My husband, Jack, 8-year old son, Jordan and I are about halfway through the week-long SNAP Challenge. It has been an eye-opening experience giving us a new perspective of the struggles that low-income families face when they receive SNAP benefits. Here are 10 observations that we've made as we planned, shopped for and ate during the SNAP Challenge thus far.
1. It was definitely harder to get lots of vegetables and fruits into our meals. We could only afford to buy a few types of produce like grapes, bananas, broccoli and just enough salad stuff to have salads at two different dinners. We are eating a lot more carbs and a lot less meat and fish.
2. We are eating more like our child. Jordan is a typical kid who mostly likes kid-friendly foods. Within severely limited SNAP budget, we cannot afford to buy both adult-friendly and kid-friendly items. So we are finding ourselves eating hot dogs and mac n cheese when we typically would make something healthier and more sophisticated for ourselves and a kid-friendly option for Jordan. We noticed that even though we do insist that Jordan try new foods we often fall back into serving him kid-friendly foods.
4. We practically have a grocery store in our house. We shopped for and set aside certain foods that we would eat this week and added them up to make sure they fit into our SNAP budget. While the other foods that stock our pantry are there, we are not eating them. When I visualize what our pantry and fridge would really look like if we truly had only what we are eating this week, I can't believe how empty our shelves would be. It is astounding to think about the choices we normally have at our disposal. For example, Jordan wanted graham crackers for a snack. I said that they were not on our "SNAP list" and after some healthy options like fruit were rejected, I actually insisted he eat Oreos instead of graham crackers, since we purchased Oreos for the SNAP Challenge week.
5. We are grateful for free food. Whether it was a being invited to a Bat Mitzvah this week, free samples at Dierberg's or the nosh served at Temple before Shabbat services, anything free is a welcome sight. When on a tight budget, free food isn't just a little treat, sometimes it's a whole meal and it gave us the freedom to stretch our SNAP money a little further.
6. The economics of large scale packages work against you. We could not afford larger quantities of food even though they are more cost-effective. We wanted to buy the large jar of peanut butter because per ounce, it costs less, but we only had enough money for the cheapest and smallest jar.
7. "From Scratch" is economical and healthy. We put flour, sugar, milk, butter on our list. We made pizza dough and banana bread from scratch. Both would have cost a lot more had we bought ready-made versions and ours did not have artificial and unhealthy ingredients.
8. Planning ahead is absolutely necessary. When looking toward the end of the week and anticipating that we might be out of many things to have for dinner, Jack mentioned that we should have cereal for our last dinner. My response was that we won't have any cereal or milk left by then.
9. We live in a society of excess. That cup of latte that I get at Starbuck's about once a week is equivalent to a whole day's worth of meals for one person on a SNAP budget. A dinner at a restaurant is easily a family's entire weekly food budget. Shopping at Trader Joe's would be out of the question.
10. We couldn't afford to feed our dog. We hypothetically are receiving food benefits for 3 people but we have four mouths to feed. Our dog does not eat expensive dog food but we figured that it averages out to a dollar a day. That would take a dollar out of our family's daily budget of $13.50. It's sad to think about our dog, Rocky, (z''l) who required a special (read "expensive") food for medical reasons that cost over $3 per day for the last six years of his life and how we would not have been able to have him in our lives for all those years.
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