Oh, SNAP!

My SNAP Challenge wrapped up Friday, seven days of eating on only $4.50 a day. I was able to stuck to the budget eating only organic and local foods from Common Ground, the farmer’s market, and my garden the entire week with all food consumed paid for from that budget except one free bowl of soup. I was able to consume 1500-2100 calories a day every day and to prepare all the food I ate myself while working 40 hours plus a week.

So, eating organically and locally on a SNAP budget is no problem, right? If you’ve been reading along with my blog through the challenge you know this is not at all true. I worked my butt off to manage it and I have years of cooking experience and have already been focusing for the last year and a half on creating nutritious meals on a tight budget from organic and local ingredients. While I pulled off sticking to the budget and maintaining the rules of the SNAP Challenge for all meals but one, as the week progressed my lack of time to properly plan began to show. And as each meal passed where I had to scramble to figure out what to eat on my budget due to lack of time to plan, it got worse. I felt more frazzled, more worried about food when I was trying to work on other things, and that led to more hunger and distraction.

It became crystal clear to me how important good food and access to it is to our functioning over the week of the challenge. If I properly planned my meals, had my food ready for when meal time came around and made sure to have my meals and snacks at appropriate times I felt well nourished and did not experience hunger. When this planning slipped and I didn’t have affordable, nutritious food ready everything went to heck. If you’ve ever been poor, you know things go to heck a lot. When you don’t have money to put toward solving problems, when day to day things going wrong like getting a flat tire or your child coming down ill so they can’t go to school is likely to turn into a fiscal crisis, well, you have a lot of stress in your life. And, as we can all attest, stress tends to lead to no time to cook meals or take proper care of yourself. I often feel functioning well in my life is a tightrope walk now when I have the means to pay for the flat tire or take the day off to care for my son, it doesn’t take much to throw off my life enough to make it neigh impossible to find time to cook nutritious food. When I added the stress of a very tight food budget, it became much harder.

I wanted to take the SNAP Challenge to illustrate that it is possible to eat very nutritious food on a budget, at the same time, I wanted to take it to raise awareness about hunger and how it takes cooking and budgeting skills to make eating well possible for the majority of us. I often hear that eating healthy is expensive and I sometimes hear from people that they feel the food at Common Ground is “too expensive.” We could spend a great deal of time debating the cost of food and why it costs what it does (which I am happy to get into in the future on this blog or in person) but we need to look at why these nutritious organic foods like vegetables, fruits, eggs and the like are so much more expensive than trans-fat-filled, sugar-laden, processed food products. The answer can be found by looking at the Farm Bill that is passed every five years in our country that decides where the farming subsidies will go and what kinds of food production will be supported. I suggest that rather than shaking our fists at the cost of wholesome, organic food at community-owned stores like the co-op where no one is out to make a profit we instead channel our energy into understanding why the least nutritious food, the most health-damaging food, is the cheapest in our country and what we can do to change that.

Let’s also look at what we are teaching in schools about food and money. I am often heard to say that what I am really teaching in my “Healthy Eating on a Budget” class that I offer for free at the co-op every month is healthy eating home ec 101. Who amongst us learned how to budget in school? How to make a weekly meal plan? Learned how to make cheap nutritious meals and about what ingredients gave you the most nutritious bang for your buck? These are skills we need to make sure kids are gaining in schools and we need to inquire about what our schools are teaching now and do what we can to help them bring these critical life skills into their curriculums. In many cases, schools are no longer set up to teach cooking and that’s a travesty. If we do not know how to take care of ourselves, how to do the most basic and core things like feed our bodies in a way that supports our health, we can expect that we are going to struggle with illnesses and issues caused by poor nutrition.

I don’t have all the answers, not one of us does. But by asking questions, getting involved, having tough discussions, and sharing ideas and skills with each other I believe we can find them. The SNAP Challenge stimulated some tough discussions, the sharing of ideas and skills, and getting involved. I think that made it very worth doing and a great success. Thank you to the Eastern Illinois Food Bank for inviting me to take part.

As for the future of this blog, I am inspired now to keep blogging about affordable and nutritious meals. I'll be posting at least once a week with recipes, tips, and photos about making great food on the cheap with organic and local ingredients. If there is a topic you'd like to see me cover, a recipe or a tip you'd like to share, please let me know!