Final Lessons from the Food Stamp Challenge

Stopped in the supermarket today to pick up something for my husband Peter who is not on the Food Stamp Challenge.  Since I still had 50 cents of my $31.50 budget to spend, I gave in and walked through the fruit aisle.  Picked up the smallest apple I could find and weighed it.  Hmmmm.  At $1.29 a pound it would have come to about 50 cents but maybe a bit over. I put it back and looked for something cheaper. Sure enough there were beautiful pears on sale at 99 cents a pound.  Chose one. Turned out it was only 39 cents at checkout. Thank you ShopRite!

And it was delicious.  Arrived home and ate every speck of it except the seeds and the stem.

This Sunday night is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  At many synagogues, including ours, folks will take home an empty grocery bag and return it ten days later on Yom Kippur with food donations for the hungry.  A few days ago one of the teens asked me to think about how those who cannot afford to donate food must feel when they are handed that bag.  Are they ashamed that they cannot do the good deed for others that most around them seem to be able to afford? How does it feel to return the next week empty handed?  I explained that someone could just recycle the bag at home, and that people do not bring the bags back all at once so no one would notice if someone did not make a donation.  Still, it gave me pause. There is shame in not having the resources other have.

When we make the announcement at services inviting people to take a bag home, we will need to acknowledge that many among us cannot afford to participate so we need others to make an even greater effort this year if they are blessed with financial well-being. And we need to be sure our ushers ask if someone would like a bag - not assume that all will take them. 

After Yom Kippur we will also need to ask ourselves: what are we doing for the food-challenged sitting in our own pews? We Jews think of the hungry as the “other.”  We don’t imagine it in our own well-educated community. 

We are wrong. 

I don’t know the solution yet.  I do know that the greatest impact of taking the Food Stamp Challenge has not been the planning, eating or reading up on the facts about SNAP.  It has been the unplanned conversations that arise as people share their stories of volunteering and donating for the hungry, teaching their children about hunger, or quietly reveal their own situation of food scarcity.  Those stories are more real than the $31.50 worth of food I lived on for the last 7 days.

One challenge is ending, but the challenge we all face - to make sure no child or adult goes to bed hungry -  remains.

P.S. If you are in New Jersey, please consider signing up as an automatic monthly donor at the Community Food Bank of New Jersey. Just go to http://www.njfoodbank.org/how-to-help/donate-funds/community-harvesters   

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.




  

Day Three Food Stamp Challenge

Is a container of bread crumbs a baking ingredient, a starch like rice or noodles, or snack food?

 

This Sunday afternoon three adults and 7 children/teens from Temple Beth-El in Jersey City encountered that challenge when we sorted food at the Community Food Bank of New Jersey in Hillside for 2 hours, thanks to the efforts of our temple member Jessi who put the trip together.

  

Each year the Food Bank assists over 1500 partner agencies, distributing over 39 million pounds of food in 18 New Jersey counties, helping to feed 900,000 people. Since incorporating in 1982, they have distributed over 400 million pounds of food and groceries valued at nearly 1 billion dollars.

In the last two years they have seen a 40% increase in food needs.

Our small part was sorting some of the hundreds of mixed boxes of food that came from food drives.  We resorted into boxes by food type: coffee, other beverages, canned foods, canned proteins, baking foods, cereals, snacks, health and beauty, bottled water, pet foods, rice/pasta, baby foods, paper goods, pet foods and a few more.  It was family day, so there were lots of young children in the section where we were working.  That made it so much fun – teaching the little ones that a can of kidney beans was protein, not just a regular vegetable. 

On the way back we talked in the car about why our teens did this. One fifteen year old was very clear about her motivation: not to feel good or proud of herself, but because it was the right thing to do to live up to your obligations to society and humanity. 

So, day three of my Food Stamp Challenge included a renewed sense of urgency to give higher priority to our temple’s weekly collection of canned food.  I’m thinking of calling it “Beyond the High Holy Day Food Drive.” 

 

And I’m sure our teens will be volunteering at the Food Bank again this year.  

After all, now we know that bread crumbs go in the baking supplies box.

P.S.  For those curious about my week's food supply: today I reduced it (i.e. ate) bowl of cereal with milk, banana, yogurt, two slices of toast, some pasta, 3 turkey Italian sausages, some tomato sauce, and red leaf lettuce salad.  

First Two Days of Food Stamp Challenge

Day One and Two

Why does the homeless man who “lives” near our temple not have food stamps? It takes so long and the paperwork is so complicated that after five hours trying to file to get public assistance, he gave up. 

Bob (not his real name) explained this to me just before Shabbat as he sat in the shade near his bicycle. 

I finished Shabbat and the second day of the Food Stamp Challenge (living on $31.50 worth of food for a week) a little hungry and a little jealous of all the delicious cakes I missed at the Oneg Shabbat and the dessert after Selichot services.  Still, it’s nothing like what Bob goes through each day.  Or the members of our temple and community who have to live on $31.50 a person every week – not just this one week. 

Attached is a photo of the food I bought on Friday morning for the week. Checking price tags so closely adds a lot of time to grocery shopping.  In the end, it came to $30.96.    I wanted an avocado that was on sale but it was 75 cents.  My only fruit is bananas which were on sale at 39 cents a pound.  I counted the slices of bread when I unpacked – 18 in all.  That means 2 a day and an extra couple for a treat. 

As of Saturday night at the end of Shabbat I have managed to eat two bowls of cereal, a banana, a yogurt, a small piece of broccoli, a few slices of cooked chicken breast, tuna with some chopped onion, a grilled cheese sandwich, and scrambled eggs with mushrooms and onion.  Not too unhealthy for two days of food though I sure do miss throwing some raisins or dried cranberries in the cereal.

I’m sure it’s more than Bob eats in two days.

$31.50 a week.

That's what the average food stamp recipient in our country gets to use toward food each week.

I spend that much from time to time on one meal.  Even on one entree.

Many of us are taking up the challenge to live on this food stamp budget for one week: from Friday, September 7 through Thursday, September 13.  I've signed on.

Why? I want to be able to understand in an even more personal way the struggles of the 45.7 million who live on food stamps week in and week out.  I want to use my experience to motivate others to ask their members of Congress to support SNAP.

Each day during the week I'll be posting here to this blog and also on my Facebook page.

If you would like to support my effort, you can donate to the Jewish Food Stamp Challenge with monies going to advocacy and to organizations like MAZON.

MY FOOD STAMP CHALLENGE PAGE

I'll post more ways to be involved in the next few days.

For now, think about what you are eating today.  What did it cost? Could you have managed it on $4.50?

My pre-challenge meals today added up to about $6 or so.
Cheerios with milk and blueberries.
Two slices of wheat toast, half a cucumber, and delicious mozzarella cheese.
Hamburger. Romaine lettuce salad.  Wheat linguine and sauce.
1/2 a bowl of popcorn.  (and two small squares of chocolate!)

Let's see how I do tomorrow.

OFF KILTER

I’m often a little off kilter just after submitting all my pieces for the monthly temple newsletter.  Maybe it’s the sermon-writing feel of spending two or three hours on my rabbi’s column, knowing it will be another week or two until anyone reads it.  Or wondering as I review all the temple upcoming activities (and check that they are all submitted to the newsletter editor) if I have forgotten some obvious event.  More likely this off balance feeling stems from having too intensely engaged with all the programs and planning for the next month, leaving me with a sense of already having lived through it yet still stuck with the anxiety of hoping it will come out alright.  

Off kilter, yes. Relieved too. There’s deep satisfaction in planning out my time, filling the boxes on my iCal with different entries in grey (work), blue (home), and purple (worship).  Over the years I have also learned how critical it is to leave empty spaces for both last minute counseling or life crises of temple members, and also for thinking time.  You know what I mean – not the putting one’s thoughts in order kind of time, but integrating and imagining time that comes from some other part of the brain. 

It’s hard to schedule that in, but today being President’s Day, I am taking the second half of the day to just read, think, and let whatever arises arise.  For the first time in months I have read through all my favorite sections of the Sunday New York Times, and even some I usually skip.  Especially liked Richard Thaler’s piece on an out-of-the-box solution to gay marriage rights, Gay Marriage Debate Is About Money, Too and the trio of pieces by Dowd, Friedman and Kristof.  I was blown away when Kristof ended with his plan to sneak into Sudan to report on human rights violations in the Nuba Mountains.  With Purim just two weeks away, he’s a modern day Mordecai and Esther rolled up into one. 

Temple life can feel far removed from the angst of the world – the injustices and pains and genocides.  That’s both good and bad.  It’s good because I need the normal rhythms of joys and sorrows that come from meeting with a family to discuss a baby-naming, or counseling a friend whose mother is on her deathbed.  Even discussing how to manage the logistics and the personalities at an upcoming Second Night Seder is really about relationships and values when you come right down to it.  I just need to remind myself that after the newsletter articles are forwarded to the volunteer editor (Karen, you’re the best!), and the items are checked off on my calendar for the day, there’s suffering and injustice that are calling out to us from across town or across the world. 

So, I think I’ll just hold on to this off-kilter feeling a little longer.  It’s a more real place to live, a place that acknowledges that our sense of completion is only an illusion.   I guess it’s just a Rabbi Tarfon kind of day.

“You are not required to complete the work, neither are you free to desist from it.”

                                                                                    Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Avot 2:16