The "Food Stamp Diet" and How It's Different From Being Poor

Every so often one hears about people doing the "food stamp diet" in order to see what it's like to be poor in America. The idea is to subsist for some period of time (often a week) on the amount typically given to members of the "food stamp" program. Here's one example, prepared by the Food Research and Action Center back in 2007. That one challenges you to live on $21/week. Here's an annual challenge run by the San Francisco Food Bank. There the amount is $33.04 per person per week.

These amounts vary not only due to region and inflation over time (food inflation has actually been pretty high over the last five years, grocery store prices are up 6% from last year) but also because these are different attempts to model how the food stamp program works. Food stamp benefits are based on the idea of supplementing a family's income so that the family can (according to the program's rationale) afford to consume the amount of food budgeted according to the "thrifty plan" from the USDA "cost of food at home" guidelines. Of course, since food stamps can't be used for anything other than approved food items, and they're given to people who are already very short of money, the effective result is that people are often trying to get all their food off just the food stamp amount, even if the program is assuming it's only a supplement.

What got me thinking about the topic is that I saw one of these "hunger challenges" linked to some time ago, via some Catholic organization which was encouraging people to take part "in solidarity with the poor". I saw the amount mentioned in the San Francisco challenge of $33 per person per week and thought, "Wait a minute, for our family of seven that would be $231. That's more than we spend per week on food, and we're around the top 20% line in family income." In normal times, we were spending around $200/wk on food. Since we've been on a tight budget paying off the boiler, we've managed to get that down to $100-$150 depending on the week (including household cleaners, diapers, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.)

So, is being on food stamps really cushy? Are these challenges just designed wrong? Being a chronic number cruncher, I had to get into it a bit.

First off, it seemed like the challenge was designed for one adult to take, so I wanted to make sure that I was translating it to family terms right. Here's my formula: The 2011 San Francisco Food Bank challenge (based on average food stamp benefits in CA for that year) was based on $33 per person per week. The USDA thrifty plan budgets $41.50 per week for an adult male between 19 and 50. Based on that, I'm assuming a payout of 80% of the estimated thrifty plan cost. Now I need to figure out how much our family would be budgeted according to the thrifty plan:
1 male 19-50 at $41.50
1 female 19-50 at $36.80
1 child age 1 at $21.10
1 child age 2-3 at $23.10
1 child age 4-5 at $24.00
1 child age 6-8 at $30.70
1 child age 9-11 at $35.00
Total: $212.20

Now you discount by 10% because we're a family with 7 or more members: $190.98

Now you assume we only get 80% of that budget as a food stamp allotment: $152.78

That now puts the amount pretty much in line with what is a doable but tight food budget for our family. Having established that, my further thoughts fall into three categories:

How Do We Keep Our Food Budget at Food Stamp Levels?
Even when we were feeling fairly flush, and not trying to keep our food budget super low, we never spent all that much more than $200 per week on groceries, and while averaging $120/wk for the last while has taken concentration, it doesn't really take that much deprivation. I think part of that probably comes from that fast that MrsDarwin and I both come from fairly frugal backgrounds, so our cooking instincts are low cost. Here are some of the keys to keep things cheap:

- It's winter, so we're having a lot of soups: a carton of broth and a pound of dry beans with various things thrown in for body or flavor can easily feed all seven of us for about $5 and leave enough to put away several servings of left overs.

- Using meat as a flavoring, not a dish. We're never into big hunks of meat eaten strait at the best of times, as a matter of cost and of culture. (Plus we're helped along at the moment by a large quantity of pig which resides in our freezer since MrsDarwin's mother gave it to us for Christmas. We're making it last and loving it.)

- Starch is your friend. When it comes to filling up lots of hungry young Darwins, pasta and rice are essential. For those of us decidedly not trying to grow, the recourse is portion control rather than subsisting on proteins and vegetables.

- No sodas or juices. Milk and water are the orders of the day for the young Darwins. (And I've cut back the beer budget to virtually nil so as to do my part.)

- Make it from scratch. We never bought much prepared food, but now we've taken that down to virtually nothing.

- Shop where it's cheap. You'd think that dealing with pricing, I'd always do this, but neither of us particularly likes looking for coupons or going to havens of extreme low price. (We tend to stick to our mainstream supermarkets and Trader Joe's.) However, since having to cut back we've started going to Aldi and it has allowed us to cut back a lot in certain areas. (Butter at $1.90/lb, milk at $1.99/gal, etc. Got to love German efficiency.)

Ways People Taking This Challenge Should Make It More "Real"
One of the things that makes the "Food Stamp Diet" promotional materials look deeply silly at times (especially to anyone who's actually lived on a lower middle class budget) is the ways in which people doing it seem to be out of touch with what most people on low budgets eat and where they shop. For instance, the 2007 set of promotional materials designed for congressmen warns participants, "A gallon of milk costs close to $5, a box of cereal is more than $4 and one apple can cost .60 to $1 each. These numbers add up quickly." I can't imagine where they're shopping, but I pay $1.99/gal for mild, $1.99 or less for a box of (non sugary, house brand) cereal, and $1/lb or less for apples.

So if you're going to take the food stamp diet challenge, at a minimum stop going on about organic and the fat content of your ground beef. Buying organic is, rightly or wrongly, a luxury and one way of consuming less fat is to eat less meat rather than spending a lot of money on extra lean meat.

Also, for those who really haven't experienced how "the other half" lives, try committing to doing all your shopping at places like Wal-Mart, Aldi, Family Dollar, etc. You'll get more food for your money, and you'll also find yourself standing in line with people who really do use food stamps. Whole Foods and the local farmers markets are not where the poor shop.

Why We Still Have It Way Better Than Most People On Foodstamps
All of this could easily make it sound like it's pretty easy to get by on food stamps, indeed that the poor have it pretty easy. That is not necessarily my point here, so let me run through a couple ways in which it's far easier for us to live on this food budget than it might be for many real families among the working poor:

- Economies of scale matter. Even the 10% discount that the USDA applies to the budget for families of 7 doesn't make up for the fact it's much cheaper on a per person basis to feed a large family than just 1, 2 or 3 people. Feeding two people on $44/week would be a lot harder than feeding seven people on $152/wk.

- An intact family with a stay at home parent helps a lot. One of our keys to living cheaply is that MrsDarwin is at home and able to get dinner started before I get home, make the kids lunches from scratch, etc. It would be much harder for a family with only one adult and a couple kids, or even with two working adults to stick to the same budget. Time is money, and as a single income family we have more time for certain things. (Of course, in some families, a parent, grandparent or other relative might fill this second adult slot.)

- We have the time and transportation to shop at three different stores during the course of the week and to bring in a week's worth of supplies from each store. If we had to shop day by day, or only at stores near public transportation, it would cost us more.

- We know that we do in fact have plenty of cash flow, even if we are trying to devote most of it to paying off a big expense rather than groceries. So we don't have any of the chronic anxiety of not being sure we'll be able to make ends meet.

Forcing Mechanisms: Cash Budgeting

The Darwin household has now been operating for about four months on a modified version of Dave Ramsey's budgeting ideas. This means that we've basically stopped using the credit cards (though contrary to Ramsey's advice, we still carry them for emergencies and have a few recurring bills that post to them each month) and even the debit card, and instead pull out an allotment of cash for all in-person purchases each pay cycle.

This at first felt very alien to us, as both of us have, by habit, not been people who carry much of any cash around. Going down to the bank and withdrawing anywhere from 500 to 900 dollars in cash still feels strange, this compounded by the way that the teller's eyebrows go up as she says, "And what kind of bills do you want for that?"

However, of all the Ramsey suggestions, cash budgeting is the one that we've found the most useful and followed most closely. The reason is that it makes keeping to one's budget very, very easy.

As inveterate planners, we are both very fond of budgets. There's a precise pleasure to planning out exactly how things will work for the next several months and seeing the rows and columns neatly add up. The problem is that while we both enjoy planning a great deal, we are both very bad at actually following a routine consistently. Self denial we can handle, and so a couple weeks of very low food spending and no "extras" is easily accomplished. But saving receipts and totaling them up every night is something we have never been able to do consistently. And so the analysis as to how closely we were meeting our budget would fall by the wayside, and after the initial burst of frugality, things would fall apart and we'd go back to that magical equilibrium in which outflows equal inflows and extra loan payments and extra savings don't seem to be happening.

Pulling out an allotment of cash based on planned in-person spending makes budgeting pretty much automatic. If you know that you have $500 to make all in-person purchases during a two week period, you don't need to to keep receipts and do nightly tallying-up in order to see how you're doing. Every time you open your wallet, it's clear how much money remains. Indeed, though we have a spreadsheet where we keep track of in-week spending by category to compare with our budget, we've stopped using the "envelope method" of splitting cash up into allotments for each spending category (thus avoiding the discussions of "Are diapers grocery or household if I buy them at the supermarket at the same time as groceries? Are gardening supplies household, home maintenance, entertainment or personal spending?) and started simply using a single slush fund of cash for each pay cycle which we split between the two of us based on who is doing the major weekly shopping runs. We have spending broken out by category in the budget, in order to arrive at the total amount of cash to withdraw, so we have a basic idea of what we can and can't afford in the current paycycle. But actual budgeting within the paycycle does itself by means of the simple "How much do I have left?" calculation.

Thus, while I don't share Ramsey's horror of credit cards themselves, cash budgeting is probably one of the tools that we will continue to use most consistently from here on out. It acts as a forcing mechanism in regards to budgeting. You no longer really have to put any thought or effort into staying in budget, so long as you don't spend more cash than you took out.