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.            

Back to my dollar bread

Well, I figured out that making one loaf of bread using a simple recipe of only yeast, flour, salt and water would cost about $0.22 . . . IF I used the bulk yeast in the freezer that I bought a while back from Costco.  I already shared my dilemma about Costco foods, so I then calculated the bread if I were to pay for that 2 ¼ teaspoons of yeast as if I’d bought it in a packet at the regular store.  The cost of the bread went up to $0.95.  So it is a no-go on the fresh bread, at least for tonight, and I’m a little bummed about it.  I know it's only 95 cents, but I just feel so scared to go over budget or have nothing left on the last day, and it is still the beginning of the week.  I may go to my bag of flea-market freezer bread instead.  Not the same, though . . . 

Day Three

Today has been my best day yet for keeping my costs down.  I had a small bowl of cereal with milk for breakfast ($0.26), a piece of toast with jam as a late-morning snack ($0.10), then I had a whole tuna sandwich ($0.12 for bread, $0.06 for half a piece of lettuce, “free” tuna since I paid for it in yesterday’s budget), chips ($0.06), a carrot ($0.11), and an iced tea ($0.05) for lunch.

Here was a picture of my lunch today:

You may be wondering how the nice bread on that sandwich is so cheap.  Well, there is a lady who has a booth at a flea market up here, which goes on every Saturday, and among other things, she sells Pepperidge Farm breads (that are a day or two away from expiring) for a dollar.  I buy them and put them in the freezer to keep them from going bad.  So at 16 slices a loaf, each slice is just $0.06.  If I had bought the bread full price at the store, it would have been $3.69 - $0.23 per slice – way too expensive!

I’ve noticed that I’ve started having somewhat of a scarcity mentality when it comes to food.  Today at lunch, I was eating the second half of my sandwich when I thought how I might be hungry later this afternoon.  So I put most of the rest of it in the fridge so I would have something to look forward to eating later.  I have heard about kids saving some of their free breakfast and lunch at school to take home that night so they have something to eat, or to share with brothers and sisters who are not yet in school.  The thought of this breaks my heart, and I know I have no idea what THAT scarcity mentality feels like.   

Rather, I find myself having selfish thoughts like: I miss snacking!  I realize now just how often I normally grab a little something to eat.  The snack I miss the most is my post-dinner snack.  Since the kids keep me so busy, I’ve been fairly used to not eating too, too much during the day.  But once they are in bed at night, I’ve gotten accustomed to making up for it by sometimes having a true fourth meal of the day – a big salad or a bowl of cereal, or yogurt, nachos, it could be anything - usually followed up by some sort of sweet.  Last night after my one bowl of soup for dinner, my tummy was growling before I went to bed.  Is this how many people feel at night?  How much worse do they feel when they’ve had no dinner at all?  And for an extended period of time?

For dinner tonight I plan to eat the leftover corn chowder I set aside.  I think it was only yesterday that I was blogging about “loving food” and sacrificing simplicity in favor of variety.  Well, here I am eating the same thing two nights in a row.  I am about to calculate the cost of making a loaf of bread.  If it’s not too expensive, then I may make some bread to go along with the chowder tonight.     

Day Two's Dinner

I made corn chowder tonight for dinner.  Aside from free water and salt and pepper, I spent $0.22 on butter, $0.23 on onion, $0.66 on corn, $0.22 on carrots, $0.70 on broccoli, $0.88 on potatoes, and $0.32 on milk for a total of $3.23, or $0.54 per serving. 

Here is how it turned out:

It tasted great, but would have been greater with all the cheese it was supposed to have in it.  I took out three servings (one for my dinner tonight and two to save for later this week) before I added cheese for the rest of my family.  The original recipe also calls for two cans of cream of potato soup, but I made my own smashed potatoes cooked in a little milk, then added other sliced potatoes because the cans of soup would have broken my budget big time. 

I normally would have had a second helping or had some salad or bread, too, but the bowl of soup was it for tonight.  I came in at $2.94 for the day, and am hopeful that some of the food prep time I did today (tuna salad, corn chowder) will pay off tomorrow and help me keep costs down again.

My tummy is now rumbling for a milkshake, but I’m drinking a glass of water instead.  

Blackberry feast

If I had included my kids in the Challenge, Sam could not have had the blackberry feast (from the freezer) he had for breakfast this morning.

I had a hard time not grabbing just a few for myself, but it's so early in the week, I'm trying to cut costs whenever I possibly can, so I stuck to plain cereal.

Day Two

Well, my first day yesterday ended over my daily budget at $3.15.  I ended up going with an egg burrito for dinner, with sautéed spinach on the side.  That spinach was what did my budget in!  It amounted to a tiny little portion with garlic and olive oil that cost me 69 cents.  I have heard it before, but now I am really starting to get it that fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive.  In hindsight, I could have had three more eggs (and been more full after dinner) instead of eating the healthy spinach.

Today has gone well so far.  I’m realizing that I have to keep my breakfast and lunch costs as low as possible if I want anything decent for dinner.  For lunch, I had Ramen noodles and half a tuna sandwich.  I felt like I couldn't have an apple to balance the meal more because of the cost.  I had gone for a long run this morning (in training for a race), and I felt like I needed the carbs more than the fruit - so I had to choose.  I'm at $1.90 for the day so far, but that includes the whole can of tuna, and I have saved some to eat for lunch tomorrow.  

It has been hard to not eat anything that I already had in the fridge or pantry.  It makes me realize just how MUCH food I keep in this house on a regular basis.  Yes, there are four of us, but do I really need to keep five cans of tomatoes in the cupboard?  (I'm sure they were on sale a few weeks ago.)  And the freezer!  It is jammed with frozen fruit and frozen bread (sales!) and half-empty boxes of veggie burgers.  Now that I really take a look at all of it, I realize we could eat out of our house for weeks without going to the store. 

I'm certain that many families in America have an empty refrigerator and freezer on a weekly basis.  I recall my mom telling me about one of her friends who makes a point to keep a "lean pantry" as part of an effort at solidarity with the poor - no mass stock-piling of food because even if some things are on sale one week - who really has the means to stock up except the well-off?  I have come to the same conclusion about food from Sam's or Costco.  I had planned to include some things from these stores in my meals this week, but the more I thought about it -- could families on food stamps ever get ahead enough to afford a $50 membership fee just to shop at these places?  Then could they have enough saved to make purchases in bulk?  Even if it amounts to better deals per pound, per ounce, per diaper, you have to have bigger chunks of money up front to get these deals.  So I'm trying not to use any of our "stockpiled" Costco food.  

I find I'm being so much more deliberate about eating (going more slowly) and so much more aware of every little penny (since I'm counting them three times a day).  I recall on Sunday being at the park with my kids, and there were a handful of pennies on a park bench that someone had left.  We left them, too, because at the time, I thought, "They're just pennies."  But now, if I saw those pennies again, and thought I could add them to my food budget, I would scoop them up and know it's worth a slice of bread.                   

Day One

I have four words to sum up my first day of doing the Food Stamp Challenge so far.  Harder. Than. I. Thought.  (And it is not even dinnertime yet.)

Breakfast was fairly easy, being my usual bowl of cereal.  I dusted off my long division skills after realizing we don’t have a simple calculator and figured out how much the cereal and milk I was eating had cost me.  Forty-five cents.  Not bad.  I could do this.  I poured myself an iced tea at the house before heading out to the grocery store to do my weekly shopping with my son.  Eight cents for the tea.  Still doing well. 

Things started heading south when my husband called late-morning to see if the kids and I wanted to meet up for lunch.  It was his boss’s birthday, and the plan was to meet at McClurg, the student dining hall at the University of the South.  “Great!” I said, “I’ll pick Eleanor up from preschool on the way, and we’ll see you there.”  Good fun, I thought, birthday lunch at McClurg!  I love McClurg; it’s not the typical college cafeteria.  The University of the South is a small liberal arts school (1,500 students) with what I would guess is a very large endowment because the university seems to scrimp on nothing here, so the dining hall has it all – woks with fresh stir fry, paninis, made-to-order pasta, a vegan line (I mean, a school in Tennessee has a VEGAN line – what?!), a dozen desserts, drinks galore, you name it.  And it’s an all-you-can-eat deal for $4.50 with my husband’s employee discount.  What a deal, right?  But I was gathering up my keys to go when I remembered – OH.  The Food Stamp Challenge.  I can’t spend almost 25 percent of my budget for the week on one meal.  Sigh.  I hurried back to the kitchen and threw together a peanut-butter sandwich, which I ate in McClurg amidst hundreds of feasting students, faculty and staff.  Oh how bad I wanted a bite of my son’s garlic cheese bread!  Or the chance to “clean up” my duaghter’s dripping soft serve ice cream cone while we walked home.  But there is a bit of the learning I was hoping for, I suppose: I couldn’t have what I wanted because so many others can’t either. 

I made a smoothie this afternoon – 39 cents after I split it with my kids.  As I anticipated, the figuring part is difficult and time-consuming (although I found a calculator!)  As far as the math and planning goes, it would sure be easier to do this with no one else in the house or with the whole family included.  Perhaps I should have claimed an entire loaf of bread and box of cereal as “mine” for the week so I am not constantly calculating how much food I used out of a larger whole.  I’m a real food-lover, though, and I think I’d rather do a lot of math and have a little variety than have the same things to eat over and over again all week just because it’s easy.  The latter scenario doesn’t strike me as very healthy, but I do admit it would certainly add some simplicity.  

On the menu tonight for dinner: either egg burritos or black bean burritos.  No extras like sour cream.  No beer or glass of wine to sip while I cook.  And no bites of ice cream straight out of the container after the kids are in bed.  Wow, I will really miss that ice cream.  But as I’m now beginning to accept: this will be harder than I thought . . .  

Challenge's Eve

As I prepare to start the Food Stamp Challenge tomorrow, I admit I am a little nervous.  On the one hand, I feel like I have a few things going for me.  First, I have always considered myself a thrifty shopper.  I regularly shop sales, make meal plans, stick to my list and clip coupons – all things I learned from my mother.  Our family also rarely eats out, so I am used to preparing most of our meals, and I have been off caffeine for the most part since my pregnancies, so coffee or sodas are not must-haves for me.  Lastly, we are “home vegetarians” – I don’t prepare meat for us at home, so that is not a part of my normal weekly shopping budget. I am hopeful these few things will give me an edge on the difficulty of this challenge, but time will tell. 

Some of my nerves for now concern the time it will take to budget and count the cost of everything I eat or drink.  I may be used to shopping for sale items and planning meals ahead of time, but I am certainly not used to keeping track of the costs per meal.  How much does a serving of cereal cost?  One apple?  A glass of milk?  I am not a fan of math, so I do not look forward to the figuring that will have to go into eating this week.  Thank goodness for calculators! 

The last comment I want to make before the Challenge starts is about my family.  I decided not to include my children in the Challenge, and this was a tough decision for me.  When I first read about it, I thought I would definitely include the whole family since I felt it would give me the most authentic experience: I would not only learn how it feels to worry about whether I will have enough to eat but whether my children will also have enough.  But the closer the Challenge has gotten, the more I have felt that I can’t do it. 

I am somewhat ashamed that I’ve decided to chicken out on involving them, since I realize there are so many mothers who are forced to feel those feelings and have those fears about their children.  Surely it is one of the most natural of all instincts as a mother to want to feed your children when they are hungry.  I am easily reduced to tears when I read or see a news story about hungry children; I’ve always felt that world hunger is the issue that squeezes my heart the hardest, and since having children of my own, it has only intensified as I try to put myself in those parents’ shoes. To think of my 19-month-old son telling me “More!  More!” and having to say “No, that’s all there is for tonight,” is a scenario I don’t think I could stand up to – not by choice. It breaks my heart to imagine how helpless so many parents must feel who truly have no other choice.        

So the process to even consider putting my children in a position where they might be hungry has provided an emotionally taxing start to the Challenge for me.  I am nervous, but also hopeful that I will continue to be affected on an emotional level this week.