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.