Well see how it goes.
* (that’s based on $5,931 per year of food expenditures for a 2.5 person household. I’ve never met a 2.5 person household yet, but that’s what’s “average.”)
Less than half…
June 28th, 2007 | Statistics | by Chuck Warpehoski
June 28th, 2007 | Statistics | by Chuck Warpehoski
9 comments ↓
Hmm. $45.62 works out to $6.50 a day. That seems a tad low to me–I’m almost sure my meals (including brown bag lunch every weekday with dinner leftovers) add up to more than that.
Take it down to only $3 and I think I’d be very hard pressed to make meals with adequate nutrition, even relying on staples like barley and split peas and lentils.
I agree, I was surprise that it was only that much, but I had someone at the ICPSR check my math for me.
With meals, there’s several things people need to do:
–They need to be healthy.
–They need to be fast enough that you can make them (a challenge for many working parents, especially single parents)
–If you’re a parent, you need to get your kids to eat it.
You probably can’t do all 3 on just $1 a meal. But I guess I’ll find out in September.
Yes – $3 a day is ridiculous. But where is it written that food stamps are anything more than a supplement to the budget for lower income persons? Do people (other than the completely destitute and homeless) have no other funds to contribute to their own food expenditures? How much is enough?
Food stamps create an important buffer so that families can cover other expenses like clothing, rent, and school supplies for the kids.
You’re right, for most families, food stamps do not cover their full food budget. But even then, by the end of the month, the fridge can get pretty empty. If food stamps are cut, that will impact our local communities. Our food banks are already struggling to keep up with demand. Children without enough to eat don’t do as well at school.
If 1 in 7 people in America don’t know where their next meal is coming from, this is a real problem.
I suspect that a lot of folks are as much terrified by the prospect of a week without Starbuck’s coffee as they are by the idea of having to actually prepare their own food But I came across this cool website in preparation for my household’s attempt at the challenge:
http://recipefinder.nal.usda.gov/
It’s a source for recipes, complete with estimated cost per serving and nutritional information. It’s even got some way to work out your shopping needs based on your recipes, but I wasn’t smart enough to get that to work.
Browsing through the recipes, it appears that sticking within guidelines might make folks eat a lot less meat and a lot more unprocessed whole foods (NOT WholeFoods™)
Information might not help with the stomach pangs but it might help us go into the challenge better prepared.
Great resource, Jim. I did hear that when the Governor of Oregon tried the challenge he spent $4 of his $21 on coffee.
Since this thread started off about numbers and statistics, I remember our preacher casually mentioning a few months back that something like half of the humans on the planet live on less than $800 a year. I was struck by the simply staggering wealth I enjoy in comparison. I know it’s a separate matter but it seems particularly offensive in that context that the US supplies food stamps to our own citizens roughly on par with the world’s most destitute.
Incidentally, a group in the UK sponsored a $2/day challenge a couple years back to raise awareness of world poverty. I don’t know anything about the group — they might be vagabonds and hooligans for all I know but at least the site had some interesting resources:
http://2dollars.org
Here’s a tip on “making it”. Pool the money for the week and buy things that you can make into a larger meal and eat leftovers. Also, eggs and peanut butter are good sources of protein and relatively inexpensive and can be served many different ways. (peanut butter on bread, or on carrot and celery sticks…etc). Use coupons, shop at discount grocery stores such as ALDI or Save-A-Lot, shop sales. Carefully portion the food out…most of us eat more than one portion size as a meal….
Once upon a time I was on food stamps and I planned out meals once a month, on a calendar. The meals I planned were things my children would eat and that I could pack as lunch for work the next day. Luckily my kids had free breakfast and lunch at school (although I kind of questioned the poptart for breakfast…it was something…they also usually had some cereal at home before they went off to school). Another strategy was to use leftovers from one meal in a meal for the next day…for instance, if I made chicken and rice, I could usually use what was left in a chicken and rice soup…
And in response to the poster who said that food stamps are supposed to SUPPLEMENT the food budget, this is true, but many families just don’t have much left over after paying for food, shelter, clothing and transportation to work.
The purpose of the food stamp program is NOT to provide food for people to live of of. Yes, it’s hard to live off of $3 a day, but the program is designed to be temporary relief, not something to live off of permanently. You should be pitching in to your food budget as well, not just the state providing for you.
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