I love a challenge and have always thought one didn’t need a lot of money to eat well, so I was well suited for the challenge. My plan was simple: a big pot of beans and rice, a pot of potato soup and some spaghetti. I don’t eat breakfast and I’m happy with leftovers for lunch. I filled things out with a half dozen eggs (protein and an option for omelets and huevos rancheros) along with some corn tortillas, and cheese (Can you tell I’m a westerner?). The soup called for a few potatoes, but I bought a five pound bag which I figured could fill out a few lunches with the office microwave.
I didn’t really know what things cost, so I went to the online shopping Giant Peapod sight to compare prices and finalize my list. I was quickly over my limit and had to go for the higher unit prices of smaller quantities. I had to buy a pint of milk instead of a quart (for the soup). I could only get a half dozen eggs, and I needed butter for the potatoes and soup (I wasn’t going to get a trans fat to save money) and you can’t buy just a stick at a regular grocery store (I found I had to go to a neighborhood store to get a single stick…it cost about a dollar, which is outrageous when four are $2.50 or more in a Giant…but I didn’t have $2.50).
I was determined to buy some produce. I know from my work with a farm organization that a dollar pays for something like 150 calories of processed food, but only about 50 calories of produce. The challenge brings this into stark relief.
In fact, my bean recipe calls for a green, red and yellow pepper. The green pepper is $.75 a pound. The red and yellow ones are around $2.50 a pound. So whereas I usually don’t bat an eye and go for the color and sweetness, this time I settled with two green peppers. Also, my potato soup recipe called for celery. At $2.00 for a product with zero calories, I couldn’t do it. I changed my recipe to a simple cream of potato soup.
Another difficult decision was the cheese. I love cheese and it was a critical addition to my beans and rice, and would be the only thing making the omelet an omelet and not scrambled eggs. Plus, cheese and tortillas were the only option I had for a snack. (By the way, corn tortillas are a lot cheaper than flour and you can get a big stack at a latino grocery, which is where you can get the freshest beans, too.) At $3.50, the cheese was more than 15 percent of my budget.
The spaghetti dish was harder to afford than I expected. I make a pretty good spaghetti with tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes, but I couldn’t afford both. The crushed tomatoes were about twice the price, so I decided to get two cans of sauce at $.75 each for $1.50 total—pretty runny fare. I was buying garlic for the beans and would have some left over, and I could use spices, so it would taste fine. When I arrived at the store, they were having a sale on Classico for $1.59 a jar. It was a few ounces less, but about three times the calories with all the additions.
I paid the extra $.09 and pictured a struggling single mother constantly on the alert to ensure her children got enough calories to meet their nutritional needs and enough quantity to feel full…or, at least, no longer hungry.
I had a quick panic at the check-out when my total exceeded $21.00. With my bonus card, it went down almost $4. Even though it was short lived, the panic was acute. What a horrible feeling to think you’ll have to pick something to return.
There was no fluff on my list. I don’t know what I would have cut.
It’s interesting to note that I went vegetarian when I’m not one. But I just didn’t see meat going far enough or being worth the money.
But what if you’re an immigrant with a traditional diet that is heavily meat based? Or you’re working several jobs and don’t have time to cook, or to go to two grocery stores as I did to maximize every dollar?
I went home and started cooking. As often happens, I got distracted doing other things. Next thing I knew, I needed to add water to my beans. No problem, I caught it in time. But what would have happened if I had burned them? Frankly, I’d be out of luck.
Forget all the previous panics and careful calculations of this exercise—one I can stop at any time—when you’re that close to the margin, one bad thing can have catastrophic results.
That’s when it hit me how scary every day must be for people who rely on food stamps. How, if your refrigerator breaks down, if you burned your beans, if you forgot to bring your lunch one day…you’d be in real trouble. You’d have few to no options. You’d go without.
I’m profoundly sad to understand—not just know—that people in this country go hungry.
That they face this challenge every day, and that at the end of the week, their challenge continues.
