Wow, day one of the SNAP Challenge is in the books! It was a pretty good day. Even though I’m only one day in, the planning, shopping and first day have been incredibly eye-opening – I’m taking lots of notes of my thoughts along the way.

Beverages: Thank GOD my office has coffee or I would have really been in trouble. I think coffee would have costed far too much of us to “waste” money on a beverage, especially because I can’t drink Folgers and I’m assuming that is the cheapest out there. Anyone else know of anything cheaper, yet decent tasting?

milk + coffee at the office

Breakfast: We needed to make a decision together on breakfast and it needed to last the entire work week – greek yogurt was on sale for 10/$10 which was tempting but ultimately we decided on peanut butter sandwiches. We were able to find natural peanut butter for the same price as the hydrogenated oil-filled peanut butter, which was thrilling. The bread was not as exciting – obviously my usual sprouted bread was out, but “wheat” bread at the store has the same nutrition stats as white bread…in other words, it is essentially white bread with brown food coloring. Ugh.

2 Tbsp peanut butter + 2 slices wheat bread

Lunch: The classic frugal food – rice and beans! I needed a bit of vegetable, so I divided a bag of frozen spinach into 4 lunches, which is a lot less than I would normally use, but some vegetables are better than none! Lunch was absolutely delicious but not filling in the least. I was hungry 30 minutes after eating it. Volume-wise, it was a large meal, but my body does better on high protein and high fat meals, which were lacking here. Thankfully I had a very busy afternoon at work and didn’t have much time to think about it.

brown rice + frozen spinach + red beans + cajun gravy (yum) + tofu

Snacks: One theme that I noticed at the grocery store was always choosing the cheapest option. In my “normal” life, I’d scrutinize the ingredients, look for whole grains and place anything that contained a huge list of ingredients, hydrogenated oils and corn syrup back on the shelf. Not so much here, whether it was bread, crackers or peanut butter, I always went with the cheapest option. Even though saltines have essentially no nutritional value, they taste great.

1 oz cheddar cheese + saltine crackers

Dinner: Is it horrible that we were both really excited for Ramen Noodles? Of course, plain ramen won’t do, we definitely needed to add some vegetables and protein, but this was a really fun dinner and I think Richie might be able to talk me into adding it into the dinner rotation once in a while. They are 4/$1 by the way…

ramen plus: ramen noodles + sauteed broccoli + 2 fried eggs

Snacks included many more saltine crackers after dinner…I was hungry but we didn’t really have anything else to snack on.

Nutrition Stats: about 1,900 calories, 75 grams of fat, 235 grams of carbohydrates, 26 grams of fiber, 20 grams of sugar, and 75 grams of protein. I’m looking forward to seeing tomorrows stats and hoping they will be a bit higher in protein and fat – it is what my body does best on! Carbohydrates leave me constantly hungry… 

This week brings something a bit different around here…

(source)

For the next 7 days, I’ll be spending no more than $31.50 for all of my food and beverages, which as you can imagine, is a lot less than I normally spend on groceries. And it has absolutely no room for eating out, which makes me incredibly nervous as I LOVE to eat out. Thankfully Richie is taking on the challenge along with me which means we get more money to spend for the week and he won’t be tempting me with expensive foods like cheese!

Why a SNAP Challenge? My new job, (which I still haven’t filled you in on, sorry!) is at a non-profit anti-hunger organization so we are all taking part of this SNAP challenge. Obviously one-week is just a tiny glimpse into actually living on this sort of food budget, but I think it will be eye-opening to say the least. I know I have already learned a lot.

Details:

• $31.50 for all food and drink (the average SNAP benefit) for the week (comes out to $1.50/meal)
• Monday July 9th – Sunday July 15th
• I’ll be eating only foods that I purchased for the challenge, but condiments already in the kitchen are ok to use
• Want to join in? Use the hash tag #SNAP4aWeek and tweet pictures of your meals to @StopHunger – we would love to have you join us! Full guidelines are here.

The next few days I’ll be sharing daily eats on my food stamp budget and I’ll be sure to share all of my thoughts at the end of the challenge.