We Pay Either Way

As most who read this know, I teach a class at Common Ground for free every month that I developed starting in January of '09 called, "Eating Healthy on a Budget" (EHOB). In the process of gathering the information from that class I learned a great deal and I've learned just as much if not more from the hundreds of people who have taken the class now.

With the community awareness of the class growing over the last two years, I've started to get requests to teach the class outside the confines of Common Ground. I've made forays into teaching the class in front of low income audiences full of folks who rarely if ever go to farmers' markets or natural food stores and I've bombed there. That's a very interesting story in of itself and one worthy of discussion, but not the one I'm planning to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the other kind of EHOB presentations I've done outside of Common Ground. I've put together a very abbreviated version of the class in powerpoint form that I can do as a talk in 25-30 minutes because I kept getting requests from University of Illinois groups, local churches, local environmental organizations and the like to do so.

One thing I've added to the presentation version of EHOB is more price comparisons. I already show folks in the full class a can of organic black beans and tell them the price, then make them guess how much the bag of dried beans I also have with me that would make the same amount of beans in the can would cost and the students are always pretty impressed with the difference. (It's around $2.00, by the way). But in need of a few more exciting visuals for the presentation version, I costed out a few things people tend to buy pre-made and what they cost to make from ingredients at the co-op. The results didn't surprise me *that* much at first, but they did make me curious. If it only costs $0.78 to make with all organic or local ingredients the same amount of lentil soup I get in a can at the store for $1.89 (conventionally, $2.49 organically), what about what it would cost to make favorite restaurant dishes?

I've not gotten around to in-depth costing I am ready to share in final form, but the process has already pointed out to me what a dramatic difference it makes to cook at home, even when you use the really "pricey" ingredients. We'll say to ourselves, "oh, that organic cheese is too expensive to use as our everyday cheese around the house!" but not blink at paying $7 at Panera for half a sandwich and a small cup of soup made from conventional ingredients in a factory and just heated up in a pan. We're not having an honest conversation with ourselves about food when we tell ourselves organic and high quality ingredients are too expensive but we then go out to eat several meals a week.

The truth is we live busy, busy lives. Sometimes, convenience is worth the price, just to have someone else make lunch or dinner. Thing is, we pay not only a lot out of our pocket books, we pay nutritionally too, are we really aware of that? Even when we get a big salad and some low-fat soup at the restaurant, the ingredients are from factory farms, shipped in plastic, full of pesticides, and often made months ago. And we pay far more for it than we would have paid to make the food at home with the very best, fresh ingredients.

And there's a reason prepared food costs more - because making food is work, time-consuming work. That's why we're often eating out in the first place, right? The salads you buy in the Common Ground deli can be made at home from the same ingredients for far less than you'll pay for a co-op deli salad and for good reason. Half or more of the cost of prepared food, in a restaurant or at home, is in the preparation. The preparation costs when you buy food out because people have to be paid to put in the minutes and hours of preparation we decided you couldn't afford (or didn't know how to) put into the food. At home, the time costs because we have to have it to put into the making of the food instead of other things. The cost of food is not just about the ingredients so, honestly, do we feel we its worth it to our health and our pocketbook to invest the time?

The answer isn't always "yes" for me. I work 40-60 hours a week depending what is going on at the co-op, right now, with a major expansion of the co-op looming, I'm working closer to the 60 end of the spectrum. My husband works 32-40 hours a week. We have a four year old son. Sometimes, despite my best intentions, I forget to coordinate the meals, make the meal plans, buy the ingredients. And sometimes I am just too damned tired and decide I don't want to make the food. I'm working to be honest with myself about this, about my choices, and to look at the real cost of them.

This weekend I am having one of my more food-ambitious swings. Despite a crazy long work week and having only one day off, I am feeling like making some food plans and executing them. So, today, I started with salad.



I pre-made these salads so they are ready to grab for lunches at work, already portioned out. All the ingredients are from the co-op.

I used:
- head of lettuce
- 3 green onions
- 1 medium carrot
- 1/8th of a head of red cabbage
- 1 pkg of baked tofu from the co-op deli
- 3 T of slivered almonds

This made 4 lunch portion salads. Without dressing, these are costing me $1.81 a piece, I am guessing 1 T of homemade dressing for each will cost me around $0.35, taking it to $2.16 a salad. A similar-sized salad at Common Ground's deli costs $3.95.

I turned the rest of the cabbage into homemade sauerkraut, but that's another post!

Next up, making a simple cold tomato and basil soup. That costs me about $1.22 a portion (1 cup, same as a "cup" at Common Ground's deli.) So lunch of a green salad with tofu and a cup of tomato soup from home will cost me around $3.50 with all fabulous organic ingredients, not attempting to use budget-conscious ingredients at all.

Is it worth the time? This week it is, to me. And it'll sure taste just as good if not better than the same sized soup-and-salad lunch at the restaurant around the corner from work that will charge me $7.99 and use non-organic ingredients. But, depending on what stresses next week brings, don't be surprised to see me at that same restaurant when you go out to lunch next Tuesday. We all do our best.

Something for Nothing

I'm not actually very enthusiastic about gardening. Well, no, that's not fair. I love watching the garden come to life, I love checking on my little garden beds, and I love most of all harvesting food from my very own garden beds. But I am a lazy gardener who does not, at least doesn't yet, enjoy the work that goes into a garden all that much. But I love the results and even my half-hearted efforts of the last four years have born some very rewarding fruit.

I planted radishes, a mescilun mix, red lettuce, white russian kale, arugula, and beets this spring. Soon after I planted, we started investigating a house. We weren't really looking to buy, but this house had everything we were dreaming of and . . . well, next thing you know, I was thinking to myself, "should I really bother with the garden, all the weeding and such? I mean, soon, this might not even be my garden." And, soon, the weeds started taking over. Everything still grew (other than the arugula, which didn't even start,but it was my first year trying it in the garden, c'est la vie)but other than harvesting the rewards, I've done nada. No weeding. No watering. Nothing. Its getting rather specularly wild back there.

I left several beds unplanted where I'd usually have bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes planted by now because it turns out we will be selling our home to the park district (we live right on a public park and they'd like to make more park out of our property) and buying a lovely new home right at the height of garden season. In these unplanted beds one of my very favorite weeds has taken over: lambsquarters. I have one whole bed so full of it and little else it looks like I purposefully planted it that way.

Many of us weed this stuff out all the time not knowing it is a tasty powerhouse of nutrition. Seriously, its a mild but delicious green, grows just about everywhere with no effort on our part, and is amazing for you. If you doubt me, check out the nutritional analysis here.



You can use lambsquarters any way you would use spinach, although I think of the taste as more like a mild asparagus. Here's a pic of it in its natural habitat, looks familiar, doesn't it? And here's a recipe for my favorite way to use it, in pesto.



Baa Baa Pesto
2 packed cups of fresh lambsquarters, leaves and very thin stems only
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, no stems, chopped up a bit
1/2 cup walnuts (toast them a bit in a skillet first for even richer flavor)
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2-3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
2T crumbled sheep feta from Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign (feel free to sub in any other feta or 1/4 cup grated hard Italian cheese like Parmesan or Asiago instead)
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Throw it all in the food processor or bender and blend until it forms a paste. Tada!

The feta and walnuts in this recipe aren't super cheap on first blush, I admit, but I love feta because you need so little of it to get a flavor punch that I think it is more useful ounce for ounce than most cheeses. Its what I call a high-impact ingredient - a lot of bang for your buck. Two tablespoons is less than 2 ounces, leaving you plenty of extra feta for fancying-up your eggs in the morning and tossing in salads. And yeah, walnuts aren't cheap, but they are nutritionally fabulous, full of omega-3 fatty acids, and again, add a lot of flavor for your buck.

All said, I made this pesto for about $4 and it will be enough for two meals for our family, easy. I am tossing it with quinoa, cherry tomatoes, and summer squash tonight. Later this week I will slather it on as a base for homemade pizza and top with lots and lots of veggies.

Three more quick notes on this recipe:
1. Vegans, sub out the cheese for 2-4T of nutritional yeast (to your tastes), absolutely yummy!
2. This pesto freezes great, I put it in 1/2 pint Ball canning jars and throw it in the freezer for up to 3 months. Just make sure the container is freezer-safe and air tight and you are good to go.
2. If you are going to store the pesto for a day or longer the very top of it will darken and discolor. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you don't want it to discolor top it with a thin layer of olive oil after packaging to prevent it.

Comfort Food

We've all got them. I'm talking about comfort foods that bring back a very specific memory or warm feeling from childhood. Many of mine are not-so-healthy, but one of the big exceptions is my great grandma Fiocchi's Italian bean soup. While I have vague memories of my still-agile great grandmother bustling in her kitchen making this soup when I was very, very young, my real memories of this soup are from my mother's kitchen. I adored this soup, the tender bits of potato were my very favorite part, my mom always cut them very small and uniform and there was something about that exact way she chopped them every time that made the soup extra special for me. And there was this flavor, this one really rich flavor in it that I couldn't put my finger on as a child or teen. I now know it was the flavor of gobs of fresh parsley, adding it to any soup or sauce is still an almost guaranteed way to make me fall in love with a dish.

All of great grandma's recipes that had been transcribed directly from great grandma by one of her daughters and my mom photocopied them all and gave them to me to use in my own kitchen when I got married. Even though I only use a few of the recipes now as a vegetarian (many contain meat)and others I just haven't gotten around to trying, this collection of recipes is to this day my most treasured wedding present. The food processor died long ago, the towel sets wore out, but this collection of recipes still has a special place on my cookbook shelf. I've made adjustments to the way my great grandma prepared the soup, but the happy warm feeling it brings me to taste it is just the same. I look forward to passing the recipe down to my son some day. Maybe on his wedding day.

Below is the recipe as I inherited it, exactly as my great grandma dictated it, meat left in. Its a very simple recipe with few ingredients, like all recipes for the best comfort food. There are lots of recipes that are complex and intricate that we can bring out to enliven a celebration or holiday, but comfort food is meant to be easy, everyday food. I've added my adjustments and comments in parenthesis.

"Italian Bean Soup

In about 3 quarts of water, cook about 1 cup of rice, or diallini or salad macs (I use whole wheat macaroni) and 1 medium diced potato (skin left on.) Add the sauce (the sauce refers to the rest of the recipe, below.) Salt to taste. Cook until rice or ditalini are cooked. Add 1 can kidney beans or Roman beans (I use 1.5 cups kidney and add 1.5 cups garbanzos to replace the meat in the recipe.)

Bean Soup Sauce
2 T cooking oil or chopped salt pork (I use cooking olive oil)
1 T ground pork (again, I leave this out usually, although Gimme Lean "ground beef" is a great veggie substitute in this recipe if you want to leave that element of flavor/texture in the dish)
1 large or 2 medium cloves garlic
1 cup chopped parsley
1 cup tomato or tomato juice (my mom always uses juice, so that's generally what I use, but this is a great place to use up some over-ripe tomatoes in the summer too)
salt to taste

If chopped salt pork is used, saute it a bit before adding the ground pork. With oil, you can start right off. Saute until ground meat is dry (mom's note is to add the garlic with the meat, it was left out of the recipe by great grandma). Add the parsley and tomato. Allow it to simmer about 1/2 hour. (Add the "sauce" to the water, potato, and pasta, then do the simmering.) "

And yes, it is very, very affordable to make, even with the ground pork. To make it a truly "Food for All" recipe, steal a page from the Italians by putting a piece or hunk of stale bread in the bottom of each serving bowl and ladling the soup over. Not only do you get to use up bread that otherwise might have gone to waste, it adds a delicious heartiness and texture to the soup.

Sloppy Georges!

I’ve been wanting to come up with a good vegetarian sloppy joe recipe for the Food For All recipe series for a while now. I thought it wouldn’t be that hard, I’d just look up a sloppy joe recipe and switch out cooked lentils for the ground meat and “tada!” I’d have another easy and tasty FFA recipe. My motives were a good part selfish. I loved my mom’s sloppy joes as a kid and I’ve been wanting to develop a vegetarian version I really enjoyed for many years now.

I started with calling up mom and asking for her sloppy joe recipe. Turns out, its made mostly of bottled ketchup and when I added up the cost, even after substituting lentils for the ground meat, it was too expensive to be a FFA recipe when made with organic ingredients and well, wasn’t all that healthy either. I try to get some nutritional balance into FFA recipes and make sure every one of them contains at least one vegetable. Unless you counted the tomatoes in the ketchup as a veggie, my mom’s recipe, while super tasty, wasn’t going to cut the FFA standards for price or for nutrition.

To address the cost I tried mixing up a sloppy joe sauce recipe I found that used tomato paste instead of ketchup. Despite all the things the recipe called for adding to the sauce, it still ended up tasting just like tomato paste and having the same unfortunate texture. After eating a bowl full of tomato paste slathered lentils on bread, my enthusiasm for this culinary project severely waned.

After finishing up the SNAP Challenge of eating on only $4.50 a day last week, my enthusiasm for creating new FFA recipes renewed. During the Challenge the only thing that kept me sane was having those FFA recipes to fall back on, which answered the question, “what’s for dinner?” without having to do crazy spreadsheets for each meal I cooked to make sure it came in on budget. The FFA recipes are already costed out and nutritionally balanced and after using them for the SNAP Challenge I truly realized what a helpful tool they are for people trying to eat a healthy diet on a tight budget. I was mulling a few ideas over in my head for FFA recipes while in Indianapolis this weekend celebrating my 5th wedding anniversary with my husband, Mike. For lunch on Saturday we went to one of our favorite Indy dining spots, the Three Sisters Café. Three Sisters serves meat, but has an extensive vegetarian offerings section that we consistently find delightful.

And what did I find on the Three Sisters menu? I’d always past over an offering called, “barbequed grains.” It just didn’t sound that appetizing and when you read the description of mixed grains in a apple butter barbeque sauce with sweet potato on a wheat bun it didn’t sound much better. Mixed grains on a whole grain bun? Sounded boring as heck. I continued down the menu when suddenly it occurred to me, maybe it’s like a sloppy joe! I asked the waitress and, indeed, she confirmed that the unfortunately named dish was a vegetarian sloppy joe type of deal. I ordered it and was convinced that whole grain berries on a wheat bun actually works quite nicely. I went home armed with a plan for a new FFA recipe.

I made my own version of the Three Sisters barbequed grains tonight and it turned out delicious. Its not quite a sloppy joe flavor, so I’ve renamed it Sloppy Georges (G being for both George and grains.) I’ve costed it out and what would otherwise be a very cheap meal still barely qualified for FFA ($2 a serving or less) due to the high cost of the organic bread it is served on. When you get into processed food products like bread, organic food really does get pretty darn costly. I’m kind of amazed I was able to fit it into a FFA recipe at all.

I’d like to try this recipe with lentils in place of the wheat berries sometime soon to make the dish more nutritionally diverse, instead of serving wheat berries on wheat bread. Its still nutritionally pretty darn great, but lentils would make it even more so. At this point I need to cook it still to check that the texture works and that the lentils don’t take the price too high for FFA. Once I try it I’ll post how it went.

Sloppy Georges
1 cup dry wheat berries (bulk bins)
1 T canola oil
½ a large onion, any color, sliced in thin half moon slices
1 medium carrot, shredded
½ a medium yam, shredded
8 slices of any Rudi’s whole grain organic bread

the sauce
1 T canola oil
½ a large onion, any color, minced fine
¾ cup prepared apple butter
¼ cup ketchup (Muir Glen is cheapest per ounce)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 T liquid smoke (not available at the co-op)
¼ tsp red pepper flakes (bulk herb bins)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

For the sauce: heat the oil in a small saucepan, then add the minced onion, stirring frequently. Cook for 3-5 minutes, then add all other ingredients and turn off the heat. Set aside.
For the topping: place the wheat berries in 2 cups water in a small saucepan with a pinch of salt over high heat with the lid on. Once boiling take down to a simmer and let cook 50 to 60 minutes. They will still be chewy and hold their shape. Drain the berries and set aside. While the wheat berries are cooking, place the canola oil in a fry pan and add the onion. Cook over medium heat for 3-5 minutes and the onion is translucent, then add the shredded carrot and yam. Cook, stirring frequently, for another 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, then mix in the wheat berries and sauce. Toast the bread and serve each person two slices of the toast topped with an 1/8 of the wheat berry topping, open-face style.

My camera either got seriously misplaced or stolen this weekend in Indy, so I apologize for the lack of pics, I would have loved to have shared snapshots of our delicious dinner with you!

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!

Day 6, No Witty Title, I'm Running Ragged

So, just to be up front, there are no pictures again. Things have been a little harried.

Last night I felt so on it. My partner was exhausted from working 10 and 11 hours days all this week so I cooked us all dinner then put him to bed at 7:30, got my son down at 8:30, and then cooked a lovely lentil stew from cheap and nutritious ingredients for today’s lunch. So on it. I ate my usual fabulous oatmeal breakfast, got my son and I packed and out the door 10 minutes ahead of schedule and the day was off to a great start. Oh yeah, sooooo on it. I was feeling great. Until I started getting hungry around 10:30 am and realized I had, once again, left my lunch at home and that I had solid meetings ahead of me except from 11:45 to noon when I had planned to scarf my lunch. While I live close to the co-op, I don’t live close enough to run home eat and run back in 15 minutes by a long shot.

And so, I led meetings while others scarfed their lunch and became more and more jealous and cranky. Finally, I gave in and spent $1.05 of my $4.50 a day budget on a vegan protein bar. That helped, but made me cranky with myself for screwing up my budget for the day because it would mean a small dinner at best. That would be annoying most days, but I started work at 8 today and other than a few little breaks, was scheduled to be at work until between 8 and 10pm to oversee the quarterly inventory at the co-op and the instillation of our third register lane. That’s the thing with hunger, it never lets up. Today was just to chaotic and stressful to contemplate rationing every bite of food and counting each penny, I’d have rather just turned off my need/desire to eat entirely. If only it were so easy.

So far today, I’ve eaten:
The usual oatmeal goodness with a few extra chocolate chips (it was going to be a loooong day, I felt I needed the pick-me-up): $0.70
The protein bar: $1.05
The lentil stew: $0.87
I had thought that was going to be all I could afford today when I was running around and trying to keep track of my eating in my head, but when I wrote this out I realized, hey, I’ve only spent $2.64! So, on a short break home I defrosted a bunch of black beans, tossed them in a pan with a diced up raw tomato from my garden and some spices and then ate it with half an avocado with a few Brazil nuts for good measure and got to:
TOTAL: $4.32
So I’m going to treat myself to a $0.15 mini fair trade chocolate to get me through the rest of this inventory night. Thank the gods.
What’s coming back to me today is the cumulative toll that eating on such a tight budget takes on you when you are balancing a full life. When you’ve got one (or more) demanding job, kids, bills hanging over your head, the stress of having to find time to eat is bad enough. Then try eating well enough that you don’t feel like hell and compromise your health while being on a tiny food budget. This is the reality so many people are living with, day in and day out.

Day 5 and Still Alive!

I mostly picked that title because it was catchy, but there’s some truth behind it too. There were definitely times during day 3 of the SNAP Challenge that I started thinking, “I’m trying to work 45 plus a week, my partner’s boss is out of town so he’s working overtime, I have a guest in town, my toddler is feeling more demanding than usual this week . . . maybe it is just not reasonable to try to do this challenge this week. Maybe I should throw in the towel, how am I going to find time to keep cooking and cleaning this much?” I didn’t give in to this voice, but I was tempted. And now, at the 5th day, its starting to feel more natural, I am getting into the swing of it. That said, I broke the rules big time today.

Part of the SNAP Challenge rules is NO free food, you’ve got to make it on the $4.50 per day allotment. From the beginning I said I would follow this rule but items from my garden would not have this rule applied to them, as SNAP covers the cost of seeds and most of my plants came from free seed anyway. I’ve said it a lot this week and I’ll say it again, growing food is easier than it seems and a terrifically cheap way to get fresh vegetables and even fruit (in the right seasons) into your diet. The reason for the “no free food” rule is to get a feel for what its like for those who are struggling the most. Most everyone I know who’s ever been on food stamps has used their social network as a support and source of food in hard times. One friend’s church knew of her plight and happily fed her family at the weekly potluck without asking them to bring anything and even sent home leftovers with them as often as they could. Many a friend dined with local family on a regular basis to help cover the gap. Everyone I know worked opportunities like out of date food at their bagel joint job or leftover donuts in the coffee room. There are as many different ingenuitive ways of sourcing free food now and again as there are people on SNAP and when you are poor, you get pretty darn ingenuitive. So why no free food if we are trying to better understand the experience of those forced to use SNAP to help get by? Because some people are not only fiscally poor, but also poor in human relationships or resources. For some, the family and friends who they rely on around them are just as bad off, if not worse, than they are. For a percentage, there are no resources beyond SNAP.

So, understanding where the rule came from, I am accepted it and have adhered to it. Until today. As I’ve mentioned, my dad was in town Monday and Tuesday. Monday night when I cooked a Food For All recipe for dinner I remembered to make 1.5 times the regular recipe so there would be leftovers for my lunch the next day despite having an extra person at the table with a big appetite. When I made the delicious (man was it good!) shepard’s pie Food For All recipe last night, I forgot to increase it so there were no leftovers for lunch today. And, with a guest in town and a long work day, I forgot to scrounge up something else to take for lunch. So, it got to lunch hour today and I realized, “drat, I have nothing to eat!” I looked around the co-op and there wasn’t much I could afford that was instantly edible. Hmm. I was wandering around looking lost when one of the deli staff asked me what was the matter. When I explained, she said, “oh, but we have some out of date corn chowder in the walk-in, its free, you could have that for lunch!” I thought about the rules for a minute, then I thought about how hungry I was and how my next meeting started in 15 minutes and how I wouldn’t have another pause in meetings for hours. I gratefully took the corn chowder and ate it.

Now, I could have simply bought something from the deli, I have the money to do that, but that felt like a true break from the spirit of the challenge. Accepting free food that I felt sheepish and not so great about taking felt a lot more like what I remember feeding myself when I was poor to be like. You often do find yourself accepting free food because someone wants to be generous or because you just need to but you don’t feel good about it. It feels out of balance to be constantly accepting free meals from a friend you can’t repay the favor to or your pride hates taking it or something. Free food rarely turns out feeling free in your heart of hearts, no matter what the intention of the giver, when you can’t repay it in some manner.

I also had no plan for dinner when 4:30 rolled around and it was time to get ready to pick up my son from daycare. Uhg, how could I have let my planning get so behind and bungled! Thank goodness that hunger (and I was definitely hungry already) spurred creativity. I came up with a simple idea. I would roast carrots (cheap), russet potatoes (cheap), beets (from my garden), and red onions (from my garden) and serve them with a simple mustard dressing over quinoa. It turned out great, and thanks to my garden, affordable! A secret about quinoa – while it is just about the priciest grain around, its also the most nutritious and it increases in volume with cooking more than any other grain I’ve tried! I bought one cup of quinoa and it made three generous beds for our roasted veggies. I tossed the greens from the beets into the quinoa for extra vitamin action, but otherwise just cooked it up plain, its got a natural nutty flavor to it that doesn’t need much help to be tasty. I’m getting addicted to throwing dandelion greens or whatever other free greens I can get out of my garden into everything to increase nutrients. I’ve found when you mince them up small you don’t even really taste them much and they can blend into just about anything at all savory. I put them in the sheppard’s pie last night, and tossed them in with the beet greens and the quinoa today.

I keep forgetting my camera at work so, once again, no pics today. Sorry about that, dinner was so pretty I wish I could have shared a few shots of it in the handmade pottery bowls from Mike’s wheel. I will try my darnedest to remember to bring home the camera tomorrow.

A co-worker overheard me talking about how I was getting only about 1500 to 2000 calories a day doing the SNAP Challenge on all local and organic food and how I felt it really wouldn’t be possible for an active adult male, athlete of any gender, or active teen to eat exclusively organic and local food on SNAP (they could definitely do a significant part of their food organic, but not all of it, to get adequate calories.) She disagreed, pointing out that when her husband and her were really struggling fiscally in the past they got by on organic beans and rice, meal after meal, and how at least that was better nutrition than succumbing to the fast food dollar menu. And she’s right. That’s not the perspective I am taking the Challenge from, I am trying to create actual well balanced meals, but she’s right that it can be done and that people are driven to choices like that all the time. If it’s a nutritional choice between kidney beans and whole grain brown rice and a burger and fries, the organic beans and rice will win hands down.

The conversations and thoughts stimulated by taking this Challenge are still very engaging to me, and, despite the extra hard work involved during a challenging week, I am glad I am taking it.