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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Can two people eat on $67 a week?
  • Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:23:47 -0700


Can two people eat on $67 a week?
A couple takes the Food Stamp Challenge and discovers it is possible to eat
healthfully on a tight budget. Careful planning and a home garden help.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/la-fo-stamp11-2009mar11,0,456336.stor
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By Jason Song
March 11, 2009

I was reading a book about the joys of making your own bacon, preferably
with mail-ordered pork belly, when my wife mentioned something about a food
stamp challenge.

It sounded ominous.

We were considering buying a house and the economy seemed shaky, so it was
a good time to tighten our belts, she said. We would live on $72 worth of
food a week, she explained, about the same amount a family of two in
California would get in food stamps.

Is that truly necessary? I asked. Sure, the cookbook suggests making bacon
from pork that cost $88 for 9 pounds, but I was never actually going to do
that. And we're pretty thrifty, I argued. We splurge occasionally but we
pack our own lunches most of the time, even grow some of our own
vegetables.

But then she showed me our credit card statements and receipts, and I
realized we weren't actually that thrifty after all. We'd spent almost $700
the month before on food, including alcohol and going out.

Maybe it was time to cut back, I thought. And $72 sounded like a perfectly
reasonable limit.

"Should we try it for a month?" I asked.

"How about two?" she countered.

We weren't the first nor the most severe members of the Food Stamp
Challenge -- in 2007, several members of Congress budgeted just $21 a
person, the national average a food stamp recipient receives weekly. The
focus of our challenge was different. We weren't making a statement about
hunger awareness or pretending we were poor; we wanted to change our
lifestyle and our budget.

The federal food stamp formula is complicated and depends on income level
and number of family members. More than 31 million Americans received food
stamps in December, the latest data available, believed to be the highest
rate ever.

We decided on some ground rules: We wouldn't count the cost of food we
already had in the pantry or freezer, and though we would accept gifts from
family, we wouldn't from friends, i.e. our parents could buy us dinner but
our friends couldn't pay for drinks.

It wasn't as easy as we thought. For a couple who grow their own tomatoes
and have olive oils for different occasions, it was hard to find a balance
between eating affordably and healthfully, much less deliciously.

But, by the end, I had found that it was even possible to make your own
bacon if you plan it right.

The first step was a trip to Costco. (I later discovered that Costco
doesn't accept food stamps, a reminder that although we were trying to live
as if we were receiving government assistance, we were enjoying options
that the truly impoverished don't have.)

I typically try to shop as quickly as possible, but my wife and I spent
five minutes just debating ham versus turkey for our sandwich meat. Both of
us preferred turkey, but we decided on ham because it was cheaper and would
be good for a couple of months, unlike turkey, which would last for only a
week or two.

I briefly wondered how it was possible for lunch meat to last that long.

We had a lengthy discussion about lettuce. A six-pack of romaine heads cost
less than $3, about as much as a small bag of mesclun at the farmers
market.

We had wanted to be as organic and local as possible. I kept a copy of the
book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which espouses the virtues of eating
locally, on my bedside table and spent a weekend expanding our small
backyard garden with a pick and shovel to make more room for greens.

Price of produce

But our spinach had died, and the Costco romaine was really, really cheap.
Then I recalled reading an article on Salon.com about how shipping 1,000
pieces of produce 1,000 miles could be as environmentally sound as 10
farmers driving 100 pieces of produce 100 miles. We put the romaine in the
cart.

Our Costco grocery bill came to $67, so we decided to adopt that as our
limit. We planned a menu for the first week and vowed to stick to it:
oatmeal or eggs for breakfast, ham pita sandwiches and salad for lunch,
ginger-lime chicken thighs for dinner.

It didn't sound so bad.

However, I figured out the secret of the ham's preservative powers the next
day when I bit into my sandwich: salt. A lot of it.

It could've been worse, I told myself. A cousin who tried the challenge at
the same time but stuck to organic fare was stretched so thin that she
nearly burst into tears when she dropped a slice of pizza that was to have
been her lunch.

Another cousin, the center on the family basketball team, mistakenly
thought that each person got $72 weekly. Then he argued that even though he
is single, because he eats more than me and my 5-foot-tall wife put
together, he should be entitled to $144. When told he was essentially
quadrupling his allowance, he promptly dropped out of the challenge.

One of the first questions my brother asked was whether I was getting
enough to eat. I laughed, but by 3 p.m. my stomach was rumbling.

Pantry raid

When I got home, I made a pot of black beans from some dried legumes in our
pantry and some brown rice. After chopping onion and garlic for the dish, I
tossed the tops into a gallon freezer bag, figuring I'd save them for stock
instead of composting them.

We also began shopping more at ethnic markets and found other places to cut
corners. Instead of getting butchered duck legs at 99 Ranch, I decided to
buy the whole bird and deal with it at home. While my wife hid, I sawed off
the legs and breasts, which we used for four meals.

I briefly considered saving the carcass to make stock, but decided that I
didn't want to see what would happen to the webbed feet after a few hours
on a low boil. I put it in the garbage.

While hauling away the duck remains, it occurred to me that that was the
first time I'd taken out the garbage in at least three days. I normally
took the trash out every other day. Since we were sticking to a plan and
using everything in our refrigerator instead of forgetting about, say, half
a head of broccoli that eventually would go bad, we were more efficient.

That thriftiness also led to some unexpected combinations. My wife bought a
large bag of shiitake mushrooms at 99 Ranch and we put them in a stir-fry
on a Monday, which was fine. By Friday, I was mixing them into omelets, the
fluffiness of the eggs intercut with the chewiness of the mushrooms.

We'd stopped going out to eat almost entirely, turning down invitations to
dinner and brunch. My parents took us out to dinner one night, and then
gave us a paper bag full of frozen bison meat leftover from one of their
own food experiments. ("It's low-fat!" my mom said).

Though we were grateful for the gift, we were also a little leery. My mom
had made it once, and we'd all agreed that it was too dry and tasted bloody
rare even when well done.

Once my wife and I thawed the bison, which looked like a dark red pork
loin, we debated how to make it appetizing. The first option, to sear it
and make a red wine reduction sauce, preferably with a lot of butter, was
too expensive once we figured in the cost of the sauce. Instead, we put it
in chili. After a few hours of simmering, it tasted just like beef.

The meat was actually a welcome break in our diet, which was heavy on
starches and basic fruits and vegetables. After eating what seemed to be my
100th apple, I began to regret that we hadn't done this during the summer
when there would have been more variety.

But even though I was getting my share of protein, I still longingly
flipped through cookbooks and began to crave a steak, which would've blown
the budget.

Salvation came in the form of a co-worker who was reporting on Philippe the
Original's 100th anniversary celebration, which featured 10-cent
sandwiches. She asked me if I wanted her to bring me a French dip, and I
could barely contain my enthusiasm.

I calculated how many sandwiches I could get for $67 and how many would fit
in my freezer, but decided they wouldn't keep very well. Nevertheless, I
inhaled the one French dip I did get.

We were ruthlessly efficient by the end of the seventh week, when we spent
only $45 on food. When we got our credit card bill for October, we
discovered we'd spent only $250 on food that month, about $18 less than our
budget and almost a third less than what we'd spent before starting the
challenge.

But by then, I was looking forward to ending our experiment and returning
to our regular life.

That wasn't as easy as we thought it would be.

Decisions, decisions

When we decided to stop by Noah's Bagels for lunch, a semi-regular treat in
the past, we were aghast at the prices. Was a bagel sandwich worth $7.29?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy a dozen bagels and then get sandwich
makings elsewhere?

"Can I help you?" a confused-looking Noah's employee asked. "Give us a
minute," we replied. The people behind us coughed politely. "Go ahead," we
told them before continuing our debate.

Finally, we decided to order a roast beef for me and a bagel and lox for
her. A grand total of $14.58, almost a quarter of our weekly budget. I felt
guilty, wasteful, and I could tell my wife felt the same. I guess we won't
be returning to our regular eating habits any time soon, I thought, pleased
and yet also slightly dismayed that I'd never get to make my mail-ordered
bacon.

But on my next trip to the Chinese market, I bought 10 pounds of pork belly
for $14, and rubbed it with a mixture of salts and brown sugar and let it
cure in the refrigerator for a week.

I smoked it on a Saturday and removed the skin once it had cooled. We
sliced and fried the bacon and made BLTs with some friends we hadn't seen
for awhile. The bacon was delicious, not too salty, crisp on the outside
and chewy on the inside.

Then I used the skin to flavor another pot of beans.









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