Making meals is a SNAP
So many choices, so many prices when it comes to bread. Hundt took the SNAP Challenge and shopped for $25 worth of groceries at Shop 'n Save in Washington.
Brad Hundt, editorial page editor at the Observer-Reporter, ponders the best deal as he shops for macaroni and cheese at Shop 'n Save in Washington.
Twenty-five dollars doesn’t put a lot of groceries on the checkout counter, but they’ll have to last for five days.
A gallon of orange juice is a necessity for Hundt.
Hundt watches as Shop 'n Save cashier Erik Miller scans tomato sauce at the checkout.
Erik Miller, a cashier at the Shop 'n Save in Washington, bags the $25 worth of groceries Brad Hundt chose for the SNAP Challenge.
Hundt adds some fruit to his shopping cart while at Shop 'n Save in Washington.
Hundt adds up prices as he shops with a tight budget of $25.
I never, ever, ever want to eat spaghetti again.
Well, OK, “never, ever, ever” is an awfully long time. And since it’s one of my favorite foods, I imagine I’ll be depositing those strands in boiling water and heating up some sauce before I know it.
But to subsist on spaghetti for dinner for five nights in a row is to severely test one’s love of this most satisfying of delicacies. Nonetheless, from Aug. 19 to Aug. 23, that’s what my diet largely consisted of as I embarked on a one-man SNAP Challenge. The gist of the challenge is to try to live on the budget of a typical recipient of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – or food stamps, as it’s been more widely known throughout its 74-year existence – for five days or a week. That amounts to anywhere from $4.28 per day to an even $5 per day.
It’s not easy. Not at all.
I managed to pull it off, but I was perilously close to a bare cupboard, vacant refrigerator and an empty stomach by the time I was done. And that I managed to avoid having to surrender to hunger, or just admitting defeat and packing in the challenge, was due to some wiggle room I gave myself – the small amount of perishables I had in the house at the start of the week would be consumed. It made no sense to let good food go to waste. And though you’re not supposed to eat out or accept food that anyone gives you during a SNAP Challenge, I gave in to weakness and nibbled on a few pieces of caramel corn that someone brought into the office two days into the challenge.
But beyond that, I hung tight to my monochromatic, strained, repetitive regimen.
The SNAP Challenge has become a favored vehicle for politicians and activists to illustrate the severe constraints under which SNAP recipients must shop and the limited diets they must endure. The SNAP Challenge has come in for criticism by some who say that it lowballs the amount of money that SNAP recipients must rely upon, since, they contend, people who apply for food stamps are often the working poor, who have jobs and are able to scrape together a few additional pennies when trips to the grocery store come around. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has reported that 75 percent of those receiving benefits through SNAP also use money out of their own pockets to buy food, and that just 20 percent of those who participate in SNAP have no other source of income.
However, Emily Cleath, communications coordinator for the Pittsburgh office of the advocacy group Just Harvest, counters that those who say the SNAP Challenge is deliberately stingy have political axes to grind. “It’s an ideological argument rather than how people live,” she said. Cleath explained that vital expenses like rent and transportation take up most of the budgets of individuals or families that turn to SNAP, so “they’re going to stretch their budgets.”
Also, she said actually getting a SNAP card in your hand is “incredibly complicated” and subject to a battery of asset and eligibility tests.
Thank heavens I didn’t have to fly through those hoops. Subsisting on spaghetti for five days has a way of wearing down your patience and fraying your temper.
So, on Aug. 19, a Monday afternoon, it was time to set out to the Shop ‘n Save supermarket in Washington to get provisions designed to get me to Saturday morning. The first order of business was heading to the aisle where pasta and related items were on the shelves. I picked up a sufficient supply of spaghetti strands and a quart or so of meat sauce. That gobbled up almost one-fourth of my budget right there. Then, it was time to debate my macaroni and cheese options. Would I purchase a brand that required it be warmed up on the stove, or go with the microwaveable option? Wanting to limit my risk as much as possible, it went with the brand that required a quick zap. Another $3 down. It was the one major mishap of the week, but more on that later.
I couldn’t get through a week without milk, bread, peanut butter and fruit cocktail and, I confess, a caffeinated, carbonated beverage of some sort. I’m more a Coke guy than a Pepsi guy, but a gallon of Diet Coke was more pricey than a gallon of Diet Pepsi, so Diet Pepsi it was.
I had wanted to grab some rotisserie chicken, knowing that one would last me for a couple of days. I know hot foods are prohibited from being purchased with SNAP benefits, but I decided to improvise. However, purchasing a rotisserie chicken would have put me a smidgen over my budget. And it would have precluded purchasing bananas or cottage cheese. So bananas and cottage cheese won out.
Bananas aside, there was no room for produce in this diet. I couldn’t afford a bag of apples and had to forego salad fixings. It’s a frequent talking point of food stamp skeptics that SNAP recipients either pass up healthy food or are flat-out junk food junkies. But here’s the reality: Produce costs more than macaroni and cheese.
If I could do my shopping trip over, I would put back the macaroni and cheese and either go with another brand and get something else altogether. Either I’m wanting in the microwave arts or I added too much water, but what resulted when I attempted to make the macaroni and cheese was less macaroni and cheese as we know it and love it than it was macaroni floating in cheesy-tasting hot water. Rather than persist with it, I opted for five nights of spaghetti.
My bill, by the time I reached the cash register, was $26.04. Close enough.
The first night, as I prepared dinner, I was careful about how much sauce and milk I apportioned. One glass of milk with dinner was OK. Two glasses might lead to my cereal being doused with water by Friday. Could I have one slice of bread with my dinner or two? Those were issues I had never had to consider before.
I usually shy away from generic brands, preferring the real thing. But the generic brand of Corn Flakes that Shop ‘n Save sells fit within my budget, and the Kellogg’s brand did not. The most pleasant surprise of the whole experience was how much I enjoyed the generic brand. Good thing. I had it for both breakfast and a before-bedtime snack. The toast that I have the morning was not the multi-grain bread I favor, but a cheaper version of wheat bread with more slices.
Lunch was the greatest ordeal. Like spaghetti dinners, peanut butter sandwiches, bananas and cottage cheese are not limitless in their appeal. While they can quell hunger quickly, I was finding that by 3:30 p.m. or so, I was hungry again. And I still had a while to go before dinner.
I was, naturally, relieved by the time Saturday arrived, and I could go to the grocery store again and spend a more typical $60 or $75 per trip, visit a restaurant (Saturday’s meals were, in fact, courtesy of Subway and Boston Market), or partake of cookies if someone brought them in the office.
More importantly, I thought differently about food in the course of the challenge. Normally determined by taste, cost and nutritional value, when I was I was subsisting on $26.04 worth of food for five days, fretting about the sodium content of sauce or the calories packed in a slice of bread, or heaven forbid, stewing about whether a peach was grown organically, was not viable. Food was fuel. That’s all.
Though it wasn’t a trial on the same scale, it wasn’t unlike the time 20 years ago when I broke my left leg in two places. Ever since, I have a special appreciation for what people go through who are on crutches, have legs in casts or have other mobility issues.
And the same goes for food stamp recipients. Next time I see someone get out a SNAP card at the grocery store, I’ll have an idea of the hard choices they’ve had to make while maneuvering their shopping cart through the aisles.