Saturday 3:45 pm
I just returned from the grocery store in town, a pretty
normal activity for me on a Saturday afternoon.
This week’s shopping trip was a bit different, however. I’ve decided to participate in what’s called
a SNAPfast. For the next seven days I’ll
be trying to live off of $28 in food, the average food stamp benefit per
week. I learned about SNAPfast last
month, when it was announced in church by Father Michael. I toyed with the idea of actually doing it
for a while, but yesterday, while attending the Bucks County Hunger and
Nutrition Coalition forum, “In Our Backyard,” I decided to go for it. Impulsively I opened my mouth and shared this
with my CEO, Jamie Haddon, who promptly tweeted it out to the world. Oh boy…no turning back now.
First, a little about me.
My name is Tim Philpot and I live in Bucks County, PA. I work for United Way of Bucks County, where
my job title is Director of Community Impact.
I live alone in a comfortable apartment, have a new car (basic, but
still new), and a lot of perks and conveniences. I make a decent, living wage, typical for a
non-profit employee. I have a savings
account that’s pretty healthy. I’m not
in debt. I don’t worry about where my next meal is
coming from. In fact, eating out is one
of my indulgences…probably where most of my discretionary income goes. I’m not particularly health conscious. I know what healthy food choices are, but I
often am too lazy to eat well.
You might be asking the question, why would I do this? I suppose my motivations are mixed. First, I am a person concerned about
hunger. In my job I’ve come to learn
that about 10% of adults in my county are food insecure, as are 15% of
children. My church contributes to a
local food pantry that sees about 1500 visits per year. I also admit that my political leanings are
way left, and I hate to see the gap between the ultrawealthy and everyone else
widen so much. I see hunger as a symptom of this and it makes me mad. Also, part of my job is being an advocate for
the hungry, so I figure that it would be good to at least try to experience a
tiny bit of what food insecure people actually live with on a daily basis. Another motive is that I like a challenge, I
like games, and seeing if I can stretch a dollar is intriguing to me. Finally, if I am honest, I must admit a
streak of darker motivation – denial. A
little voice in my head whispers things like, “Can it really be that bad? Aren’t people just making poor choices and
buying chips and soda and the like? If
they really shopped smart (like me) they’d be just fine.” I’m not proud of these thoughts, and most of
the time I don’t believe them, but occasionally they nag me. It’s time to put them to the test.
So I went up to market and pulled out my smart phone
calculator and got to work. How far
could I stretch $28.00? I started with
rice and beans, figuring that these would be relatively cheap and filling. Then pasta and tomato sauce, followed by a
few canned vegetables and a loaf of wheat bread (my Home Ec. Teacher mother
would frown if I were to eat white bread).
For proteins I selected “meat bologna,” one can of tuna, and some
chicken breast filets. In the dairy section
I picked up a quart of milk and a small tub of butter with canola oil. I’m not sure why I picked that particular
item, except it was on sale and I figured everything else I was purchasing was
really bland, so some butter would hopefully improve the taste. I rounded off my list with some produce,
including two small broccoli crowns, two white potatoes, a bag of raw carrots,
two apples, and a tangerine. I was
hoping to get a bag of oranges, but realized I was overshooting the $28 mark,
so I settled for one rather anemic tangerine.
I hope you can’t develop scurvy in a week.
Here’s what I didn’t buy:
soda, dessert, frozen dinners, sauces, yogurt, cookies, pretzels, or
hummus. There is no beef in the haul, unless you count a little bit mixed into the
bologna. I did consider buying a whole
chicken, but I’ve never cooked one and thought that this perhaps wasn’t the
time to start. I considered, but decided
against frozen chicken backs (I’m not kidding). Spam was also kind of expensive, so I
skipped that as well. No, I normally
don’t eat spam, but I suppose I’ve heard the stereotype that people on a tight
budget sometimes do. I notice that about
80% of my purchase is store brand products.
I didn’t really plan that out, but went for what seemed cheapest in most
cases.
On this trip I resisted buying anything else. No toilet paper, dish soap or greeting
cards. Although I’m starting the fast
tomorrow, I didn’t buy a big meal for tonight.
Either I’ll chow down on what’s left laying around my fridge, or I’ll go
out.
Finally I took the cart up to the checkout and rang myself
up. $28.01. How did that happen? I was certain I was under the mark. I decide to give myself one cent of grace. Impulsively I ask the clerk to take my
picture. I’m no good at selfies. She treats it like a bizarre request (doesn’t
everyone do this in the grocery store?) but complies.
Back at home I snapped a pic of everything laid out on my
kitchen counter, cleared off two shelves in the refrigerator and packed
everything in there. I set up some rules
for myself: No coffee at home, but I’ll
give myself permission to drink it in the office. If, in the course of the day, someone in the
office leaves a tray of cookies or a box of donuts in the break room, that’s
fair game too, so long as I limit myself to one. Everything at home left over from last week’s
shopping trip is off limits. I decide
against doing a weigh-in…too dramatic. I
will try to write a little about the experience every day. Not sure it will amount to much, but who
knows.
Starting a typical week today. As usual I leave only the barest margin of
time to get myself out of the house and on the road to work, not eating
breakfast. This is not because of the SNAPfast, but my general lack of hunger in the mornings. About 10:30 am I’ll start to want
something to eat. So, with no hitches I am out
the door exactly when I need to be.
Until it hits me, about a quarter mile up the road, that I have
packed no mid-morning snack or lunch. I
turn back and zip down my driveway, run in, and open the fridge. What to grab? I settle on the can of tuna, an apple, and a
couple of slices of bread. I should get
some protein and vitamins from these. It
occurs to me that I am relying heavily on sandwiches, and as the bread to
bologna ratio is 2:1 (two slices of bread for each one slice of bologna), I
think I am going to run out of bread.
Happily, I remember that fried bologna was a treat as a child, so it
might be fun to resurrect that as a breadless alternative. Do you
know that if you cut four little snips in the perimeter of the bologna and heat
it up in a frying pan, the center will rise up, making something that resembles
a Mexican hat? At least that’s what my
Aunt Carolyn called it when we were growing up.
Go figure….a mostly Irish kid from the south, eating a "meat" named for a town
in Italy, fried up to resemble a sombrero. Is that diversity or what?
