My Week on Food Stamps: Day 2 

Monday’s meals:

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, strawberry’s, yogurt and milk

Lunch:

Curry with a carrot

Snack:

Banana halve with brown sugar sprinkled on it

Dinner:

Curry with a carrot and a bowl of salad with dressing

Desert:

Banana “Brule” (banana cooked with brown sugar)

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

Things to report for the day:

I was a less hungry today. I think I am adjusting to a lower calorie diet. I am not hungry all day long, although my meals are very filling, they are low calorie. So I am full for an hour or two and then I start to get hungry again. It's not terrible but it is enough to be distracting. I have a job that requires a lot of attention to detail and I found that it was difficult to stay focused at work. Another thing to note is that I was invited to join some friends for lunch today. I met with them but I was not able to buy anything. I can see how being on food stamps could have some social effects as some people might feel awkward going out with friends as they order lunch or dinner and you just have to watch them eat food you cannot afford.

Thoughts of the day:

You do not realize how much you rely on pantry items until you do not have them. Butter, salt, oil, peanut butter, spices, a can of tuna and all of the other odds and ends you keep crammed somewhere. These things have a long shelf life and are not too pricy so I am just accustomed to having them around. However, the problem is that you build these collections gradually. If I bought one of those cylinders of salt it would last me for months (maybe even years.) But I could also buy a pound of rice or a loaf of bread for that same amount of money. But when you have nothing in the cupboard at home it boils down to I can eat a rice or bread for a meal, but salt does not make a meal so I won’t buy it. So I can see how it would be difficult for a person on food stamps to build up enough “pantry items” to make the most of their food budget, because most of the budget needs to go to staples and not items that can to help stretch their staple. So instead of adding a few pantry items each week you are probably only adding a few pantry items each month.

This has a huge impact on a person’s grocery bill. You can buy 1.25 gallons of vegetable oil at Costco for $9. That would last most families a long time and it can help turn cheap flour into bread, and cheap vegetables into a stir-fry and it’s also a necessity to prevent food sticking to conventional pans. But the “startup cost” of buying the oil is high. If I would have bought a bottle of cooking oil at Safeway it would have been $3.50 which would have been 7.8% of my weekly budget and this week. The pantry item I sprang for was spices (buy one get two free!) to make a palatable main dish. Of course if I were to be on this budget for the long term I would work on building up pantry items like oil each week. But it would likely be a few months before I had a decent pantry, and a few months can be a long time when it comes to limited food.