Eat Your Broccoli. Or Maybe Not.

With only two days to go in the Food Stamp Challenge, it's looking a lot like there will be leftovers. Not for today or tomorrow's meals, but some leftovers after the week of living on $31.50, the average food stamp allotment.

This morning - Wednesday - I still had 3 eggs, can of tuna, 1/3 head of lettuce, 1/2 block of cheddar, 2 8-oz servings of cooked chicken, 1 lovely purple eggplant, 1/2 an onion, can of lentil soup, 6 pieces of wheat bread, leftover broccoli (more on that to come....), 1/4 box of cereal, about 5 oz. of uncooked pasta, almost a full jar of pasta sauce and enough milk for two more breakfasts.



So for my late lunch - after a long and meaningful morning welcoming new converts into Judaism at the mikvah/ritual bath - I returned home to cook up the eggplant, some of the onion, tomato sauce, 1/2 the pasta and grated cheese over the top. Yummy.  Had two bowls of it.

Dinnertime now with some lentil soup with a few small pieces of the cooked chicken mixed in, and two slices of toast.

I was tempted to add the leftover broccoli.  Then I remembered what it tasted like.  When I bought it on sale it looked a little "old." Sure enough two days ago I had to cut out brown spots and gave up and left a few in.  Bitter but ate it anyway. Once was enough even though I saved it just in case I ran low on food.

Found myself changing other little habits.  Usually I clean my mushrooms and cut off the bottom stems. This time, hesitated and only took off a sliver.  Another meal had a few cooked noodles left over and might have tossed them instead of adding them to the next meal.  Put them away in the fridge.

Honestly, I have it too good. Last night at the Temple Board meeting a dad was talking about how it would be impossible to feed his two teenage boys on $31.50 each per week. Their appetites are voracious.  Another parent joked that it's more expensive to feed teenage boys than to buy clothes for girls.  I only had to feed one healthy adult female without a sweet tooth. (Well, I still miss dried cranberries.)

It's also one thing to cut back on fresh fruits and veggies for only a week; to keep up a balanced diet with enough calcium and vitamins over several months would probably be impossible on this budget.  On top of that, I never ate out. This meant planning ahead and sometimes eating at odd times if I was stuck at work longer without food. (I took to carrying a small bag of cereal in my purse.)

What if I was a busy parent with little time to prep a meal? How could I ask little children to go hungry a few hours until we got back home to make a meal? Might I offer a cheap bag of chips rather than offer an apple that might only get half-eaten? I also have new respect for school breakfast and lunch programs (and the schools that serve after-school healthy snacks or suppers).

If you have not already gone online to do some learning around this issue, check out this great website http://www.snaptohealth.org/farm-bill-usda/   The site is aimed at creating ways for the government to increase the impact of food stamps along with educating about nutrition and health. You can read how SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)  - the newer name for Food Stamps - comes up for renewal as part of the Farm Bill every five years.  2012 is one of those years.

Of course it's not so simple to renew the bill since U.S. lawmakers cannot agree on how much to cut support to farmers or food stamps for the poor. Watch for this to heat up in October and November.