tags: food stamps, poverty, fish, hunger, politics
Congresscritter Tim Ryan has his own blog and, if you recall, he has been participating in the "Food Stamp Challenge" where he tries to eat on no more than $3 per day for one week. His solution to this problem was to purchase peanut butter and jelly and a loaf (or was it two?) of bread and just live on that for one week. (Incidentally, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are a real luxury in my life. Even though I am not on food stamps, I have to eat on approximately $2 per day or less, which means I eat vegetarian spaghetti). Anyway, Ryan tried to board a commercial plane to return to DC recently and found that his peanut butter and jelly broke TSA liquids rules and were confiscated. So he ended up surviving on 33 cents and a bag of cornmeal for a day and a half.
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I'm glad that some of our elected officials are getting a taste of living on food stamps. I wish that some of the anti-welfare crowd would take the challenge as well. All the same, there is a big difference between doing this for a week and for an extended period of time, as I am sure you know. In the latter case, it becomes an obstacle to physical as well as mental health.
One week? Colour me unimpressed.
At present I could live on no food (excepting water) for a week and it would probably do me good so says my doctor (yes I'm overweight).
I suspect any healthy and well fed individual could.
They should try it for at least 6 months.
Hey, I *like* vegetarian spaghetti, but I can't afford the vegetables. (Yes, I know tomatoes are fruiting bodies.) What's your recipe?
Also, I'm worried that pasta, by itself, might be a little low in Lysine (198 mg/1000 kcal, vs. 12 mg/kg recommended daily) and Methionine+Cysteine (293 mg/1000 kcal vs. 13 mg/kg recommended).
Do you supplement that somehow?
well, you might not like it much since there's no fresh ingredients in it. i actually use canned spaghetti sauce (chunky), and add two cans hot tomato sauce, one can of red salsa (chunky), two jars of canned mushroom slices and a spoonful of canned garlic. this concoction lasts me about six days and costs approximately 99 cents per serving -- each can costs me 99 cents at my local 99 cent store. the pasta costs 69 cents per bag (i use angel hair pasta which i can cook up in 4 minutes in the microwave) and each bag lasts seven days. i don't use supplements -- should i?
I ate on less than $3 a day from 1980 to 1998 (when I got married) without any problem. Couponing is very helpful. I never used a food bank or food stamps, figured that was for poor people.
Red meat was the most expensive thing I did without and used beans and chicken and fish to cover protiens - I couldn't figure out how to be a full-on vegetarian without feeling hungry all the time.
Now we spend about $5.60 per person, per day for groceries, but that includes diapers and other baby/toddler things. I have two boys so I expect they will need about $25 each for food from about age 10 to about age 25.
I suppose it depends a lot on where you live.
Michael E - What's "couponing"?
Grrl... I am NOT a nutritional expert by any means, but I'm familiar with the concept of essential amino acids (the ones humans can't synthesize) and did a little research.
I used the copy of WHO's requirements list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
and the nutritional content of ingredients from the USDA web site at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/
It's easy to get enough of everything if your diet is varied, but if it's monotonous, you have to watch out. Vitamin supplements are cheap and easy, because they're only needed in trace amounts, but amino acids are actually needed in macroscopic quantities.
Beans are cheap (dried pinto beans are usually cheapest; look where mexicans shop) and cover the areas that the classic starches (rice, wheat, or potatoes) come up short. So I decided to do rice and bean burritos (with garlic powder and a splash of salsa) a lot.
Um... I just re-did the math, and I made a mistake in the numbers I quoted above. I extrapolated from the USDA's "per 100 g" numbers, but I somehow read across the kcal line and got the much larger kJ number on the next line instead. (It 's not blatantly wrong in terms of dry weight, but I was asking about cooked spaghetti.)
Doing it properly, I get 715 mg Lysine per 1000 kcal, and 1127 mg Methionine+Cysteine per 1000 kcal. Which means that no, you're not going to suffer any deficiencies.
So sorry for the false alarm, you're doing fine. White rice comes up short, but wheat is better. I'll have to raid the dollar store and give your recipe a try!
POV: "couponing" is going through all the supplements and leaflets that you get with newspapers or in stores to find money-off coupons for food and necessities like toothpaste or toilet paper. I suspect this is more common in the US than anywhere else in the world. But if you are shopping on $12 a week, then $0.25 off something can make a real difference.