The End

Well, classmates, Happy Sunday night.  I’m glad it is the last day. Today I ate cereal for breakfast, grilled cheese for lunch, and a mix of things for dinner: two scrambled eggs, some leftover pasta and some roasted cabbage.  Not bad for the last day. 

I added up my final costs after dinner and came in at $19.58 for the week.  I would love to go make a banana milkshake with my remaining $1.42, but it’s getting late (for me), and I think I will save it for tomorrow.

In general, I feel like I was able to get enough to eat this week.  There were times I felt a little hungry, but the difficulty for me was more in the planning and constantly having to think about what I was eating, how much it was costing, and the general scarcity mentality that I have had to adopt this week.  It was exhausting in some ways.  I can imagine it would only be more exhausting if kids were involved and can also imagine that over time, the stress of it all would really start to wear. 

All in all, the Food Stamp Challenge has been an eye-opening experience and one that I hope to participate in again.

Grass popsicle

So I got the $2.50 popsicle.  I chose a rice one.  Yes, a rice popsicle.  It tasted like rice pudding and was delicious.  However, a third of the way into it, I handed it to my son, who was very mad he didn’t get his own to hold, but who would get a 19-month-old his own $2.50 popsicle?!  He would just drop it, right?  Well, as it turned out, not so much drop it as throw it.  Yes, throw it.  When I gave him mine to hold, he shrieked and threw it in the grass.  My rice popsicle.  The one I just paid about one-eighth of my whole week’s food budget for.  So you know what I did?  Yep.  I picked that thing up out of the grass, picked the grass off and ate it. 

I couldn’t throw $2.50 in the trash like that.  (Those who know me, though, know that I would have probably done this regardless of my weekly budget!) 

Tonight, we had pasta with braised broccoli and olives.  At first I thought there’s no way I can eat anything with olives in it because those are so expensive.  But it was just two tablespoons of olives in 10 servings, and after some calculations, each serving turned out to cost $0.74 total.  I did not, however, get to indulge as I would have liked in the massive pile of pecorino Romano cheese that you see in the picture below . . .

So the day (including the popsicle!) ended up at $3.99.  I have $4.18 left for the last day tomorrow, and at this point, I am feeling home free.      

Second to last day!

Yesterday ended up at $2.02.  And I even ate a small salad before bed last night.  When I added up my day and realized I had room in the budget for a salad – I jumped on it.  So I guess I wasn’t as numbed out about all of it as I thought.  And old habits die hard, I suppose. 

I have contemplated a few times how I would be eating if I had decided to involve my children.  I would have been much more unwilling to compromise their nutrition than I am my own, so I know I would have willingly cut into my own “share” to add to theirs if I thought they needed it.  This would have meant less food for me, and I am not sure I could have done with much less than I’ve had without my mood and energy being really affected by it.  Yet, I’m sure parents are doing this all the time.  Even yesterday, I sensed that some of my jaded mood may have had to do with being hungry.  I felt like my patience with my children was a little thinner than usual, too, and I wonder - could this have been hunger-related?  For parents who are constantly hungry, how does this affect their parenting?  (And everything else from there?)

I just ate a very bland peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and my family and I are about to leave to go to Nashville to spend the night with my parents and let the kids play with their cousins.  I am definitely nervous about how I am going to stay within my budget when I have less control over what is available to eat.  Even though food at my parents’ house would normally be “free,” I will have to keep track and calculate whatever I eat.  Luckily, my parents are frugal shoppers and vegetarians, so I am pretty sure I will be able to stay within budget.  Going into this weekend, I have $8.17 left for these two days (Saturday and Sunday), so I’m really feeling like I will make it!

I do have one big splurge for the week on the agenda for today.  This afternoon, we have plans to go to the park and get popsicles to celebrate my husband completing his post-doctoral year of supervision and getting his license as a psychologist.  This is a “big splurge” because these popsicles aren’t your normal high-fructose-corn-syrup-on-a-stick.  It’s a gourmet popsicle place called Las Paletas, and they are $2.50 a pop.  On a normal week, I would certainly put them in the “special treat” category at that price, but this week, $2.50 is a huge deal.  Huge.  But I feel like I’ve worked hard this week to keep my costs down (I remind myself of the matzo cracker!), so I am telling myself I deserve it.  Even as I write that, though, the word “deserve” sounds strong when I’m talking about a popsicle that costs nearly an entire day’s food budget. . .           

Tired today . . . tired of carbs

Today, I feel like I have hit my stride with the Challenge.  I haven’t been dwelling too much on what I’m eating or not eating.  I’m beginning to know about how much something is going to cost me before I put it in my mouth.  And I’ve been eating many of the same things I’ve eaten already this week, so no major new calculations have been needed.  I’m tired, though, and I think I know why . . .

It has been a carbohydrates kind of day, I must say: cereal, bread, sandwich, pasta.  Not the kind of balance I normally strive for, but I feel a little numb about it, frankly, like, who cares – I took care of my hunger.  Today, it’s not too much about nutritional content or even taste, much less aesthetics (which I am normally attuned to with preparing food).  I wonder if this is how some people feel who eat on $21 a week regularly – this sense of numbness about what they’re consuming.  Like the only point is to satiate hunger.  Nutritional content?  Who has the time or money for that?  I can imagine I might be annoyed by people like me who would have normally begrudged someone a Pepsi (as my classmates might recall) and insisted on more fresh foods.  I realize the cost and calorie comparison isn’t as easy as I might have liked it to be.  (Although I still contend the government has a responsibility here, even if it costs more!) 

I do realize part of my numbness is about feeling close to the end, though.  What are a couple more days of eating a poorly balanced diet when I know I’ll be able to get back to my normal variety on Monday?  My health will recover.  For people who subsist on food stamps for months and even years, they do not have that light at the end of the tunnel. 

Spaghetti dinner

I reached dinner last night having only spent $0.90 for the day to that point: cereal and milk ($0.26), a matzo cracker ($0.05) and hot tea with “half” a teabag from the day before ($0.05) and the last of the corn chowder for lunch ($0.54).  And I didn’t feel too hungry throughout the day either.  But by the evening, I was definitely hungry, so I decided to treat myself to a good, balanced dinner (while still keeping costs in mind).  I made spaghetti with sauce ($2.75 for all of it, so $0.92 for me since I believe I ate about a third of it!), a salad ($0.35 for my serving), and homemade bread ($0.95 for the loaf, so $0.19 for me since I ate about 1/5 of the loaf, plus $0.31 for a little olive oil on it – a splurge, but my favorite!)  And after talking earlier today about needing my multi-vitamin, I actually forgot to take it until the end of the day, so I decided not to worry about it. 

So I ended the day at $2.67 - my second-best cost savings yet, and I wasn’t feeling deprived either (although that plain matzo cracker was pretty gross.)  Here is a picture of my family as we were sitting down to dinner, and a picture of the fresh bread.

An unsatisfying snack

This morning I had a snack – a giant matzo cracker as big as my head. 

I found these at a place called the Sharp Shopper in Cowan, Tenn., for 49 cents a box, which amounted to just 5 cents a cracker.  I had been in the Sharp Shopper before (being the sharp shopper I consider myself), so I checked this place out for deals earlier this week and found these crackers.  Much of the food at the Sharp Shopper is expired (I have seen stuff in there with expiration dates more than three years ago), but I get the feeling that if you have a hungry family, expiration dates may not matter to you, and your $21 could go a long way there. 

I have never had a matzo cracker before, but in looking at the box (which had NO expiration date on it, so who knows?), I made an assumption these things would at least have salt in them – they’re crackers, right?  I should have read the ingredients: “Passover stone ground whole wheat flour and water only.”  Not. Tasty.      

On another note, I’m considering making taco salad tonight with black beans.  I’m already nervous, though, about the cost of the lettuce for a whole meal salad.  Again, fresh produce is expensive for the amount of calories you trade off for.  It might be spaghetti with a small side salad instead.  I’ve found getting balanced meals is somewhat more of a challenge when the costs really count. 

One little luxury that I haven’t taken out of my routine yet is my multi-vitamin.  It costs me $0.17 a day, but I feel like I might need it now more than ever since I’m not eating as many fruits and veggies as I normally would.  I love the writer and author Michael Pollan, and one of his “Food Rules” in his book by the same name is, “Be the kind of person who takes supplements–then skip the supplements.”  The idea is that people who take vitamins usually care about their health, and if you eat well, you shouldn’t need the extra nutrients from vitamins, which have not been scientifically proven to work.  But I can only trust this philosophy if I’m eating a good variety of foods, so for now, my little insurance pill stays.    

No cake allowed

Well, I did end up having two slices of the flea market bread (toasted!) with a little olive oil last night.  It actually felt like a treat.  And I finished the day yesterday at just $2.06!  Cooking ahead of time and eating leftovers really paid off, I think.  If I can continue to keep my costs low, maybe I can splurge on a milkshake at the end of the week.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

My husband came home from a meeting last night with a big piece of chocolate cake, and said, “Hey there, I thought we could split this,” as he put it right next to me at the computer.  I just stared at him.  “I can’t,” I finally said.  “Oh, sorry, I forgot,” he said as he went to get a nice tall glass of milk to go with it.  Big sigh from me.  A part of me was thinking, “Wahhh!  Poor me, I want that cake!  And I haven’t had a glass of milk all week!”  And at the same time, another part was chiding that whiny part, thinking, “You are so damn entitled, aren’t you?  It’s one week!” 

I realize this is such a good exercise for me.  When it comes to food, I have almost always had what I wanted.  Even when we had WIC benefits in Texas, we used it as it is envisioned to work – as a supplement to our weekly food.  It helped enormously, don’t get me wrong, but that food was not the total of what we had to eat in a week.  I have never had to really sweat it and fear not having enough.  That has been part of the value in the Challenge for me so far this week.