ENVS 607: Food Challenge (Fall 2015) – graduate student food challenge experiences

Eating Local on Snap: The intersection of Access, Labor, and Leisure (Conclusion)

November 23, 2015 / mwillett@uoregon.edu / 0 Comments

Part of this challenge has been to document accessibility of local, organic, and fair trade foods. This combined both the regular, and often assigned, SNAP challenge with an eating local challenge and looked at both through a social justice lens. In thinking about what accessibility means to low income people, I kept coming back to the concept of time as an unequally distributed resource. Therefore, a big portion of my posts were not about food at all. However, I am hopeful that by the end of it, the connections became clear. In this challenge I reflected on the interconnected degradation rituals connected to SNAP and other assistance programs. I offered a picture of how much time they consume in my own life and how are they ultimately related to food accessibility. It is important to state that I am aware that my personal experience is not representative of a generalized experience. Furthermore, my social position as a white woman in higher education affords me many privileges not equally accessible to women of color. My personal struggles in poverty are privileged ones indeed.

Beyond the monetary obstacles, I would argue that there are temporal barriers that while often not addressed in a typical snap challenge, cannot be separated from the socio-economic factors that constrain our daily food choices. This is not to say that all snap challenges ignore time completely, as many students might document how long a bus ride to the store took, or even how long it took them to soak the beans they purchased. However, the general theme of responses I have seen tend towards documenting either hunger or boredom with the food options, which is a best an abstraction of the lived reality those of us on SNAP deal with on a day to day basis. Alternately, there is an almost fetishization of the snap budget that occurs, with celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow documenting how healthy she was able to eat on her “snap dollars,” or with regular students trying it out for a week and then going back to their lives without the constrains of a mythical snap budget.

Common to the above types of responses, is the lack of attention to the hidden complexities of living on a snap budget and just how much time this actually consumes. While pedagogical tools such as the snap challenge are useful to increase privileged groups’ awareness of food insecurity, they are ultimately problematic in that they abstract food from the daily life of marginalized groups. In order to speak to this absence, I offered a narrative of the interlocking issues that come with the SNAP budget. Something that could be added to the exercise would by an imposed “time gap” simulation. Where students spend the first portion of their term tracking their time. Then once the snap challenge begins have the students spend twice as much time studying and working, while they then have half the time to get anything else done in their personal lives. If they have an hour for personal errands, cut it to a half hour. If they have three hours to hang out with friends, have them cut that in half and have them notice how something as simple as seeing a movie is out of the question. Maybe with these additional parameters, the SNAP challenge would come closer to offering a more realistic experience.

The issue of labor was another central part of this blog exercise. Really all I can say is that I wouldn’t know how to find the time to source my food ethically. So much of my diet is tied to unfair labor. I make my choices from the options available to me. I am pretty certain that I will spend more time as I find it trying to source my main food options more ethically, but currently that is not an option in my life. Voting with my snap dollars is not a privilege I can afford. High end consumers, though, and the restaurants that cater to them, could feasibly vote with their real dollars in a way that goes beyond making themselves feel better and actually works towards a tangible food justice goal. I will close that by saying I know little about the Grits politics. Maybe they do work in the food justice realm that is not apparent on their website, even so, maybe they could consider doing a sliding scale SNAP night, where those of us on SNAP can reserve a table and have a night out where we are treated like people who also happen to enjoy good food.

Eating Local on Snap: The intersection of access, labor, and leisure (update 3)

November 23, 2015 / mwillett@uoregon.edu / 0 Comments

By my third update I have stopped tracking the time I was spending on food and in looking back on the food we ate, most of what I cooked this week was from my fridge or my Winco trip with the local red barn groceries finding their way into my menu as snacks, ingredients, or in the case of the squash as I will detail below, failures! I never did make the winter vegetable slaw, but if you want to try it, it is truly amazing. I find that beets, carrots, and purple cabbage all keep really well in the fridge. Apples too.

Recipe: Grate one apple down to the core, along with a few carrots, and a red beet. Grate or finely chop some purple cabbage. Mix it with a small amount of pomegranate molasses, lemon olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (I have great friends who gift me with these types of things for birthdays and such). Eat and eat and eat and eat! So good! You can get creative and add chopped oranges too.

I didn’t get a chance to look at the Grit’s menus too closely, but what I did notice was that one dinner with a wine pairing is 55.00 per person. If I went there I would need to have both time and childcare and then I would need to be prepared to spend the equivalent to almost 2 weeks of my foodstamp budget. While they might source their food locally, their wine list included wines from France. Furthermore, any establishment that carries that much wine is automatically implicated in labor issues as wineries locally and abroad are highly labor intensive and often make use of migrant labor. The website did not have the farms they source from, but I bet that Willamette Valley Food and Farm coalition would have that information in their brochure. I think the access and labor issues embedded in high end restaurants like this deserve way more critical analysis than I am able to do with this blog. Still, I think the local food movement that births restaurants such as this allows for upper class consumers to feel like they are making a conscientious difference by eating locally, while allowing them to ignore labor and accessibility issues embedded in their food. I don’t see anything progressive about this restaurant. The irony is it still has the Shamrock diner advertisement painted on the building, showing that at one time, one could get a meal there for 25 cents. Right now it is just another business that is adding to the quarterly rent increases I experience. When I think about the Grit, I cannot help but wonder how long before I am priced out of the neighborhood I have lived in off and on my whole life.

So now that I have given you the recipe for a salad I intended to eat and talked a little bit about food I could never afford to eat, let me tell you a bit about what I did eat. (note, I the pictures all looked better while I was editing this post, for some reason they show up all wonky on the published version).

Don’t let the squash fool you, it is still cold on the inside.

The first night I brought out some lamb that I had in the freezer. I had already prepped it with spices, finely chopped onion, dried cranberries, and parsley. I wanted to try a recipe for a lamb stew. It was really quick. I browned the lamb, added grated carrots, some sumac, cinnamon, and a bit of lemon juice, a can of chick peas, and some chicken broth. I topped it with fresh spinach and chopped almonds. Garnished it with yogurt. It was pretty good, though not something I will make again. I had a lot left over which leads me to my squash disaster.

So on Thursday night, I needed to use the squash, as I mentioned in my previous post, it was going bad. So I remembered that I had left over stew from the other day and I stuffed it all in the squash and put it in the oven. However, I couldn’t get it started until late, so it wasn’t done when we needed to eat. So I turned off the oven and we went to Café Yumm. I ended up spending 15 bucks, which as I learned previously is roughly equivalent to 2 days of snap budget. Then Friday, I took the squash with me to my dad’s house and tried to cook it the rest of the way. It was okay. Not great. I left the leftovers with my dad. I don’t care for left over lamb.

Breakfasts this week remained pretty normal. The weekdays were some variation of the recipes below.

Oh, eating breakfast amongst the groceries that still need to be put away.

No sugar Oatmeal and sausage: Bring water, cinnamon, and raisins to boil, add a bit of muesli and old fashioned oats. Turn off stove, mix in a bit of vanilla at that point and let sit while the sausage finishes cooking. Top with plain yogurt.

Egg and Gouda English muffins: Toast English muffins with Gouda on them, put on a little mayo, salt and pepper, add scrambled egg and eat with a side of sautéed zucchini. So good!

Sausage and English muffins with cream cheese and jelly with apple slices on the side.

Saturday morning was way better. I got to use the challah bread for French toast. I needed to use the left over sausage from this week’s breakfasts, and I had bacon in the fridge as well. So we had French toast, made with cinnamon nutmeg, clove, and vanilla in the egg batter. We topped it with frozen blueberries and the last banana from our Winco trip, topped with a tiny bit of maple syrup and plain yogurt. Today, I didn’t feel like cooking so Liam had cereal, from Food for Lane county and I had coffee and toast.

The cheddar cheese went over well, and was gone after two afterschool snacks, and a packed school snacks. All in all I think it made three sandwiches, and two packed school snacks.

I found the back of the Late July crackers to be an amusing read at the breakfast table. Despite such a big box, those lasted for about 2 snacks, one the night he got them, then one after school.

Snacks this week were also pretty normal, other than the ingredients were of higher quality than usual and therefore, it was a bit more frustrating when Liam wasted them. I also gave him the possibly local bell pepper. He didn’t like it. It tasted funny apparently and wasted a bunch of it at school. I packed him leftover oatmeal from breakfasts. Sliced carrots, and golden delicious apples. I have to cut most everything so he can eat things with his braces.

Lunches happened for Liam at school mostly and more often than not I ended up skipping. Though I did have a meeting over lunch and there was food there this week, so I ate that. I did end up eating a banana for snack, but as per usual, I was mostly way hungry come dinner time. Today as we prepped the apples and pears my dad gave us from food for lane county for sauce, I stuffed a few pears with feta, chopped almonds, cranberries, and dried figs and baked them. Liam stuffed his with cream cheese and cranberries. This was pretty darn tasty!

Dinners, other than the traumatizing squash were pretty tasty. There was the stew mentioned, then Wednesday after a very long day there was chicken meat balls and potatoes that a friend made us. It was glorious to be able to just pop that in the oven. It amazes me even with that, I still ended up spending a lot of time in the kitchen this week. I cannot recall the specifics of the other meals. I am using the tomatillos tonight in guacamole and as a salsa on top of the enchiladas I pulled from the freezer. I actually have to end this post now, as I need to go cook dinner. My conclusion will follow shortly.

SNAP for Singles- Concluding Thoughts

November 23, 2015 / Erin Crnkovich / 0 Comments

I am a few days out from the SNAP Challenge now, which has given me a bit more time to consider my experience of it. Since I told myself from the offset that I would try to do better than Gwyneth Paltrow, I thought it would be useful to go back and read her blog on the Challenge (http://goop.com/my-29-food-stamp-challenge-and-the-recipes-brouhaha-that-ensued/). To be perfectly honest, I don’t think she entirely deserves all of the flak that has come her way from this. But perhaps I’m just more sympathetic to it because of my own failings at the Challenge.

For me, more so than anything else, this challenge has been an exercise in guilt. Guilt for spending so much money on food in my daily life. Guilt for being able to do so because of my lack of responsibilities beyond schoolwork and paying rent. Guilt for cheating at my rules and not being able to say no to the foods that I wanted. Guilt for wasting the food that was already in my fridge because I tried not to eat it during the Challenge (and yet for some reason ended up buying new food on those days I cheated?). Guilt for not being fully invested in this project due to being sick and overloaded with work (and, if I’m being perfectly honest, because I was doing it more for the sake of my grade than any other concern*). Guilt because all of my reflections on the Challenge focus on my own experience of it, rather than the lived experiences of people participating in the SNAP program. Guilt, guilt, guilt.

And I don’t know what good all this guilt is doing anyone. It’s certainly not directly helping anyone who is experiencing hunger and food insecurity (and, of course, I’m feeling guilty about that because I could be donating to a food pantry or volunteering my time somewhere doing something besides just feeling guilty-at least Gwyneth donated to the Foodbank for New York City).

I’m back to my original thought about whether it would work better simply as a thought experiment. Because planning out my rules and how I would go about them, setting my grocery list, examining prices and comparing them to my budget, was the most useful and edifying part of the Challenge anyway, for me at least.

The Challenge did successfully force me to confront my relationship with food and the ways I use it for comfort, sociability, even occasionally just to pass the time. It also made me think about the relative benefits of being in a partnership that would allow me to share food expenses, as I might then have been able to afford enough food to vary my menu slightly throughout the week**

Although I believe I have a (fairly) healthy relationship to food, the issues I brought up in earlier posts regarding those darn Swedish fish also made me think about the dangers of pushing this challenge on someone with less healthy relations to food and what form their potential guilt might take.

I wish I had something more uplifting or simply more worthwhile to add to the dialogue here and to conclude with, but I’m mostly just happy to have the Challenge be over with- for which, of course, I feel one more layer of guilt.

*Guilt for not adding photos to any of my blog posts.

**Small consolation that this didn’t cause me guilt. It did, however, cause me to experience some other equally unpleasant feelings…

USDA Food Challenge, part 5: Conclusion

November 22, 2015 / Jared Pruch / 0 Comments

Overall, I think this challenge yielded some beneficial insights. I didn’t do nearly as well as following my rules as I had planned, but the planning itself was an edifying exercise. Things I noticed in particular:

Lots of the food items I bought on a SNAP budget looked pretty much like a typical grocery shopping trip: bananas, dried beans, eggs, milk, bread. The biggest difference here was brand/certification, and volume- the bread I bought for $1.39 per loaf was not typical for me, nor the eggs (I usually get local eggs from a friend). I definitely noticed the experience of bringing home a single, rather light bag of groceries (what I could afford on my $22 limit) compared to my usual experience shopping with my wife.
The food group I found hardest to afford on the SNAP budget was vegetables. The Food Plate is heavy on grains, dairy and meat, and by the time I bought these staples I had little $$ left for veggies. Overall, I was struck by how close to the Food Plate guidelines you could get by eating bread, cheese, milk, potatoes, and eggs. Lobbying influence?
If I were to do this challenge again, I think I would try NOT shopping for a week, and just eating the food that we have in our house! My wife asked me: “Why did you buy all this stuff? We already have tons of leftovers and frozen food!” We are generally pretty good about not letting food go to waste, but I think living off the fridge/pantry/freezer for a week would have been an interesting ‘natural disaster/middle class food waste’ spin on the challenge.
I can’t imagine that anyone voluntarily builds their diet around the USDA Food Plate. The portion sizes are confusing (different grains count for different ounce allocations, etc.), and the website is a rabbit hole (although they do include numerous testimonials from people who have lost weight from eating on the Food Plate Diet).

As others have said, I don’t think this week gave me real insight into what it would look like to live on SNAP benefits- limitations of time, forgetfulness, and simple laziness led to me breaking my rules fairly consistently. I admire others in the class who have been more successful! It has been valuable to read others’ posts and get some insight into the varied backgrounds of our class members.

SNAP for Students: Final Reflection

November 22, 2015 / Kassandra Hishida / 0 Comments

When I began this challenge, I set out to better understand the resources available to students grappling with issues of food insecurity as it relates to time management, academic success, and overall well-being. As I tried to live on a budget comparable to that of an individual receiving SNAP benefits, I made an effort to make note of the time spent on the purchasing, preparation, and consumption of my food for the week. So far, I have learned about a dietitian on staff in the University Health Center and a local food pantry serving our student population here at the University of Oregon. I did not find any SNAP-related recipes (besides these few posted by the UO Student Food Pantry) or educational pieces specifically created for students. At first I was surprised by this. I’ve heard and read a lot about students increasingly struggling with food insecurity and I had expected to find more resources available to students trying to eat healthy on a small budget. After researching the eligibility requirements for SNAP, it made sense that I had not found student-specific resources published by the USDA or Food and Nutrition Services. According to the FNS website, most college students are NOT eligible for SNAP benefits (see image below for more details). I had no idea how strict the rules were for students, and had actually suspected that I would be eligible for the benefits as a graduate student and Graduate Teaching Fellow (GTF). However, with my current position I am only allowed to work 16 hours a week so I am four hours short of SNAP’s requirement that eligible students work at least 20 hours a week. I do not meet any of the other exceptions listed for able-bodied students ages 18 through 49 and so I am definitely not eligible to apply for SNAP benefits.

Although I now understand the lack of SNAP resources for students, I am still concerned at the lack of resources readily available to those trying to further their education. I hope to pursue a career that will allow me to engage and empower students through meaningful educational experiences. However, I question how we can expect our students to succeed if they are unable to meet their most fundamental needs as they struggle to pay rent, pay tuition, and to find the time and money necessary to eat well and eat enough. As a student myself, I know I would greatly benefit from such resources, and I imagine that many of my peers would as well.

In search of more answers regarding federal hunger programs, I had hoped to incorporate these issues into an assignment in a Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM) class I am taking this term. For my final research paper, I had wanted to do analyze SNAP policy literature and see if any research has been done regarding a need for the expansion of SNAP eligibility to include more of the student population. However, when discussing my proposed topic with my professor, she wondered why I would want to focus on a population that is only temporarily impoverished. She shared that she felt that students were typically supported by their parents and that, although they may have to eat more Top Ramen than they’d like to during their time in college, that they’d eventually earn degrees allowing them to move out of poverty and into financial stability. Although I recognize where she is coming from, I also feel that this perspective does not account for the broad spectrum of students participating in higher education and the varied values of degrees upon graduating and moving out into the “real world.” I don’t feel that we should be so quick dismiss students’ needs, and that to doing so leads to the normalization of food insecurity on college campuses. This is something that Dana Johnson, the current Oregon State University Extension Nutrition Education Coordinator, focused on in her thesis, “In college and food insecure: An invisible population.” (Her thesis is available on academia.edu.) I recently had the opportunity to meet with her to discuss her work and brainstorm ideas for this project. I specifically wanted to create a challenge that brought to light the issues discussed throughout her thesis, especially since I had decided not to pursue my proposed research topic for my PPPM class. (My research was a dead end due to a limited literature exploring these policy issues as they relate to college students.) Although I was unable to do all that I had hoped to accomplish through this challenge, we had an excellent conversation about the ways in which students are almost expected to go hungry and what her experiences establishing a food pantry at Oregon State have helped her to understand about food insecurity among college students.

As I mentioned in my first post, I had hoped to avoid engaging in the challenge in a way that belittles or undermine the reality of those who rely heavily on SNAP benefits and other federal resources to feed themselves and their families. I don’t want to say “it wasn’t that bad” or “this way easy”, although the truth is that it wasn’t so bad and that it wasn’t so hard BECAUSE I knew that this was only for a week and that I could always break the rules whenever I wanted or needed to. (Which I did, not even 48-hours into the challenge!) Although I have mentioned that the food that I ate wasn’t so different from any other week, the experience was. I had to spend much more time thinking about what I would eat, how I was going to get it, when I was going to eat it, and whether or not I would be able to afford it. I also am not usually so emotionally affected by my food. Throughout this week I grappled with guilt, stress, anxiety, and frustration as I navigated this experience and questioned what it meant every time I followed or broke the rules. While I have done my best to not participate in the casual “poverty tourism” that many SNAP Challenge participants fall into, I know that my brief 5-day experience has not even begun to touch upon the many issues facing those that are hungry. I worry that my participation in this challenge became more about feeding myself than about understanding the complexities of food insecurity.

Overall, I found the most valuable pieces of this challenge to be the discussions with my peers participating in variations of the same project, the research I conducted on resources available to students, and the space for reflection provided in these blog posts. The financial restrictions of the assignment were challenging. However, besides eating out significantly less than usual, in the end my diet was not so different from what I might have time to throw together in a typical week. I am left asking myself what I have gained from this challenge. More than anything, it has inspired me to continue to investigate the resources available to students (here at UO and in general) and to question the ways in which I am currently planning (or not planning) my own meals.

SNAP Challenge for Singles- Day 5

November 20, 2015 / Erin Crnkovich / 0 Comments

Well, I am nearing the end of the SNAP Challenge, and I am back to wondering whether there’s really any added benefit of actually going through the challenge, rather than just considering what it might be like. Part of me thinks this might be due to a lack of proper dedication on my part- I have cheated easily and frequently on the challenge, due mostly to the simple fact that it was within my means to do so. But, more importantly, I don’t believe the SNAP Challenge gives anywhere near an adequate picture of what it is like to live on SNAP, with its attendant time commitment and opportunities for emotional degradation (which were beautifully expressed in another student’s posts).

Because I do not have the financial need to stick within my proposed budget, staying within it has become less a matter of solidarity or experiencing what others may experience (which, as stated above, is an inaccurate premise anyway) and more a matter of deprivation for the sake of my goal, ie. fulfilling the Challenge.

In this sense, participating in this challenge has felt more like being on a diet than anything else, with the same feelings of guilt and shame for “cheating”. As I sat there eating my Swedish fish on Day 3, seemingly unable to stop myself, I was reminded of being in high school and feeling similar shame for not being able to say no to a donut that was offered to me in Algebra class.* This is not what this challenge is supposed to be about, but all I can think about is my inability to deprive myself in the service of a broader goal.

A part of me wonders if my experience of the Challenge would be different had I come to it on my own, rather than doing it for the sake of a college course. This in itself is also a bit of a false presence, because I would never have taken part in this challenge in the first place (due mostly to the emotional ties to food to which I alluded in a previous post**). I do think, however, that I would have come out on the other side of it feeling completely differently, patting myself on the back for accomplishing my goal (or, more likely, berating myself for not meeting it) rather than realizing that the goal itself is ultimately futile.

*It’s crazy that the shame I felt was so strong, I still remember the class that it occurred in.

**Again, privilege at work, I want so badly to say, “The hanger is real,” but it feels like an insult to people who do experience food insecurity and hunger on a daily basis.

SNAP Challenge for Singles- Day 3 and 4

November 20, 2015 / Erin Crnkovich / 0 Comments

Well, I’m afraid I’ve flouted my rules entirely. I forgot to mention that on Day 1, I also finished off a slice of chocolate cake I had had in my fridge. This did not technically break my rules (again, breaking rule #3 via rule #5), but more important than the fact that I did it is the reason why I did it. I was very stressed out at the beginning of this week from the combination of homework, illness, and grading midterms, and I ate the chocolate cake purely out of a need for comfort.

The need for comfort is exactly what led to me breaking my rules more fully on Day 3. Wednesday marked eight full days of illness, and the third day of eating fairly tasty but ultimately unsatisfying chicken soup and crackers. I just needed something to make me feel better.

So I bought myself some tomatoes, salad dressing, canned corn, and mozzarella cheese* and made a variation on caprese salad. I also bought a bag of Swedish fish, which I ate in its entirety throughout the course of the evening. It was AMAZING. I honestly think the extra sugar helped me get over the hump and into recovery.

It also really highlighted the emotional aspects of food consumption, how it can offer comfort and emotional support, as well as being a very utilitarian way to treat yourself. Then there are also the obvious and myriad ways that food can affect your health and wellbeing, particularly when you are already ill.

I did even worse on Day 4, accepting at varying points in the day a latte, pizza, and a beer from friends. It almost didn’t occur to me to try to say no to these things for the sake of the challenge because of the very real way in which they were all tied to important social interactions and relationship building that I couldn’t bear to miss out on. Of course, these interactions were facilitated by my position as a grad student (free pizza abounds on campus) and the financial situation of the friends who offered to buy my drinks (who did so for reasons completely irrespective of the challenge). Food is such an integral part of social exchange, I can imagine how starkly it would change my experiences to not be able to partake of these opportunities.

*In this, as in so many other points in my life, fancy cheese has proven to be my downfall.

SNAP Challenge for Singles- Day 1 and 2

November 20, 2015 / Erin Crnkovich / 0 Comments

Being sick, I figured the best course of action would be to make myself a giant pot of chicken soup and live from that for a week. My ingredients included chicken broth (two for one with your Safeway card), 2 russet potatoes (of which I only used one so far), an onion, and fresh garlic. For breakfast/snacks I also bought a large container of yogurt, saltine crackers, and peanut butter.

Even during the shopping process, I found myself making compromises with my rules in order to satisfy the requirements of both my budget and my recipe. I already had a 1-pound bag of baby carrots at home that I had bought beforehand for $2* and I had half a container’s worth of chicken breasts sitting in the freezer that I estimated to cost $7 (as I had bought the original package for around $12). I marked it up slightly as penance for cheating on a technicality, but buying a completely new package of chicken would have put me over budget.

In some ways, I almost wonder whether this challenge would work equally well (or poorly, given how mine has been going so far) to do it as more of a thought experiment than as an actual experiment, because it is simply too easy to cheat and justify it to yourself.

I had already broken rule #3 by day one (but via rule #5, so I told myself it was okay)**. I realized too late that I had not bought any fruits for the week, so I ate an apple and later added some frozen berries to my yogurt. It’s sort of that conundrum, do you follow the exact wording of the rule, or do you follow the intent of the rule, because each option my lead you down a different road. It also highlights the fact that this challenge is a matter of choice and not necessity, and as such, how impactful can it truly be?

*I factored this cost into my budget, and while I am kicking myself now for not buying the 2-pound bag of regular carrots for the same price, I can’t help but also think “what single person is going to be eating that many carrots?!”

** Rule #5 was that, if I did cheat on my budget, it would be by eating food that was already in my kitchen before the start of the challenge (and Rule #3 was simply to stay within my $22 budget).

SNAP for Students: Week at a Glance

November 20, 2015 / Kassandra Hishida / 0 Comments

Below is an overview of what I ate throughout the week. When first discussing this assignment we had talked about sharing recipes used to prepare meals on a SNAP-like budget. I don’t have much to share in this regard because my meal preparation was a matter of pouring milk over cereal or spreading peanut butter and jelly on a piece of bread.

When planning this challenge, I had considered trying recipes specifically designed for low-income individuals relying on SNAP benefits. My lack of planning on my part prevented me from fully engaging these types of resources, but I was curious to look at an example we came across during class several weeks ago, Leanne Brown’s Good and Cheap, winner of the the 2015 International Association of Culinary Professionals judge’s choice award. The culmination of Brown’s work as a master’s student in the Food Studies program at New York University, Brown has provided a free pdf of the first edition of her cookbook as a resource for anyone trying to eat ‘well’ on a tight budget.(Click here for a free pdf!) Although Brown’s intentions are noble, there were several aspects of the book that I did not care for. For one thing, I felt that some of her recommendations were reminiscent of the likes of Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan. Some of these tips seem fundamentally out of touch with the audience she is hoping to help out. (See quotes below) Of course, it is not completely fair for me to take these quotes out of context. She does acknowledge what her book is and is not. She admits that there are particular aspects of SNAP participants’ lives not accounted for in these recipes, such as lack of kitchen equipment or inability to afford particular items. For the most part she is aware of these shortcomings and discusses them openly. I even found some of her tips helpful and wished that I had looked at this resource prior to beginning prior to this challenge. That being said, I do wish she had talked more about the time involved in some of the lifestyle and cooking tips provided in this book. Although she attempted to provide affordable recipes, I don’t know that she has fully accounted for the time required to procure and prepare some of the items she suggests to her readers. As I mentioned before, the book is available as a free resource online, although there is a longer, “better” version available for sale on her website. I’ve conducted a brief search for similar by student-specific SNAP recipes, but have not found much. This may be in part due to the limited eligibility of students, which I will discuss in my concluding post.

“Eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures.”

“Try to buy fresh loaves of interesting bread from an independent bakery or the bakery in your grocery store.”

“Buy expensive eggs if you can. More expensive eggs are usually worth the money—they taste so much better than cheap eggs.”

“A few recipes call for fancy kitchen equipment, but in my work with low-income families in New York, I’ve found that items like blenders, food processors, and electric mixers are fairly common.”

-Leanne Brown

Good Eats, pages 5 – 13

Lastly, I wanted to reflect on what I was eating as well as the way I spend my time during the school week, so I incorporated the time spent prepping and eating food as part of this challenge into my regular schedule for the past 5 days. As I mentioned in the last post, I specifically chose foods that require a very minimal amount of my time. In a typical week, I often dedicate even less time to food prep. Instead of packing a lunch with what I have in the pantry, I just wait to eat until I am on my way home from campus. However, when I do this I am much more likely to try to buy something to-go from a restaurant or from the coffee shop I am camped out at because I don’t feel like I can productive at home. Of course, this is not particularly financially feasible in general and was simply out of the question for this week. However, I have always relied on coffee shops as my place of productivity and this was apparent to me this week more than ever. With several deadlines this week, I opted to bring food into the library with me instead. I was very grateful that the library did not have any rules against food, otherwise I am not sure exactly how I would have gotten all my work done this week.

Snap Challenge Day 5 and Conclusion

November 20, 2015 / Meagan Clark / 0 Comments

Hi everyone,

This is day 5 of the SNAP Challenge and for dinner tonight we are having chicken fried rice (picture below). Ingredients: Onion, Egg, Rice (already had), Carrot, Sesame Seed Oil and Soy Sauce (already had). Picture is posted below. Here are my overall thoughts on the SNAP food challenge: We already eat like this so it really wasn’t much of a stretch. I actually really wish we qualified for SNAP, but we make 200% of the poverty level and I believe the cutoff is 185%. As I mentioned before, I wish that we had incorporated more veggies and fruits into this weeks SNAP challenge. Breakfast consisted primarily of eggs or cereal, while lunches were soups/ramen cups (mainly for my husband when he goes to work). I stuck to leftovers for lunches. Throughout the challenge, we have ended up with quite a few freezer leftovers of lasagna and split pea. So, even though our budget went a little over the max and we used some stuff we already had- we ended up with so many leftovers for several days to come. While I am sure that most college students are already living on a tight budget, I do think that this challenge was useful. It really makes you think about the food choices you make and how to incorporate meal planning into your daily routine. Even when both of us work, we just throw something together in the crockpot or even prepare the meal ahead of time.