Try it yourself!

 

If you want to give my experiment a try for yourself here are the instructions;

First determine you budget

1.   Assume that you are working twenty hours a week at the minimum wage of your State rounded up to the nearest dollar and you get paid every two weeks.

For me that was $10 and with two pay periods per month that came to $800.

2.   Calculate your family’s net income according to USDA standards (theirs is a little more complex with exceptions for the disabled, the elderly, and people who pay child support but for the sake of simplicity, this works fine for an able bodied person under 65).       

-Step one deduct 20 percent from your total income.

-Step two subtract the cost of your rent and utilities up to 50% of your total income (but no higher than the limit of $496)

I assumed that I was living in Section 8 housing and only had to pay 40% of my income in rent and utilities ($320). So my formula was $800 - $160- $320= $320 of net income

3.   Now calculate how much you’re getting in SNAP benefits (food stamps). Find your household size one the chart and see what your maximum benefit is. Then subtract 30% of your net income from that amount.

People in Household	Maximum Monthly Allotment
1	$    200
2	$    367
3	$    526
4	$    668
5	$    793
6	$    952
7	$ 1,052
8	$ 1,202
Each additional person	$    150

 

I have a household of three so that is $526 maximum. Then I subtract $96 so that means that I would get $430 a month.

4.   Now WIC comes into play, consider that any infants in your home will not need any food stamp money as that will be covered with breastfeeding and/or formula and that children under 5 who are eating solids only need 30% of their portion of their food stamp money.  Subtract that from the total food stamp budget.

These numbers were a best guesses by me, so feel free to play around with them to be more accurate for your children. But that meant for me that my son would only need $43 (30% of one third of $430) of food stamp money per month.

5.   Now subtract the amount that children will be using and find the portion that each adult should have.

For me that was $193.50

6.   Then divide that amount by 30.416 (the average amount of days in a month) and multiply it by seven and that is your weekly budget.

For me that was $44.50

Now that you have determined your budget

here are the rules:

1.   You must do all your shopping at a major grocery store chain that does not require a membership fee (the type of grocery store you could reasonable expect would be accessible in most neighborhoods in your area.)

2.   You can only eat what you buy with the food stamp budget and nothing else, not even salt for seasoning or oil to grease a pan.

3.   You can only use basic appliances and kitchen utensils (i.e. refrigerator/freezer, oven, stovetop, microwave, pots, pans, bowls, fork, spoons, knives, spatulas, etc.)  for your food prep and cooking.

4.   You must meet (or get as close as you can) to the USDA guidelines for proper nutrition. 

USDA guildlines for proper nutrition

You can find out what they are for you here but for an adult on a 2000 calorie diet it goes as follows:

6 ounces of grains per day, 3 ounces of which should be whole grains.

2.5 cups of vegetables per day with the following criteria:

• 1.5 cups of dark green vegetables per week.

• 5.5 cups of red or orange vegetables per week

• 1.5 cups of beans of peas per week

• 5 cups of starchy vegetables (for example corn or potatoes)per week

2 cups of fruit per day with the following criteria:

•         There must be a variety of fruit (which I interpret as at least 3 different kinds)

3 cups of dairy per day

5.5 ounces of protein foods

• Protein foods are meat, nuts, peas and beans. Peas and beans can count towards your vegetables or Protein but not both

• You should include two 4 ounces servings of seafood per week.

No more than 6 teaspoons of oil per week

No more than 260 calories from added sugars or solid fats (butter, lard)

No more than 2300 milligrams of Sodium total.

Total Calorie intake should be 2000 per day.

There you go there are the rules. Do it for 7 days and please let me know how it goes for you. I would be very interested to hear your perspective.

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday's meals:

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, brown sugar and milk

Lunch:

Curry and two and two big bowls broccoli with salad dressing

Dinner:

Curry

Dessert:

A can of diced pineapple with a little sugar and a cup of hot milk with a little cinnamon and sugar added.

Things to report for the day:

Well this is the end. I had enough food to get me though but just barely. If tomorrow was the day that more money would come in I would not be able to have breakfast unit after I shopped. If it were a work day that could complicate things. Not a lot of food to carry over to the next week. But it is something. I weighed myself and I lost exactly one pound. Not a huge amount of weight but it is surprising when you considering that I ate almost a pound of brown sugar this week.

 

I will add in a picture of the food that is left tomorrow. It's late.

 

Thoughts of the day:

Based on my experiment I believe that it is would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to meet the USDA dietary recommendation while living on food stamps. Nothing really ground breaking today. So I do not have a lot of thoughts to add at this point. But I would like to say that I am grateful that of the worries I have in my life, worrying about putting enough food on the table is not one of them and I would like to thank my wife for being patient with all of this.

If you found this series of posts interesting in the slightest I would strongly encourage you to duplicate my experiment. After all the scientific method require that others be able to reproduce my results in order for my theory to be sound.

I plan on doing two more post on this topic. Tomorrow I will post some instructions about how to do this experiment. I would be very interested to follow someone else experience though the process. Then sometime next week I will write a more detailed capstone of my thoughts on this whole process.

Thank you for following this and feel free to ask me any questions you may have about my experiment.

Fridays meals:

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, brown sugar and milk

Lunch:

Curry

Dinner:

Curry with and two big bowls broccoli

Dessert:

A can of diced pineapple with a little sugar (Lay off was hungry)and a cup of hot milk with a little cinnamon and sugar added.

 

Things to report for the day:

One more day left. It looks like I have rationed the food well and I should get to the end of the week with no problem. I am out of strawberries, salad, and carrots at this point, but that was expected. I have added broccoli and pineapple to the mix and that will get me to the end. But it is fair to say I have not had a lot of variety.

Thoughts of the day:

The lack of variety has got me thinking . It has been boring but doable. But I am not really picky about what I eat. Though I could see this as a big problem with people with children, 49% of food stamp recipient are under the age of 18. I believe kids would be less patient with eating the same food over and over. Especially the kids who are old enough to go to school and see the other kids lunches.

I was also thinking of the variety aspect, you could look at the food that I bought and you might think there were better choices that could have been made. After this week I would agree I would certainly would have bought some things differently. But we eat what we know. Unless you are a really wiz in the kitchen I would imagine most of us probably have about a dozen meals or so that we cycle through, and we stick to variations of these meals. So imagine now that you find yourself on food stamps now many of the ingredients you may be comfortable with are out of your financial reach, or only available when on sale.

 

Shopping on a budget is not only limited to what deals you can get but also what foods you know how to prepare. For example, let's say last week that egg plant was on sale (I just made this up I do not even know if it was there or even in season). But what am I going to do with it? I have never prepared egg plant before and I do not know what to look for when buying an eggplant. Should it be firm, or soft, dark colored or lighter? So even if it is a great deal I am not going to buy something that might ultimately be wasted because I might prepare or cook it improperly and have it become uneatable.

My point being is that it is easy to take our own experience for granted and assume that they are, or should be, common knowledge. We only know what we are taught and a food stamp budget is hard to navigate without at least some culinary know how, and is not a forgiving environment for self teaching.

The rationing of my food also got me thinking about hunger and obesity. It seems like a contradiction in terms but my experience this week has shown me how easily they could coexist. With the “feast and famine” cycle I wrote about yesterday I can see how people could have a tendency to overeat when there is food in the house after a week of being hungry when the cupboards are bare. You spend the first part of the month eating too much and the last part not eating enough. So you get to spend much of the month hungry and still gain weight in the long term. The worst of both worlds I suppose.

I think it is easier to do than you might think. Have you ever shopped hungry? The tendency to impulse buy, especially fatty and sweet food, is hard to resist. I think it is part of our basic instincts to want to load up on sweet and fatty food after periods were food was scarce. 

Now you can say that person should know better. That they should be more cautions when they ration their food so they do not run out at the end of the month, or not waste money on too many "treat" foods at the start of the month. But we all have things we know we should do but don't. How many of us need to lose weight? Or exercise more? Or just eat better? Sure we are risking heart disease and diabetes in the long term, or just feeling gross and bloated from over indulging in the near term, but that’s down the road and this chocolate cake is in the here and now. It is always easier said than done.

Thursday's meals:

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, strawberries, brown sugar, and milk

Lunch:

Curry with two carrots

Dinner:

 

Curry with a carrot and two big bowls of salad with dressing

 

Dessert:

 

Can of diced pineapple

Things to report for the day:

 

It did not really happen today, but late last night. I have adjusted well enough to being somewhat hungry for long stretches of the day. I feel a little tired and a little impatient with people at work, and I do not focus as well but on the whole I just plow throw the day. But last night I could not fall asleep (falling to sleep when you hungry is a tricky). I do not have enough food to eat “unscheduled snacks” without risking running out by Saturday. The one food I have enough of to have extra of is my seeming endless bag of Iceberg lettuce and a bottle of salad dressing. At about midnight I realized that I just wasn’t going to fall asleep without eating something and I have to get up at 5:40am to get to work on time so I needed to get to sleep. So there I was in my kitchen a quarter past midnight eating a big bowl of salad and forcing myself to drink water. Eventually I was able to get to sleep. But I was very tired today, and had very little patience for the lady on the bus loudly discussing her friend’s bachelorette party on her phone. Really? At 6:30 in the morning? This couldn't wait?  

 

Thoughts of the day:

Two things really jump out at me today about being on food stamp. First, it is stressful to see you food start to run low. I imagine that my situation would be similar to someone at the end of the month before the next month’s funds come in. You look at the food you have and measure it out in your mind over and over thinking: Is this enough to get to the end of the week? It is stressful. We all have grocery budgets but most of us are not slaves to them. If we are short on something we can spend a little extra now and then and just make up for by not spending as much later. But with food stamps when the money is out, it is out and you have to wait until next month. So you have to plan your budgeting very carefully to ensure the money lasts till the end of the month.  

Years ago I lost a lot of weight (about 80 pounds) so I am no stranger to being hungry for long stretches. But as anyone who has dieted can tell you the first 3 weeks or so are the hardest. The thing with being on food stamps is diet is fluctuating with the availability of food so you never really adjust so the hunger is always sharp. If things were really lean at the end of one month, it would be hard not to want to eat more at the start of the next month when the money came in. I can see how it would be easy to fall into a "feast and famine" pattern at the start and end of each month. Even with the best planning you will always have unforeseen consequences that might result in you running low on food by the end of the month. You left the milk on the counter overnight, the fruit you bought went bad, you burned the beans, your kids spilled all the juice trying to pour it, etc.

So when there is food in the house you are eating well enough to maintain your weight long term (you could even be gaining weight), you're not going to starve. But that might mean that you pretty hungry the last week of most months and you will never really adjust because the cycle will start again next month and the hunger come back just as hard as before.

That leads to the other thing that occurred to me. I believe that the intent of the food stamp program (SNAP) is intended to be a temporary help in most cases. Getting people through hard times until they can get back on their feet. And what is the way that that is going to happen? Most households on food stamps have an employed person in them. If you are able bodied you are only able to receive food stamps for 3 months unless you are employed or in a work training program. So obviously that employment in these homes is insufficient or there income would not be low enough to be eligible for food  stamps. The only way is that a person is going to get off food stamps is to have find better job,  get a raise, or work more hours. But the idea of food stamps should be just enough to get you by is somewhat contrary to this goal. I have notices with myself this week that being hungry most of the day has affected my work. I feel impatient, I have a harder time following conversations and directions from my coworkers, and I am generally tired (the connection with hunger and lack of decent sleep is one I did not expect). I have been able to just push through and get my work done each day. After all it is just one week. But if this was to go on for a month or six months I could certainly see this catching up to me and affecting my reliability at work if my productivity drops the last week or so of each month when I run low on food at home.

Tired, unfocused, irritable; not exactly words you want to put on a resume. So if I really was working a part time job as, I outlined in the scenario for this experiment. Would I get called in for extra hours or offered a full time position if my boss mistook my hunger for a poor work ethic?

My Week on Food Stamps: Day 4

Wednesday's meals:

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, strawberries, yogurt and milk

Lunch:

Curry with two carrots

Dinner:

Curry with a carrot and a bowl of salad with dressing

Dessert:

Banana “Brule”

(If you want to see pictures just look Sunday not much has changed)

Things to report for the day:

Nothing new really except that when I peeled one of my bananas today and it was rancid and soupy, so that's 100 calories I won't get this week.

Thoughts of the day:

One of the parameters of my experiment has been to see if I could live off of a food stamp grocery budget from my local grocery store and meet the national recommendations by the USDA (who is also the agency that administers food stamps (Check them out here).

I tried to get as close as I could to the recommendations when I shopped and I did a so-so job (I would give myself a C+). This is what I have been able to manage so far:

Grains: 13 ounces per day

This is more than twice as high as the recommended amount, six ounces. This is not great but at least they were all whole grains and mostly unprocessed. I feel better about than if it was six slices of white bread.

Vegetable: 3.6 cups per day

On the surface it looks like I can say I met this one (the USDA recommends two and a half cups per day), but I think it was more of a letter of the law and not the spirit of the law (Especially if you consider the variety recommendations). Most of my vegetables have been in the form of Iceberg lettuce. If you do not count the lettuce I will only average 1.6 cups (carrots, onions, broccoli) per day by end of the week. Not to defame Iceberg lettuce but there is not much nutritional value there:

One cup of Iceberg lettuce has eight calories, 0.7 grams of fiber, 7% of my daily need for Vitamin A, 1% for calcium, 2% for iron, and 3% for Vitamin C.

Compare that to Romaine lettuce (which was too expensive for me get):

One cup has eight calories, one gram of fiber and 82% of daily need for Vitamin A, 19% for calcium, 3% of for iron, and 19% for Vitamin C.

But Iceberg lettuce pre-chopped was $2.50 for three pounds and it came in its own re-sealable container. The Romaine or Spinach I was eyeing was much more expensive per pound and I would have had to purchase some plastic storage bags or plastic wrap (which cannot be bought with food stamps) to keep them fresh.

Fruit: 1.8 cups per day

I did not quite make this one as the USDA recommends two cups per day, but I will get a good variety though out the week with strawberries, pineapple, and banana.

Dairy: 2.5 cups per day

I did not quite make this one either, it would have been 2.8 cups per day but my yogurt fell out of the fridge on the end of first day and I lost about two-thirds of the contents and I was out of money so I could not go to the store to get more. Either way, I would not have gotten the three daily recommended cups.

Protein: 5 ounces

I came up short on this one too; I needed five and a half ounces. Also I did not do any seafood, all of my food for the protein “group”  (the USDA counts dairy separately) came from lentils (cheaper than tuna), which is a complete protein when eaten with brown rice and oatmeal during the day.

Oils: 5 teaspoons

I met the oil requirement of less than six teaspoons a day with a daily intake of five teaspoons per day (from salad dressing). 

Other:

I met the sodium requirement, I have been at around 1500 milligrams per day and the limit is 2300 milligrams per day, which is good. I was way over for the added sugar recommendation. The USDA says no more than 260 calories from added sugar daily and yesterday I was around 325 calories (mostly from putting brown sugar on a bananas and the sugar that comes in the yogurt.)

Overall daily calorie intake 1873 out of the recommended 2000.

An  interesting thing to note from yesterday’s post. I really stepped up my sugar consumption because I was hungry and did not really even think about it. In fact I was shock when I looked at the bag of sugar and saw how much I ate. I have been eating on average 2.6 ounces of sugar a day, but even that is not closing the gap. To make up difference I would need to eat 3.3 ounces of sugar (11 tablespoons). If I had not done that and just had two teaspoons of sugar with my oatmeal and did not add any extra sugar for the rest of the day I would have only have had 1610 calories on that day (which is what I had on Sunday).

Observation:

The problem is that foods that are high in both calorie content and nutrition generally are more expensive. It is not just luxury specialty foods that can be out of reach, it is also what we would consider “regular food” too. For example if I would have been able to swap out my five ounces of lentils for protein with five  ounces of chicken it would have netted me 94 calories a day. Swapping one of my cups of lettuce for one cup of corn would have got me 81 more calories (when you factor in the dressing).  

I really should have bought some potatoes. If I would have moved my budget around and bought five medium potatoes that would have been in the limits for the USDA recommendations limits on starchy vegetables per week and it would have netted me 114 calories per day. I would not have had any butter, salt, oil or anything to put on them but I this point I would fine eating a plain diced and boiled potatoes. But I would still have been running a caloric deficit of 286 calories.

I do not believe it is possible to meet the USDA guidelines outlined here based on a single week’s budget. Perhaps if I did it based on a monthly budget (which is more accurate to how food stamps function) it would be possible but I am not even sure of that. Limiting yourself to six ounces of grains per day, with no more than 260 calories from added sugar, no more than six teaspoons of oil and no more that five cups of starch vegetables per week really limits what you can do with a small budget. 

If I ate nothing but peanut butter sandwiches with a glass of milk all week I could have stayed pretty full and met 2000 calories without too much trouble (Just in case you’re wondering that is four sandwiches with four cups of 2% milk per day and you would have to buy two jars of peanut butter, two gallons of milk and three loaves of bread to get you through a week). But that is hardly a healthy diet.

 

My Week on Food Stamps: Day 3

 

Tuesday's meals:

 

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, brown sugar, strawberries, yogurt and milk

 

Snack:

Cup of hot water with brown sugar (more on that later)

 

Lunch:

Curry with a carrot

 

Snack:

Banana “Brule”

 

Dinner:

Curry with a carrot and two bowls of salad with dressing

Dessert:

Banana “Brule”

(If you want to see pictures just look Sunday not much has changed)

Things to report for the day:

So I think that I have more or less adjusted to the new diet. What I mean is that I am getting used to being somewhat hungry for most of the day. You know the feeling you get when you are really looking forward to dinner but it won't be ready for another 20 minutes? That what it feels like for about 2 hours before each meal. I have good meals. But the calorie content is low and after an hour or two I feel like I need to eat more. It is not like I feel like I am starving all day, but I do feel tired and distracted most of the day. Today my wife was sick so I stayed home from work to watch my son (If I really had a part time job that would mean missing income that I really could not afford to lose). I think I am starting to come down with what she has (a sore throat). Usually I have some herbal tea, or lemon water with honey. I do not have any of those things on a food stamp budget so I tried brown sugar in hot water. It is gross and does not help so I would not recommend it.

Thoughts of the day:

Something has become quite apparent to me. A big concern you hear people say when discussing food stamps that that some people do not make health choices with their food stamp financial support. But even after only two days I have gained some insight in the matter. I get really hungry shortly after meals. After I bought a bag of brown sugar for my oatmeal I thought to myself; "what a waste, I will hardly eat any of this sugar by the end of the week." But now I am about a half of the way through the bag 1 pound bag just to keep from being hungry during the day (which is gross to think about). I load up my oatmeal with it and I use a bunch when I have bananas. But I am hungry and loading up on the sugar helps keep me feel fuller longer.

So I can understand why a person would be tempted to turn to junk food when they are on food stamps. Healthy food is less filling for its cost. Since I have started, I get hungry not long after most meals and I cannot eat larger portions because then the food won’t last to the end of the week. So I have added in the sugar when I can.

You know that feeling you get after you have eaten too much junk food? You’re full and you do not really feel like eating (or doing much of anything else for that matter).  So I think some of the unhealthy eating that takes place for people on food stamps is due to a certain degree an unfortunate practicality. A box of Little Debbie snack cakes is fairly cheap, especially when compared to fresh produce. Oatmeal crème pies are $1.79 for a box of 12, I was able to buy about 10 carrots for $1.50. So a carrot and an oatmeal crème pie are both about 15 cents per piece.

So what would help you feel fuller and feel full longer with your meal, three carrots or three oatmeal crème pies? So your choice is between feeling hazy due to too much fat and sugar, but full, or eat healthily on a small budget and feel grumpy and distracted from hunger.

Pick your poison.