Second Harvest Column: Food Stamp Challenge

By Lois Rockhill

I can only report on the Food Stamp Challenge. I have not taken it. Living on $3 a day for food is just too hard to try right now. There are too many things grabbing my attention.

I don’t think I could juggle the menus, count the pennies, skip the meals that the challenge might entail. I did attend some meetings this spring in Muncie where a similar challenge was laid out in full.

TEAMwork for Quality Living had experts at the session to give us newbies tips on what to buy and how to prepare it. Those experts were women living with Food Stamps as a part of their daily lives.

The Food Stamp Challenge has grabbed the attention of policymakers and journalists. It hit TV not too long ago. In fact, we had someone call us at Second Harvest Food Bank from the Brian Williams NBC news show wanting to follow a real-life Food Stamp user around in the grocery. We linked them up with a local resident but it didn’t work out.

U.S. Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., and Jim McGovern D-Mass., and wife Lisa McGovern have all taken the congressional version of the challenge. From the Utah House of Representatives, John Dougall took the challenge and blogged an interesting journal of his week-long experience.

Unlike bloggers featured on the foodstampchallenge.com Web site, Dougall reported a successful experience living on less than $3 a day. His menus were rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, included some meats but excluded all snacks.

He allowed himself one chocolate chip cookie per day from a homemade batch that he socked away in the freezer. Here is what he listed having eaten one day:

• Breakfast: whole wheat pancakes, egg, oatmeal, banana, milk.
• Lunch: peanut butter sandwich, banana, celery, orange juice, milk.
• Dinner: egg and sausage burrito with skillet potatoes, milk.
• Snack: one chocolate chip cookie.

He made nearly everything from scratch and tried to follow the USDA food pyramid to keep the meals healthy.

Lee had a much more difficult time with the challenge. She found herself skipping meals and eating from the dollar menu at fast food restaurants. Her account from the foodstampchallenge.com Web site, “Friday, I had grits and toast for breakfast, crackers and a banana for lunch and two hamburgers from White Castle ($.51 a piece) for dinner. On Saturday, I skipped breakfast. I bought a small container of chicken and dumplings, an apple, a can of tuna, a box of macaroni and cheese and a can of turnip greens (total $2.25). I had the chicken and dumplings for lunch and skipped dinner. Sunday I skipped breakfast and lunch and made a macaroni and tuna casserole, with greens on the side, for dinner and half a can of peaches for dessert.”

The gist of the challenge is to call attention to the Farm Bill that continues to be pounded out. There remain critical discussions and political alignments when Congress gets back to business after Labor Day.

Whether the Food Stamp Challenge experiences will be pivotal may depend on the persuasiveness of those who participated. It’s hard to figure how much a Utah state representative can impact federal deliberations but from responses on the Web, he didn’t convince everyone that his ability to spend one week within a Food Stamp budget was either a universal or model experience. He noted that his challenges were planning menus that incorporated solid nutritional choices and figuring his budget. Once the food was home, preparation did not require much time or expertise.

From notes in his blog, I would add that had his children participated, he may have had more complexities to deal with. He ate a peanut butter sandwich for one meal every day of the challenge. And only one cookie. Need I say more?

Most of the challenge participants saw the world through new eyes. They were keenly aware that theirs was a one-week experience, while for 26 million Americans using Food Stamps it’s hard to see the self-sufficiency light at the end of the survival tunnel. Participants became more aware of prices of food, accessibility barriers to low-cost supermarkets, and budgeting and planning issues that were easily backgrounded by day-to-day issues of living.

More groups are picking up the Food Stamp Challenge to develop awareness of hunger among their constituents. The tool kit is at www.frac.org/pdf/FSC_Toolkit.pdf .

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Interfaith Council for Justice and Peace in Michigan are spotlighting the experience. Let’s hope that as more people take the challenge, more voices will be heard in support of this most important component of the Farm Bill. We still have time to let our representatives know that Food Stamps keep hunger at bay for our children, our seniors, our citizens with disabilities and our working families who just don’t earn enough to make ends meet. The stronger the program, the healthier the nation, and it’s the Farm Bill that will determine the strength.

Lois Rockhill is executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana. She can be reached at lrockhill@curehunger.org.

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