Well, it is day one and many of my original rules are already tossed by the wayside. I am allowing myself coffee, I think my son likes me more with coffee. I am allowing myself to accept food from friends. and I am allowing myself to eat out if I am by myself using that time to work at a coffee shop. This term is insane and breaking those rules is helping me navigate it. I would also like to apologize in advance as this will be my longest post, but I promise pictures to keep you interested.
Like I mentioned in my introduction post, in approaching this blog project I am working with the following general assumption: the likelihood that those of us on SNAP will be on other assistance programs ranging from WIC, State health insurance, and housing assistance etc. is very high. I bring this up again here because just as food cannot be abstracted from daily life, the interlocking demands that these programs place on an individual cannot be separated from each other. To illustrate this I decided to start this post out with a few highlights of my life navigating some of these interlocking demands. For context, the document I was working from when preparing this blog post is saved on my computer as “degradation rituals.” I find the title fitting. The following snapshots are either background situations and/or relatively current events. While not all of them visibly connect to food, though some do, in my experience these snapshots all fundamentally shape my food choices in a variety of ways.
Snapshot on the last time I went to farmers market.
I will start with this one as it is directly related to food. This 
was probably four years ago, maybe five. My son has always been very high energy and super challenging behavior wise, and I have always been learning how best to solo parent him as I go. This trip to market was well before his formal diagnoses of ADHD and anxiety. I had a WIC voucher that was expiring that day that was specific for the farmers market rather than the produce section in the grocery store. They give a certain number out each summer and I think it was for 30 dollars. This was my last chance to spend this voucher and we needed food. Things started out okay, but once I started to try to pick out produce, my son started running off into the crowds. When he wasn’t running off, he was picking up and handling all the produce. I was ungracefully juggling the items we wanted to buy, and unlike other shoppers, I didn’t have a fancy 60 dollar wicker basket imported from Central America. I also had to be very specific to keep within the limits of the voucher as I didn’t have cash and couldn’t go over the limit. I was also trying (unsuccessfully) to hold onto my son. People passed us 
trying to get to their own produce. I received plenty impatient sighs and middle class side-eyes as I struggled with the list, the produce, and the unruly child. Not one person offered to help, not even the people working in the stands. They all seemed busy catching up with regular customers. Embarrassed and near tears I put down all the produce, picked up my son and left the market. When I reached the elevator in the parking garage, the tears came and as I was venting about not having food, and not being able to use the voucher because of my son’s behavior a woman got on the elevator and decided that it was entirely appropriate to comment on my poor parenting choices rather than even consider ways she could help. That was the last time I went to market. I no longer considered the space welcoming to people in my situation as a broke and overwhelmed single mom. How can this particular moment be captured in the snap challenge?
Snapshot on how to spend a quarter
Higher education has been for me, as it is for many others, a path out of poverty. My decision to attend graduate school was primarily to increase my son’s life chances. While SNAP and other Federal assistance programs put forth a personal success and independence rhetoric, in my experience, they are ultimately not supportive of higher education beyond the undergraduate level. Once I transitioned to the graduate program, my food benefits decreased dramatically. Prior to this current school year, I was under contract as a GTF and while my stipend was certainly far less than a living wage for a household of two, I was receiving 16.00 dollars per month. That is about .50 cents a day, or a quarter per person in a 30 day month. At one point, when 90% of my annual 11K stipend went to childcare costs, I think I was receiving about $230 per month, which is a little over 8 dollars a day, or $4.00 per person across a 30 day month. But remember, 90% of my earned income was going to childcare.
Luckily during this time, I was receiving child-support, albeit less than the court ordered amount and the majority of the child-support went to paying off the 30,000 dollar debt I ended up with in my divorce. Furthermore, if we are paying attention to time, countless hours which cannot be detailed here, along hundreds of dollars in legal fees went into fighting the state and my son’s father to make that happen. They wanted to consider my 900.00 a month childcare expenses to be zero as my GTF was part time employment and my course work childcare needs were not considered work related. So in my situation, what exactly was SNAP supplementing? Student loans which at this point are up to about 100k. With this in mind, I am curious if there is a snap challenge that asks people to plan their food money around a quarter a day?
Snapshot on Losing time
In July of this year, I had reported that my GTF contract ended and my income had dropped. Because it was summer term I was not enrolled in graduate school. Therefore, I was told to come in and participate in what they call an OFFSET program, where a person’s eligibility of snap benefits is dependent on their job search efforts. This is similar to the one for TANF benefits, though not as intensive. I couldn’t make the date for the orientation and had to try to reschedule. In the meantime, my food stamps remained at the prior amount from when I was receiving my GTF stipend. I had to call several times to get the orientation scheduled which finally happened in late August. After spending an hour or two in the SNAP office with my son, I was then required to meet a certain number of “job contacts” in the month for two months in a row. They back dated it to the original orientation date, so I had two weeks to complete the first month’s contact requirements, and the last month’s requirements would have went well into the beginning of my term.
Even though I was going back to school in three weeks and students with children are not required to do the Offset program, I was limited by the boxes they have to routinely check. My situation couldn’t and wouldn’t be viewed as a whole. I was forced to spend 2 months looking for a job and whatever job I found, I was obligated to keep or I would risk losing my food benefits. This ignores the fact that any regular job I found would not accommodate my upcoming schedule and it seems that I would have been forced to have them fire me, because quitting would have been in violation of the program requirements. I then spent the next few weeks of my summer writing resumes, making job contacts, and wasting time to jump through their hoops. My food stamps increased to about 290 per month, which is about 4.80 per person per day, but I wasn’t actually aware of this increase as they are only required to notify you of decreases, and I thought my application was still in limbo. Luckily the State of Oregon carries over snap dollars to the next month, some states do not. During this time, I also obtained flexible employment on campus, so I didn’t need to spend a second month making their required contacts. However, the same day I submitted my job contact log and reported obtaining employment, my annual recertification packet was also sent to me to fill out and return.
Besides the annual recertification, there are interim reports and required change reports to maintain SNAP eligibility; a recipient can, and does spend, quite a bit of time filling out paperwork, collecting supporting documents, and turning them in. In addition to staying on top of the paper work for food stamps, I am also on Section 8 housing and I have to fill out recertification paper work for them, submit supporting documents and bank statements annually, and reporting any changes in income within 14 days of their occurrence. I am also required to meet for at least an hour with my case worker on a regular basis, which has been at least once per term, if not more. I am also required to have a worker come out and inspect my home once a year. I have to either arrange for another adult to be there or I have to take time to be there and the window for arrival is usually anywhere between 8am and 1pm. This can get complicated as I usually have to drop my son off at school at 8:25. Then there is paper work required for the state health insurance and the time it takes for that which is very similar, if not more redundant than the other paperwork I have described. While we are on the topic of state insurance, I recently spent three hours just trying to get a prescription filled, about an hour of which was sitting on hold with OHP to ask why they denied my prescription, the rest was driving back and forth and waiting in the pharmacy that wanted to charge me 150.00 for my prescription. How often does it take three hours to fill a prescription with a regular insurance company? In contrast, when I had the GTF insurance, I never had a problem filling prescriptions and I rarely spent more than 10 minutes on hold.
So with piles of forms, all coming at different times year I can find myself filling out and submitting paper at least every two or three months. It truly feels like I am constantly filling out paperwork and none of these programs take into consideration that they have my all of my information on file. I find this worth repeating. These organizations all have my information on file! They also have the means to look up all the information I provide to them before I provide it. Yet I am required to fill out new paperwork every time, down to our social security numbers and address. I would think housing authority knows my address. I find that my handwriting is at its worst on state applications, I consider this is my own private resistance to the endless hoops they keep me jumping through.
I have touched on this a bit above, but many times jumping through these hoops requires me to lose time at work. A recent example comes from the shift in my employment from being a GTF to being a student worker. I had questions about my paper work in relationship to this change. I had read on the documents that I was not eligible for foodstamps if I was a full time student who was not also working 20 hours a week. It turns out as a parent, I am exempt from this requirement, but I was confused about this at the time and called my case worker to ask about the details of my particular situation so that I could fill out the recertification paperwork correctly. A few days later, I received a call back from a different person saying that my questions were too general to warrant a call back from my actual case worker and that I needed to come into a drop in appointment to ask my questions.
In order to go into the SNAP office, I ended up having to take two hours off of work. (yes, I bolded and italicized this sentence on purpose) On a side note, this paticular snap office is located in the building the old Waremart grocery store used to be. It was very much like winco, but even more like a warehouse, hence the name. It was where all the snap recipients shopped because the cheap food was there in large quantities. I spent a bit of time in this building as a child. I also spent time pushing carts of food home from it. Well, it closed down when I was about 10 or so and they opened the SNAP office there shortly afterwards. I find this ironic.
When I arrived at the office, they wouldn’t answer my questions without filling out the paperwork so I sat down with the forms and brought them back completed to the front desk. I stood in line and waited both times. Once information was entered into the computer each relevant page was stamped, (which was most of the pages), they told me a case worker could meet with me in a half hour for the required interview, or I could come back another day. I chose to wait. I was prepared with reading for this class , ironically on claimsmaking around food insecurity and hunger. I am lucky enough to be able to bring work with me. I am not sure how many other people on snap have this type of work, so for many, they cannot multitask like I was able to. Once it was time for my interview, the case worker led me through a maze of grey cubicles and then looking between my paper work on the desk and her computer in front of her she proceeded to verbally ask me each question that I had already filled out, and put the answer in the computer. Then she gave me more paperwork to have my employers fill out and return. It is important to note that I have never once had the same case worker twice. By the time I reapply or report a change, my file is on to a new caseworker.
So at this point I hope you are wondering where a single mother who is in graduate school full time, working three separate part time jobs, and parenting a high needs child 100% solo finds the time to go through these degradation rituals? Though I can’t actually answer that, because I don’t know. More importantly though, we need to ask what happens to the people who just get tired of the endless paperwork and demoralization? Actually, I know what happens to some of them because I can remember being 15 or 16 years old and following my mom out of the SNAP office just after welfare reform. She left in the middle of an offset orientation. Needless to say, we didn’t get our food stamps renewed. As someone who has lived this, how any of it can be captured in a week long or even month long SNAP challenge is beyond me. Furthermore, the absence of any pedagogical effort to capture even some of this in undergraduate classes makes the snap challenge feel like a glorified, but educational, version of poverty tourism.
But what about food?!
So now that we have gotten the paperwork out of the way, let us talk briefly about the actual food, that is what the snap challenge is about right? While today was the official day I started tracking, I actually attempted to go to the grocery store last night. I had given up on being able to find the time to get to place with good local options. When I started thinking about this project, I had intended to get all of my bread items at the 100 mile bakery in Springfield, my meat at Longs, and my produce at the Corner Market farm stand off of River Road as it is by my house. Well time to do all of this never magically materialized in my life; so in the end, being out of most everything on a Sunday night and needing at least the next day’s breakfast and snacks for the boy, I drove to Winco only to get almost there and realize I forgot my EBT card. So we drove home. Yesterday was not a good day. As it was a school night, I didn’t have time to drive all the way back out to WinCo before needing to get the kid in bed, so I opted for the Red Barn. to at least get a few things. While there I impromptu decided that this would be a good chance to see what I could find that was local. While good for the project this was ultimately bad for my pocket book. Keeping in mind, I didn’t prepare a menu plan ahead of time, so I tried to only get things that were on my grocery list as staples I usually use.
Overall I spent about $99.00 dollars at red barn. I got four local golden delicious apples these should last for four days as snacks for my son and/or ingredients in meals for both of us. I purchased a dozen local eggs and gallon of organic valley milk which will last the week and more with my son drinking it and me using it to cook with. I got a small bag of local whole wheat flour; I don’t know why I bought this. I didn’t have time to come up with a meal plan and it was there and local, so I did. I also got a few carrots, four small local beets which are a staple in our kitchen, along with a large head of purple cabbage, another staple. I use these in an amazing slaw that my son loves (recipe to follow in another post as this post is already entirely too long). I purchased a small bag of local tomatillos and a celery root, again no meal plan really, but they were local. I picked up two tiny blocks of organic, but not local, cheese, one Gouda and one white cheddar. When I say tiny blocks, I mean tiny, almost pointless in my family tiny—we go through a lot of cheese, but keeping with the spirit of this project, I purchased the miniscule cheeses and a small bag of garnet yams. The yams will probably make one meal if I cook them as a side, possibly two if I mix them as an ingredient. The cheeses, at most might make it through a few breakfasts, maybe a lunch and an afterschool snack or two.
Funny thing is the yams and a few other local items like the tomatoes we bought where in a mixed bin marked “some local,” leaving me to intuit which ones looked local and which ones were imposters. I also got one bell pepper that was marked local, though when I got it home I saw a sticker on it that suggests it is not local. My son can go through one bellpepper as part of one snack. I got a small organic squash which will end up as part of one or two meals. I also got a loaf of bread, a bag of bagels, and some Challah bread, not obviously local ingredients, but from a local small business. The bread products should last a week. My kid spent his $2 dollars of pocket money on a vitamin C tablet and a $4.00 dollar box of “natural” crackers. I picked up the difference for the crackers on my EBT. I cannot buy vitamins on EBT. I also purchased a small thing of Sweet Creek farms jelly and one of their enchilada sauces. I have enchiladas that I made before the term started stashed in the freezer and needed sauce so I can pull a few out for dinner sometime this week. As far as the jelly and sauce, source of ingredients was not apparent to me, but the company is near the coast. Oh I also got peanut butter.
So all of this food, except for the milk fit loosely into two bags. That is near $100.00 dollars for two bags of mostly local groceries. My food budget for the week was about $65 dollars. I do not expect much of this food, besides the flour, jelly, and peanut butter to last far into next week and without drawing on food in my cupboards and freezer, on their own, I don’t expect these items to make full breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for the week. Checking out with all these groceries was hard as the counter was small, my son was super chatty and less than helpful (imagine that), and I was bagging my own groceries with one of the bags on the floor even as there was not room for it on the counter. There was a line behind me, and it felt a little reminiscent of my traumatizing trip to market I described earlier. Leaving the store I remembered why I usually only go to the Red Barn for tiny trips.
That was last night. Today, I went to WinCo to get other things I needed really badly, like non-food items that red barn doesn’t carry at anywhere reasonable prices. Besides non-food items, I needed more food. With a kid, three jobs, grad school and all that paperwork, I don’t have time for weekly shopping trips. When I put food in my cupboard, I need it to last. Typically I will do really big shopping trips during the breaks between terms (using both by ebt and my debit card), prepare a bunch of food for my freezer during the break and then do smaller monthly or biweekly trips as staples run low during the term. This is the only way week 5 and on is anywhere near bearable, and even that isn’t guaranteed.
So anyways this afternoon, I got the boy from school, at 2:45. On the way home, we stopped at Longs meat market to order our turkey for thanksgiving and to pick up 9 dollars worth of sausage for the next two weeks’ school day breakfasts. We arrived home at about 3:30 where I prepared him (not me) an after school snack of Pb&J on the fancy redbarn bread. After he ate and I got my list together we left for WinCo at about 4:20. For the sanity of everyone I will not list what I bought. But for comparison’s sake I brought home 5 bags very full with groceries spending about 156.00. For $57.00 dollars more than what I spent at the red barn, I got more than twice as much food, some of which will probable last 3 or 4 times as long.
We got home from the store at a little after 6pm and immediately started putting the cold groceries away, leaving the other bags piled on the table for later. If you remember, I didn’t eat snack, nor did I eat very well at work and class today, and at breakfast I had the much smaller portions, so by this time I was what my son and I call “shaky hungry.” I was flushed and hot and unfocused. Unlike the politicians who take the snap challenge, I am used to it. Earlier, my friend had brought us some food he had made. I was truly grateful for this as I didn’t have to think about what to cook. We had left overs in the fridge to from the night before so I put all of that in the oven and while that was cooking we cleaned up as much as we could in the kitchen. I was also very lucky as my son was being super helpful so it was low stress and his teacher forgot to give out the homework today so he didn’t have to work on that, which was a relief as I was busy and the table was still full of groceries. Eating amongst the bags of groceries at the table was pretty cramped but mostly uneventful. We ate off paper plates, as the kitchen was still not clean fully. I finished eating before my son did and while he finished, I worked to get the rest of the groceries put away. At 7:15 my son finished eating and I sat down to work on this blog post, the kitchen is still not clean. From the point I picked him up from school, to the point I sat down in total is 4.5 hours doing food related things. This does not count the half hour I spent this morning cooking his breakfast and packing his snack. Given not every day includes a trip to the store, particularly one in which I am doing such a close inspection of the prices to compare them to the options at the Red Barn. However, the daily time I spend on food related things is not insubstantial. Today I clocked 5 hours of food activity.
Over the next few days I will track all my food related activities. During the next post I will talk more about time and I will detail more about my experience purchasing all the local food and how it relates to fair labor practices, but for tonight this post is more than long enough, and as it is, I still have to do some version of editing this post and find those pictures I promised.
Goodnight!
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.
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!
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.
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!
