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.

Late in the week, the most *challenging* element of my challenge became abundantly clear: it was time. I thought that frontloading the effort of mapping out meals per day according to the Food Plate, and having those ingredients on hand, would (mostly) ensure I could stick to the meal plan.

But, to be honest, I simply haven’t had time to think about the component portions of meals in the detailed way that strictly following the Food Plate would have entailed. I work part-time, and between grad school, work, and responsibilities at home, remembering to use the Food Plate just became less of a priority (and I don’t even have kids yet…).

Having said that, I did eat a few lunches and dinners from my spreadsheet. Wednesday, I had pinto beans and pork sausage with a cabbage slaw for dinner. Thursday for lunch I had a huevos rancheros kind of meal. I’ll save final reflections for my last post, but suffice it to say that I have not managed to abide very strictly to the specific rules of my challenge…

As it turns out, my USDA Food Challenge breakfast doesn’t look too different from what I usually eat. Here’s what I ate:

• Protein: 2 eggs + 2 T peanut butter on toast= 4 servings out of 6 recommended one-ounce servings for the day
• Dairy: 1 cup of milk= 1 serving out of 3 recommended one-cup servings for the day
• Grains: 2 slices of whole wheat toast= 2 servings out of 7 recommended one-ounce servings for the day
• Fruit: 1 banana= 1 serving out of 2 recommended one-cup servings for the day

Breakfast was heavy on the cheaper ingredients. I anticipate that lunches and dinners will be more challenging to abide by the Plate on a SNAP budget.

Here’s what I have ‘left’ to eat for the day, in terms of my Food Plate recommendations:

• Protein: 2 more one-ounce servings (meat with dinner)
• Dairy: 2 more one-cup servings (cheese sandwich for lunch, milk with dinner)
• Grains: 5 more one-ounce servings (bread with lunch and dinner)
• Fruit: 1 more one-cup serving (banana for afternoon snack)
• Vegetables: 3 more one-cup servings (beans and cabbage with dinner)

Even though I initially thought my groceries would be enough food to get me through the week, I’m realizing that I’ll probably run out of some items that make up my sole representative of that food group (for example, bread is the only grain item I bought, and I don’t have enough to eat 7 slices of bread each day…).

Sunday evening I picked up my food for the week. It was definitely the most scrutiny I’ve ever applied to a trip to the grocery store- lots of double checking my list, budget per item, and going back and forth in the store in an effort to save $0.50 here and a dollar there.

A couple of things I noticed:

• I was not able to purchase everything on my list- my estimates were generally $0.30-0.50 on the low end, which in the end meant I simply couldn’t afford some of the items I wanted (raisins and celery). If Haggen had a bulk section I could have purchased a small bag of raisins, but the prepackaged portions didn’t fit in to my budget. This probably means I’ll be a little short on my USDA-recommended portions of fruits and vegetables.
• In general I bought the cheapest brands for food items (bread, cheese, beans, milk), but I did splurge a bit on eggs (I spent $0.50 more to get brown eggs). The item that was hardest for me to buy in terms of my personal values was the Jimmy Dean pork sausage. I wanted some kind of meat for the week but couldn’t afford to buy according to my values.
• I was struck by how beige/brown/white my food items are! Milk, bread, cheese, dried beans, eggs, bananas. The only color I managed to fit in was a purple cabbage- I didn’t feel like I could afford any of the greens I usually would buy at the grocery store.

Overall, I think this amount of food will feed me well enough for the week, even if it’s short on the ingredients I usually would shop for.

My challenge this week will be to eat as closely as I can to the recommendations of the USDA’s ‘Food Plate‘ (formerly the Food Pyramid), while shopping on a SNAP benefits budget. Our class visit with Emily Timnitt about her work with the state of Idaho got me thinking. If the Food Plate is what the USDA thinks Americans should be eating, could someone reasonably do so on SNAP benefits? 

The rules of my challenge are pretty simple:

1. Start on Monday, 11/16, end on Friday, 11/20
2. Total budget of $22.00. I’ll do my shopping at a grocery store I can walk to, Haggen’s Market.
3. I will use some ingredients from my house, like spices and oil.
4. I will do my best to eat daily portions based on recommendations from the USDA food plate.

The Food Plate is divided into five food groups: Fruits, Vegetables, Grains, Protein, and Dairy. The first thing I noticed while getting ready to live by the Plate for a week? Perhaps unexpectedly, the USDA gets VERY, very specific about exactly how much of each group one should eat per day (based on age and sex), and about what exactly counts as a portion (raw vs. cooked veggies, etc.).

So, my first challenge was to figure out what a typical day of living by the Plate would look like: how to allocate portion sizes of each group across breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack and dinner to make sure I hit the targets.

My afternoon of research quickly resulted in extensive spreadsheets that looked like this:
(if this is blurry, just click on it- not sure why WordPress isn’t translating JPG quality…)

And this:

I came up with a few days’ worth of menus that met the daily recommendations.

Next challenge? Figure out how to ‘splice’ the daily recommendations with a budget of $4.40/day. The USDA does have some recommended shopping plans on a budget, here and here, but it felt like less effort to just come up with my own list. (Incidentally, I couldn’t help wonder what the budget was to bring all these resources online, and whether the USDA is tracking click-throughs…)

After a visit to Haggen’s to check prices, I came up with this shopping list for the week:

• 1/2 gallon milk
• 1 dozen eggs
• 5 bananas
• 1 loaf of bread
• 1 lb. cheese
• 2 lbs. dried beans
• 1 bunch celery
• 2 cups peanut butter
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 2 large potatoes
• 1 lb. ground beef
• 1/2 head cabbage

This afternoon (Sunday), I’ll go shopping and take a picture of my Food Plate ingredients for the week.