Experience | mealsonashoestring

Experience (Journal Style)

General

What is a better way to understand another person than to be in their shoes? So just to add a little spice to this study, I decided to participate in the SNAP challenge for 6 meals (two days) and see what it feels like to eat on a tight budget.

The SNAP challenge is a challenge for people to eat with a budget of $4.40(*1) per person every day, which is the amount of money a participant in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) receives. The challenge can be for an arbitrarily long time, from a day to a month. Many do it in September, the U.S. Hunger Action Month established by the nonprofit Feeding America. The purpose of the SNAP challenge is to raise public awareness and empathy for the food-insecure population in the U.S (*2).

Figure 30

Figure 31

Shopping Trip

Eating (*2)

Let’s face it, Americans are not really starving to death, so the challenge of having a budget is mostly finding the right food that keeps you full, healthy, and is affordable. Shopping in the store with a $8.80 budget, it was hard to get a variety. Since there are minimum sizes the store sell things at, not having much money means you can only purchase a few items. Furthermore, even just having a budget as a challenge, I felt quite stressed about getting the cheapest and most nutritious choices. I picked up a bag of potatoes as my starch, only to discover that bread costs a lot less per calorie. Finding affordable vegetables was hard, so was finding cheap (and not suspicious looking) meat. I also had the issue of not reading the price tags clearly enough and was very disappointed to discover that the big price they had on top… required a membership card. Overall, I think I found an ideal combination of food (a loaf of wholewheat bread, two sausages, a head of lettuce, and three bananas), but the lack of options and stress made the shopping part of the experience somewhat challenging.

The cooking and eating part of the experience was actually quite okay. With some salt and vegetable oil (that I thought wasn’t too realistic to purchase for myself just for two days), each meal was delectable and I stayed full. However, because of the lack of options mentioned above, I essentially ate the same things every meal. It got boring quickly. Additionally, I don’t think I consumed enough vegetables, and the lack of variety definitely comes with the lack of micronutrients. Of course, one can be more creative with a bigger monthly budget of $132, but at least from my experience, real obstacles still exist: it was a bearable living, but not a comfortable one. Another point to be noted is that not everyone has the same access to local resources like I did, nor does every food-insecure individual have adequate information about healthy diets. All these reasons contribute to the issue of food-insecurity in U.S.