Posted on 09/22/2011 7:36:30 AM PDT by Abathar
(CNN) -- That is the reality for the more than 40 million Americans who rely on food stamps. According to the Food Research and Action Center the average food stamp allotment is just $30 per week.
I began thinking about taking a food stamp challenge earlier this month when I met several women who we profiled on hunger for two CNN stories airing this week. These women had to make tough choices between paying bills and buying food. Often they skipped meals so their children could eat. Often the amount of food stamps they received was not enough.
Living on a food stamp budget for just one week won't begin to put me in these women's shoes or come close to the struggles that millions of low-income families face every day; week in and week out, month after month. But I do expect to gain a new perspective and a better understanding.
(Excerpt) Read more at theindychannel.com ...
To be fair, you’re not putting in milk or pb&j. Those are staples in our house. There’s your 7.60 and you’re within budget.
So goes the urban legend.
She couldn’t eat on $30 a day. Maybe even $30 a meal.
You meam $30 per meal???
She has to skimp on breakfast and lunch so she can afford dinner.
I assume this does not include the cost of drinks.
If I only had $30 a week to spend on groceries, I’d start gardening, not demand my hardworking neighbors support my mooching a$$.
I was standing in the grocery line, frozen dinners and discounted (sell-by date expiring) meat in hand. In front of me, checking out, was an Hispanic woman with three pudgy kids. Included in her purchase were steaks, ice cream, soda pop, chips, cookies and fresh salmon.
She handed the EBT card to the cashier. The bill totaled over $80. The cashier informed her that the card was $4 over the available credit.
She handed 3 Monster energy drinks back to the cashier.
All during this time, she was texting on her new i-phone.
I saw this woman out in the parking lot, loading her groceries and kids into a newer SUV.
I jumped into my 1992 pickup, my cell with a cracked screen in my pocket, and returned home to microwave and enjoy my TV dinner, still clinging to my dignity and pride. But apparently, that is not worth much these days.
You fail to list needs like tatts, hair treatments, bling, nails, etc.
>>You want people to eat pink slime and pig tendons on a regular basis?<<
Yes.
Perhaps you had parents who had not lived in the depression or didn’t come from “The old country”. My grandparents used every bit of animals they slaughtered. Ever see Head Cheese or scrapple? Ever eat Czarnina? When you are hungry, you eat the protein given to you.
Personally, I think we should give poor people boxes of food. If they don’t like the food, they can trade or buy their own.
Wasn’t on the sale bill! Cans of vegetables are often on the sale bill for 2/$1, Peanut Butter was one of the items on the 10 for $10 deal they had 2 weeks ago.
And the killer thing is I only shop at Pricecutter for their deals, everything else is cheaper at Walmart.
$30 a week is very easy. Boring, but easy.
The only thing interesting here -
Is that the poor choices and lack of personal responsibility that left the person to be on food stamps - are not present in that same person to allow them to budget.
A failure is a failure.
Even the “I deserve more” approach - look at the Freepers here - happy to get $30/month.
Yes I could, but that $30 is per person. So a family of 4 has $120 bucks. And that doesn’t count WIC, food distribution centers, and other welfare and ssi payments.
But, one person on $30 bucks could eat at McDonalds off the dollar menu and have 4.5 items a day, so you know that if they turned their attention to rice, beans, meat, pasta, etc., that they could eat quite a bit.
1 lb of spaghetti, 1 can of sauce, one pound of burger, and you have enough spaghetti for days, and you’ve spent $5.
For some of us, its about all we have left now.
I suspect I could eat on considerably less than 30 bucks per week.
It should also be noted that its been years since I ate anything from a restaurant.
Actually I had a dad who was in a concentration camp as a child during WWII and a Mom who actually liked and served Spam. So there.
Way back in the early 70’s when I was newly married and working as a teacher in SC, me and my hubby were shopping. We were making like $5,000 a year each. So we were shopping the specials, getting hamburger and canned goods on sale, etc. When we checked out we were behind a woman getting shrimp, steak - all the good stuff. And you guessed it, she was paying with food stamps.
>>Wasn’t on the sale bill!<<
Got it! You did well!
Personally, I’m taking my kiddies for a trip to Sam’s today. We are doing a run to stock up on Peanut Butter. I hear the peanut crop was awful this year and that is the next product to shoot through the roof.
I hate it but my older daughter and hubby can’t live without it.
In the early 60’s, when my husband was still in school and working only part time, Betty Crocker ran an offer to figure out a monthly food budget with recipes for anybody who would write in.
I had 2 babies at the time, and I submitted our family for the budget help. At the time I was spending $12 a week, and we were eating well — everything prepared from scratch. Betty Crocker wrote back and recommended that I figure out a way to get more money because they were sure that I was depriving my family of essential nutrients!
It turned out that I could not meet their budget criteria because all of their menu plans required the use of Betty Crocker packaged mixes and meal helpers. “Scratch” cooking wasn’t considered an alternative.
OTOH, my local grocery store of the time (the Co-Op in Berkeley, CA) published a free pamphlet with recipes, submitted from other shoppers and members, that promised a month’s worth of recipes that would serve four, for $1 per day. Some of them were really good and I used them often.
I should scrounge through my old recipes to see if I still have that book. I’m sure that we ate better then than we do now.
We also live in Ohio, and my husband found out that if we received food stamps, we’d receive something like $1000/month for a family of six. Even buying cleaning supplies, toiletries, and pet food for our two large dogs and the cat, in addition to our food, we come nowhere near that.
I shop Aldi, clip coupons, make things and freeze them for later use, and most importantly—I make a menu each week and put together my shopping list from that. My husband takes his lunches from the previous evening’s leftovers most days. I make the kids mark down which days the following week they would like to take their lunches to school so I can make sure we have enough lunch fixings in the house. Next year we’re doing a garden to save on the fresh fruits and veggies our kids love and to do some preserving (I started practing canning this year with tomatoes the neighbors gave us).
When my husband was in the Navy and making so little we were actually eligible for food stamps (which we never took), we ate quite well. I did double coupons at Vons and then got our toiletries, paper goods, and cleaning supplies at the WalMart next door, using coupons there as well. I would save a good $50 on average each trip through the coupons and store card savings.
Not only is it very easy to eat on $30/week, a person must be stupid and or lazy to not be able to do so.
An interesting discussion..one man’s frugal is another man’s junkfood. But I think it’s true that people today are not taught, and few take it upon themselves to learn, what constitutes proper nutrition and how to get the most for their food dollars.
Of course if all you have to do is swipe, swipe, swipe your EBT, it’s all free anyhow so why bother?
Easily. I normally try to keep it around $3-$4 a day.
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