, it’s late and the unnecessary extravagances are catching up with me. Point stands.
I haven’t done the math, but that’s not a lot of calories. I buy packages of turkey sometimes, and I think the ones I buy are in the neighborhood of 400 calories for the package.
Of course, people can “survive” eating nothing for 4-5 days, but when adults get down below 1200 calories, most aren’t going to be very happy.
You could try to see if both you and your SO can live for 4-5 days on that list of ingredients. I’d be curious to hear your feelings about it after that.
Of course survival and happiness aren’t always the same thing. I’m not advocating a starvation diet necessarily, I’m just saying that the cost of keeping a human body functioning isn’t as high as some would have us believe. For two people, even if you triple it and get into excess calories, it’s not exactly undoable. So long as both parties aren’t digging ditches for a living, the daily caloric requirements are fairly low.
Stay away from the junk, the prepackaged dinners, the chips and soda and whatnot that most people seem to think they need to “survive” and you’d be surprised how inexpensively you can live. For that matter, I could probably do it even cheaper off the McDonald’s “dollar” menu - but I like to actually cook, or at the least put together some nice sammiches.
So basically Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax?
I started a separate thread on this. From my calcs, it doesn’t seem like the scheme is possible using anything close to current levels of taxation.
If you were laid off in the Great Recession and over 30 or 40 that’s not unimaginable – a lot of businesses won’t even consider interviewing someone unemployed who applies for a job, leaving the unemployed in a nasty situation where they can’t even get their foot in the door. There is also the phrase “too old to hire, too young to retire”. If you have a college degree and apply to a lot of retail positions they won’t consider you because you’re “overqualified”.
I went through about four years of under employment and temp jobs despite (up until then) 30 years of continuous work life and a college degree, and a lot of what I did get involved manual labor many people in my age group wouldn’t have been capable of doing due to physical issues.
Excuse me? – why do you get to ignore the cost condiments? Do you think condiments are handed out for free to the poor? They’re not, I assure you.
Assuming by “roll” you mean something that provides one sandwhich, you’re talking about what, 2 sandwhiches per day for a week? A quick google gives a caloric value of 240 to 480 for a turkey sandwhich with cheese. Even at the highest end for that, two sandwiches a day gives a total calorie intake of 960 per day… but that was for a Subway turkey sandwich, which sounds a lot bulkier than the one you’re describing (and has more vegetables). At the low end it’s 480 calories per day which is starvation level. Even on the upper end that’s under 1,000 calories per day, less than the 1200 or so usually allotted to a small, sedentary adult.
You don’t see a problem with any of that?
Plus, the laughability of stretching that over a week – maybe the head of lettuce, yes, but one tomato and one onion? And how big is that package of turkey meat? At a $1.00 package I guarantee that either that’s a miniscule amount of cheese or that it’s not actually cheese, it’s some sort of cheese-flavored food product
So you’re example is largely meaningless without quantities of items in the packages listed. In addition, even if we assume sufficient for 14 sandwiches, the calorie amounts are inadequate to sustain an adult human being.
Seriously, either come back with the quantities of stuff in those packages (calories per serving/slice/package would help, too) or I say you didn’t actually think about this, you just pulled the notion out of your backside that two sandwiches day would work for the poor.
Actually, it IS starvation.
And that’s not even getting into the nutritional inadequacy involved.
Your proposed “diet” of turkey sandwiches actually IS inadequate.
But not as low as you seem to think.
Oh, and if, as I suspect, these are the sorts of sandwiches that have one slice of turkey and one slice of cheese each then it’s the low end of calories (240) which means you actually need five of those per day to get the recommended caloric intake of 1200 per day for a small, sedentary adult.
Oh, and when I was on food stamps most of the work I got involved manual labor – building a garage, roofing repair, landscaping, hauling flood-wrecked appliances out of basements…I wasn’t sedentary. The only way I got by was by 1) having a large garden (which was MORE manual labor) which is not always an option for the poor, especially urban poor and 2) my most frequent employer would often buy me lunch. And I still lost weight at times.
Even a lower tier retail job requires more effort than sitting at a desk - standing and walking around all day burns more calories than a paper-pusher’s job.
Seriously – YOU try living for one week on two turkey sandwiches a day. Have your family try it – I’ll be really surprised if they stick to it, or don’t “cheat” somehow.
Of course, this is also leaving aside that $133 per month is the AVERAGE food stamp benefit, not the actual one many people live under, which is less, meaning it’s a supplement and not intended as the whole of their food budget (Hence Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, a.k.a. “SNAP”). On top of which, “turkey sandwiches” is NOT how you live on $133/month. How about I let you re-think your strategy before I detail how you do it, speaking from actual experience?
That sort of ignores that TANF has a lifetime limit of 5 years, in many areas (such as mine) the waiting list for housing is 10 years, in many states Medicaid eligibility is limited even for the caretakers of children (resulting in children having medical coverage but their parents not), and so on. While most poor people qualify for something, most of them also do NOT qualify for all possible benefits.
Untrue. As noted, it does not cover able-bodied adults in a number of states.
Yep, I have actually done it, in real life, and not as some sort of “experiment”.
It’s not nearly as easy as the likes of Werekoala imply. And we weren’t receiving the average allotment, we were receiving the maximum, and I still had to keep a large garden, often relied on the generosity of family and friends to take us out to eat once in awhile, and hit the food pantries on occasion. It was a boring, monotonous diet which, judging by the 10 pound weight loss I had at once point, was not always calorically adequate.
Turkey meat was a luxury, OK? It’s actually a pretty expensive meat, especially pre-sliced as a deli meat. I can buy steak for less per pound than deli turkey.
I haven’t seen Werekoala’s prices around here (Boston area) for decades.
Broomstick, I’ve lived on homemade gruel, but you are a budgeting goddess.
The one thing that always trips me up when I think about American hunger is how fat most poor people are.
How can one be food insecure when they weigh so much?
And then I pause and think for a minute. Your stomach doesn’t register hunger based on the number of calories you’ve taken in, but on the volume of its contents. The grocery store shelves are full of cheap calorie dense foods. But they will not make you feel full. At least, not like a salad will.
I can get a bag of white bread and a jar of peanut butter for $2. This would make for a bunch of “meals”. But in order for me to not go to bed hungry, I’d have to eat a lot of PB sanwiches. Which means I’d be eating a lot of “empty” calories = obesity. If I could afford some bulky fruits and vegetables, I wouldn’t have this problem. But bulky fruits and vegetables are NOT cheap, at least not compared to all the other stuff.
Hunger isn’t a joke. It messes up concentration, learning, energy levels, and mood. You can’t teach a hungry child. A hungry adult doesn’t make for a good employee. Both of these are impede the escape out of poverty.
Another thing about what is now called “food insecurity” - when you aren’t sure about future food supplies the tendency is to eat as much as you possibly can at any sitting in order to survive future famine.
I haven’t been homeless (thank Og!) but I’ve know the current and former homeless. They do exactly that - eat as much as they possibly can hold when food is in front of them, because sometimes they do go without meals. It’s a survival trait that served our species well in hunter-gatherer times but these days not so much.
But hey, if the poor can’t overcome millions of years of evolution through sheer will power they’re lazy!
This is a little backward, compared to the food you purchased that you detailed in your prior post the junk food, soda, chips, cookies etc are actually almost certainly a much better cost/calorie ratio.
I have a weakness (I think inspired by my childhood growing up in the rural South) for the occasional true junk food: Little Debbie snack cakes and things like that. Maybe once every two months or so I’ll buy something like that. The last time I bought a package of the chocolate and peanut butter wafer things, it was like $1.99. Each of the six individually wrapped snacks had 310 calories, that’s 1860 calories for only $1.99.
The food you bought, you’re probably talking 600 calories total–lettuce, tomatoes, and onions have almost no caloric content whatsoever. Turkey is very low in caloric content as a lean meat. Those vegetables are cheap, but you can’t live off of vegetables like that.
There are cheap staple foods to be purchased, but you’re in the wrong section of the grocery store if you’re shopping in the produce aisle. Where you should actually be shopping for best bang for your buck is the dry goods: rice, beans, flour, corn meal etc. That stuff is actually all very high calorie per dollar spent. The produce aisle you can go to for the occasional infusion of variety, vitamin content or whatever, but it’s not a great place to get calories for money. If you’re just wanting to make sure you get some vegetables in your diet and don’t want to live off rice and beans, the frozen food vegetables are actually much cheaper than buying fresh.
Just for giggles. I wanna share a couple of oddities about the foodstamp program here.
First, in some senses it’s very non-judgemental about what constitutes “food”. If I choise to, I could have an all Mountain Dew, Snickers Bar, Sweet Tart and Gummy Bear diet, because even candy counts as food.
In other ways, it’s horribly judgemental. If agrocery store has a deli, you can’t use your allotment to buy, say, a cooked chicken breast or some prepared lunch or dinner hot meal. I emphasize “hot” meal, because the program won’t allow purchase of “prepared meals”, that is, meals you could start eating right at the deli counter. BUT – if the chicken breast or meal doesn’t sell, and they freeze it overnight and sell it the next day out of their freezer section – THEN I could buy it with food stamps.
The distinction is ridiculous, of course, because there are any number of regular foods that I could eat right in the store if I wanted, including Snickers Bars. Someone told me that the language was added to prevent people from using food stamps for restaurant meals, but I honestly don’t know.
Just for reference to Werekoala and Broomstick’s points.
I lived for about a year on a weekly food budget of around $10 a week. Yes, it was boring. Yes, I ate the same thing an awful lot. Yes, I had a lot of leftovers. But no, I didn’t starve or lose an appreciable amount of weight. This was around 2004-2005, but even if you want to double prices for inflation, that’s mean $100 for a family of 4 is enough. Not great, not happy, not optimal, but enough.
What did you eat?
A lot of people don’t realize that while “hunger” isn’t starvation, it is NOT a good place to be. I spent most of my youth as a “poor” and when people make this point, I tell them to eat the diet I had for around six/eight months at one point:
Each oatmeal every day for breakfast. Unflavored. No sugar. No milk. Lunch is a single plain McDouble (match the…“meat” burger that was given at my school as part of free lunch) with a small order of fries. For dinner, you get a choice: Ramen or the $1 pack of spaghetti with the 1 sauce (.25 when I was a kid) and no meat.
Yes, it is “cheap” but I can’t really eat Oatmeal, anymore. My wife makes fantastic spaghetti sauce but I avoid having more than a token amount while guests/children pig out.
I was lucky to be spared having to live my entire life that way. But I certainly don’t want to slam the door on the faces of others just because I’m no longer in that situation. I’d honestly like to help them get an actual supply of fruits and vegetables, but those only keep going up (in part because of our government’s meddling) and when apples go to 99c/pound, that dollar is better spent on something that might make a whole meal for a family.
A) What did you eat?
B) How often were you able to “cheat”? For example, free coffee with sugar is a source of calories that many people (not just the poor) take a lot of advantage of at work. They skip breakfast and use that to reduce their costs.
Ramen and PB&J, probably. I did the same thing in college (though I had no reason to because my parents were paying my bills) and wound up on iron supplements for a year.
I’m assuming you were a grown adult when you did this.
Imagine trying to feed teenagers, especially teenaged boys, on $10 a week. I have never had to buy groceries for a teenager, but I do remember how much I ate when I was going through my growth spurt. I could put away some food and STILL have a growling stomach.
Imagine trying to feed a baby AND a teenager. On $100 a month. You’ll keep everyone alive, but there wll be much misery in that household. Constantly crying baby. Complaining, listless, angry teenager. Frazzled, depressed parent. Maybe we shouldn’t have compassion for the irresponsible parents that get themselves in this situation. But the kids didn’t do anything wrong.
I feel stabby if I skip a single meal. A country full of stabby people is troubling to me.
Luckily they won’t have the strength to drives their knives in very deeply.
These costs must depend a lot on location. Here’s a flyer from a supermarket in a poor Boston neighborhood.
I could feed three cats on $10/week.