When I was a teen, our high school cafeteria offered daily lunch specials that became a bit of a running joke. The cafeteria worker who made the signs announcing the day’s selection must have had a special place in her heart for quotation marks, because they were used frequently, in ways both unconventional and unappetizing: Today’s Special: "Egg" Salad, or "Grilled Cheese" Sandwich or, more disturbingly, "Tuna" Sandwich. I bring this up four days into the Texas Food Stamp Challenge because I’ve been wondering about the diets of the 56% of food stamps recipients who also happen to be children. On a budget of just $4.50 per day, proposed for cuts that would make it more like $3.70 per day, do children get much truly nourishing food? Or do they get something more like quote-unquote "food”—the processed stuff in boxes we with resources take for granted not having to feed our children?
Over the summer, two national reports, released within days of each other, found that Texas has some of the nation’s highest rates of both child food insecurity (meaning uncertain access to food, often linked to hunger) and child obesity. As our CEO Eileen Garcia wrote in the Austin American-Statesman at the time, "Obesity and hunger might seem like opposites, but in reality both can reflect financial struggle. About half of Texas children grow up in low-income households, where cheap but satiating junk food might be all that fits the family budget. … 1,000 calories of junk food, like pastries and soda, cost on average 10 times less than 1,000 calories of nutritious foods, like fruits and vegetables.”
So in accepting the challenge to try five days of eating on a food stamps budget, I and many other Challenge participants wanted to go one better than the official rules set by the Texas Food Bank Network: we wanted to also eat healthily. There are many ways to do that, but I tried: (1) to have some sort of protein, carbohydrate, and at least one fruit or vegetable at each meal; and (2) for most of it to be minimally processed, fresh foods made in Texas.
I shopped where I could get some goods from bulk containers, selecting just enough for the five days. With $20.90, that got me 6 eggs, half a pound of rice, one small milk for cooking, and some natural peanut butter, which totaled $6.68. Another $5 or so went to dried lentils, a loaf of wheat bread, a small butter (OK, "butter”; it’s a spread) and a little pasta. I spent 70 cents on salt and a couple of spices. The variety of seasonal, conventionally grown Texas produce cost nearly $9.
Here are four things I learned:
- Real healthy eating requires resources. As meticulously as I shopped, it still didn’t feel like enough. Not enough food, maybe—I would have breakfast and still hear my stomach rumble on the drive in to work—but especially not enough flexibility. Like I started having symptoms of a cold mid-week, and wished for some nice, healing orange juice or noodle soup. Not many diet crazes forbid too much leafy and green if you’re craving it. But having an ultra-tight food budget will do that to you.
- Parents sacrifice food for their kids. I didn’t involve my daughter in the Challenge, but still found myself giving her some of the fruits and bread I'd intended for me. Research has found most parents on tight food budgets do this, giving some of their own share to their children. A fellow challenge-taker in Lubbock, with a diabetic son, has an especially moving personal story about it.
- Time works against a food stamps budget. Picture counting the slices in a loaf of bread, and it dawning on you that, in two days, you won’t have anything to eat. An online site recently highlighted the "Midnight Baby Formula Bread Line” phenomenon. At places like 24-hour Walmarts, the stores fill up late at night on the last day of the month, with parents buying formula, bread, and milk as soon as midnight strikes and a new month of benefits makes it possible for them to get what their children need.
- We need a Child Nutrition bill passed, plus a fix for the cuts. If you’re scratching your head over why Congress would cut funding for food stamps in such tough times, read on. Child nutrition programs, like the school lunches that millions of Texas kids depend on, need reauthorizing every few years. A bill passed by the Senate, The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, offers to not only continue those programs but improve them so more children have access to nutritious food. The rub is that senators moved funding out of the budget for the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP, the actual name for food stamps) to help pay for child nutrition. Now hunger advocates are urging a compromise where the House passes the Senate’s otherwise positive bill for children, and then both chambers act immediately with a different vehicle to reinstate SNAP funding. Feeding America is collecting organizational sign-ons for this strategy at this link. You can also contact your Representative in the House with a similar message
Most children in Texas need food stamps or school lunches at some point growing up. It’s time we make these programs work, so every child gets the benefit of real, quality food.
P.S. Big props to my fellow staff member, health policy coordinator Lauren Dimitry, who joined the Challenge especially for the "cuts” portion—eating no more than $3.70 worth of food per day today and tomorrow.
