Food Stamps

Living on food stamps is a really tough adjustment, especially at first. It means acknowledging things aren’t working out and a big change is needed, with one of those being how to budget entirely different–and with a much smaller amount to work with. That amount varies from person to person, but various people have tried to take the food stamps challenge: here’s how they fared.

Melinda Moulton

Moulton is the CEO of Main Street Landing, a redevelopment company in Vermont. She’s used to spending $75 each week on groceries, and kicks in another $75 for lunches each day of the workweek. In 2013, she took part in a food stamps challenge called the 3Squares Challenge where participants had to eat on only $36 a week–with no extra money for daily lunches–which worked out to $1.71 a meal.

To say Moulton had a rough go of it is vastly understating it, as she describes the process as not knowing “how people do it. Physically, I dropped three pounds, had episodes of weakness and was exhausted. I am hungry a lot.”

Granted, food stamps are meant to act as a supplement to the weekly grocery budget–as their name indicates–but even as a supplement, $36 a week is not a lot to go on at all.

Sarah Gray

This Salon columnist, who lives in Brooklyn, created her own food stamps challenge. She took the average amount of $133 a family gets each month (93 meals, $1.50 per meal), and upped it a bit to get closer to the average amount that a single New Yorker would get (gross monthly income of $1,245 nets a maximum of $200 per month) to arrive at a figure of $41 a week (halfway between the national average of $33 versus the New York average of $50).

Further, she would only use the $41 on groceries (21 meals) and not resort to what was already in her fridge, with the sole exception of condiments and spices, reasoning kitchens already contain these items and don’t buy them on a weekly basis.

By the end of the challenge, Gray found herself skipping healthy foods because they were too expensive, calling her mother in tears because she was hungry and cranky, and almost getting dizzy and passing out from a lack of calories (she has low blood sugar).

Sharon Astyk

In a departure, Sharon, a writer for Science Blogs, refused to take part in the food stamps challenge not because she didn’t think she could, but because she already knows the reality of life on food stamps thanks to two of her former foster sons.

She describes the abject misery, constant hunger, juggling, and worrying about getting caught in great detail, writing that the mother of her former foster children’s “older teen daughter misses a good chunk of school every month because they don’t usually have menstrual supplies, but she can lose custody for not sending her to school either.”

Perhaps most vividly, though, Astyk writes:

How well will you do in school or at work with a week of living on two slices of bread a day with peanut butter – all that is left of the food stamp budget? Or the days when it is bread with ketchup packets lifted from McDonalds on it? How will you do lying in your bed smelling food from other people’s use of the communal kitchen and crying because there’s nothing to eat? How will you feel after three hours in the cold in line at the food pantry you come away with nothing, because there was only food for the first 200 people, and you were number 239? How will you feel when you have to choose between letting your kids go dirty to school and letting them go hungry?

Astyk’s solution? “What I’d like to see as so many contemplate cutting food stamp subsidies is a realist stamp diet.”