September is the month that many people do the SNAP challenge. For the SNAP challenge you must spend no more than $4.50 per person per day on food, which is the average amount a family recieves on SNAP (formerly known as Food Stamps). Many people blog about their experiences doing the SNAP challenge, or write articles about it.
Ten years ago, back when they were still called Food Stamps, my family of three was living on $150 a month for food. If you have any income at all, no matter how little it is, the expectation is that you will be spending some of that income on food, and the food stamps supplement the rest. The reality is much much different from these expectations.
At the time we were getting $150 a month in food stamps, my husband at the time was working full time for minimum wage, while I attended beauty school full time. Winter was 4. Minimum wage in the state we lived in was the same as the federal minimum wage of $5.65 an hour. Our rent was $525 a month. We also paid for a landline phone and electric. We had no car. After paying for housing and utilities we were left with less than $200 a month, and we still had to manage bus fare, $50 a month for day care (the state paid for the other $250 it would have normally cost), clothing, toiletries and paper goods, health care items, and everything else. The reality was simply that there was no extra money for food above and beyond the $150 we recieved in food stamps. We had to make do.
We made it work, because we had to, but it wasn't easy. I clipped coupons and paired them up with sales, walking miles to four different stores so I didn't have to spend money on bus fare. We were lucky to live in a suburban area with a nice, cheap indoor farmer's market close by. That helped. In that way we had many options that people in more urban areas do not. We ate a lot of pasta. A lot of potatoes. A lot of pancakes. A lot of beans. Pretty much no meat. We did eat some fruits and vegetables, but since they didn't provide as many calories per dollar as starchier foods, we had to limit them.
We had few small appliances, and minimal cookware of very low quality. No crock pot. No rice cooker. Now that I have those things I realize how much more you can make from scratch, and how much easier it is when you have a good selection of good quality tools to use. We had to buy everything in the smallest sized packages we could, even though the cost per pound is much higher this way, because our budget was simply too tight to allow any wiggle room for buying larger quantities of things. Spending extra to stock up on something would mean not having enough to get the other things we needed for the rest of the month.
We were also lucky that we didn't live this way for too long. I only had a couple months of school left when we applied for food assistance. My now ex husband found a better job, and I finished school and started working. We were still poor, but not three people trying to make it on one minimum wage job. Some people, whether due to family size, disability, lower cognitive function, or some other barrier that cannot be changed, do not have a choice. Some people do not have a realistic way out.
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