Food Stamp Challenge

I’m not shy about saying that Crazy dumbsaint of the mind is one of my favorite blogs. The blog covers all kinds of topics, but what got my attention were the posts about feeding a family on a food stamp budget. Her posts hit home: my childhood memories include dandelion green salads, foraging for hickory nuts and wild asparagus and trips to the food pantry. So when she posted SNAP: A Food Stamp Budget Challenge, I knew I had to do it.

She is challenging her readers to try feeding their family on the budget allotted by the state for food stamps. In my case, I’d have to feed my family of three on about $86 per week. I have no question that I can do it, but Crazy dumbsaint wants us to show our work: she wants to hear about our menu plans, our recipes. She wants to see what we buy, where we bought it and what we paid for it.

Challenge accepted.

I’m gearing up to run this challenge for a full week, from this coming Sunday to the following Sunday. I am in the process of making my meal plans now, and I’ll complete my shopping on Saturday.

I’m setting parameters for myself:

1. Since we are a, *ahem* prepared family, we could eat for a ~~week a month~~ awhile without buying a single scrap of food. But what fun would that be? Items I have on hand won’t be off limits – I’m not going to buy new salt or new flour just for this challenge – but I’ll try to account for them as best as I can in our budget.

2. I will use items from our garden and the eggs that our chickens lay. Gardens and chickens aren’t computed into your income for food benefit calculation, so I think they are free, fair game.

3. I have a Starbucks gift card and a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, and I won’t touch either one next week. Not even in a caffeine emergency.

When our challenge week is over, I’ll post the results and link them up at Crazy dumbsaint’s blog. I’m excited to see how other families approach the challenge too.

It should be a very educational week around here.

6 Responses to Food Stamp Challenge

Jupiter

September 21, 2012 at 8:23 am

yay yay yay!
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Jennifer

September 21, 2012 at 8:34 am

I love the sentiment behind this, but I don’t understand the “challenge.” Crazy Dumb saint was using $33 per person per week as average. With my family of 5, that is $165 a week on just food. Currently we spend $130-150 a week but that includes food, toiletries, pet food, cleaning stuff, etc. Per month my food stamp challenge amount would be $660 on just food. I looked at my last receipt from the grocery store. It was $140 and included things like Keurig coffee, two pounds organic beef, Popsicles, cat food, huge pack of paper towels… Meaning, no attempt at being thrifty yet still under the “challenge” amount. What am I missing??? Or am I just an awesome shopper?

- Jenn @ Monkey Butt Junction
  
  September 21, 2012 at 4:54 pm
  
  You may be an awesome shopper but there’s some economy of scale too with larger family sizes. For example, around here a whole chicken is about six bucks – roughly 7% of a weekly allotment for my family of three. I can turn that whole chicken into two decent meals for my family. For a single person, that same chicken is 18% of the weekly allotment, and while a single person can probably eat a single chicken over the course of four days, who wants to? My long winded point there is that I think it gets easier when you have a bigger pot to draw from even though you have more mouths to feed.
  
  Plus, I know that we don’t consume just what we buy in a week – when I’m cooking I’m using rice that we have on hand, jars of pasta sauce purchased a few weeks back, etc. For the purposes of this challenge though I’m going to try to financially account for everything we consume in the week and keep it within the budget.
  
  I think the real challenge isn’t necessarily whether a family can do it for a week. I think the real challenge is if a family can do it week after week, with no “safety net” if one week the family’s needs are greater than the allotment.
  
Jennifer

September 21, 2012 at 10:29 pm

Do you know how much average US families spend on groceries per person? I took a very informal poll of my friends and $30 per week per person seemed the average. Can I ask how much you normally spend? We budget $600 per month, but again that covers more than just food. Not sure how much is other.
I’m not arguing with the idea, just trying to understand the situation.

- Jenn @ Monkey Butt Junction
  
  September 24, 2012 at 10:13 pm
  
  It is very hard to find a “US average” that is truly representative because cost of living makes such a difference. For example, my mother in law is a shut in and she lives in Southern California. I do all of her grocery shopping for her online for home delivery. What she pays for milk, eggs, even most vegetables is substantially more than what we pay here in Wisconsin. Case in point from this week: she bought turkey bacon for $6.09. I paid $1.00 for the same thing.
  
  I think the challenge is to keep track of what we are spending and what we are spending it on. It made me think twice before I put a $8 bag of nuts in my grocery cart. If I wasn’t tracking so carefully for the challenge, I probably would have bought the bag. But putting that bag in the context of a hard limit – I couldn’t reasonably do it. You become much more aware of the price tag on every item when you have a hard limit to your budget. That’s part of the challenge.
  
- Jupiter
  
  September 25, 2012 at 11:26 am
  
  A lot depends on where you live,too. There’s a link in the post that tells what the state you live in gives per person, which is supposed to be based on the average of what most people spend but most people I know on FS don’t even get that much. There’s also a special part of this challenge for those who shop under that amount normally. You’re more than welcome to link up and share how you do it. Most of the people who read my food stamp related posts are actually on food stamps and are looking for help and ideas on how to budget AND eat well, so every bit of helpful tips helps!
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