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.

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.

Sorry for another long post.  I tried to make it shorter, but there is just too much to say in order to address the intersecting nature of access, local food, and labor.   Like my last post, I will include a few snapshots of my life as a SNAP recipient.  Again some of this isn’t obviously about food, but really it is.  Sorry, I didn’t have time to include fancy pictures, but maybe you can make do with hyperlinks, (Though I still didn’t get to do the here, here, and here hyperlink thing that I see in real blogs.  Sigh* Maybe next time.)

SNAPshot: On sleep deprivation

Near the beginning of the term, I had gone to Longs meat market to get sausage and bacon for the month. Longs takes SNAP. I spent about 15 dollars on it. Pretty reasonable. Well I also happened to be exhausted as I was running on only a few hours’ sleep. This was an after school errand. When we got home, I got the kid a snack, set him up with a book, and promptly fell asleep. I woke up later that evening cooked dinner and then cleaning the kitchen I realized I had forgotten all the meat in the car. It had been sitting out there for hours. I bring this up as the 15.00 is almost 2 days of my SNAP budget for my son and I, and this is ultimately and issue of time. If I had more spare time in my life to juggle parenting, work, some version of a personal life, and school, I wouldn’t be so tired all of the time, and had I not been so tired that day, I might have remembered to put the meat in the fridge.   That was not a good day.

SNAPshot: On feeding the challenging child

In my previous post I mentioned that my son has always been high spirited and challenging. I have currently been trying to address this through diet and behavior management tools. He has a multi vitamin with omega and vitamin D in it and he has a magnesium supplement he takes at night. I need to add more omegas so the supplements alone cost about $40-50 dollars per month. This is not something I can purchase with SNAP. In comparison, I could get him a Snickers bar. His diet mostly revolves around protein. I start his day with a high protein breakfast and try to have some protein in his snack. His school lunch is fully vegetarian. He consistently eats from the salad bar, though less than consistently gets enough protein in the school lunch meals. This is not because protein is not offered, but he is responsible for eating it on his own. Regardless of the absence of protein, the school lunches work well to ensure he gets the fresh vegetables and low sugar options for food. I am truly grateful for the school lunch program at his school. Without it, I would certainly spend more time and money packing lunches as there is no way I would be confident that regular school lunches could meet my son’s dietary needs. After school I try to have another protein based snack and then later we will have dinner. Well dietary approaches to behavior can only do so much. They behavior is still challenging and it has certainly come to a head again this week. The kid got kicked out of his aftercare program and I had to rearrange my work schedule, losing valuable work time to accommodate this change. He is currently with me at work right now as I type this because his behavior this morning was too volatile for going to school. This week is not going so well and it is drawing from my already limited supply of time and energy. Cooking is something I usually enjoy. I find it to be soothing and sometimes the act of cooking helps me cope with the overwhelming demands on my time. However, this week, cooking feels like another chore.

SNAPshot: On having your car broken into

The week didn’t start well either. Monday morning when we got in the car to go to school, I realized that it had been broken into.   This is an annual occurrence in our cul-de-sac. Luckily the windows were not broken as I had forgotten to lock the door after our trip to the grocery store. I was a bit distracted. I bring this up because the fact that it is something that I have gotten used to speaks to my housing situation more than anything else, which is entirely connected to my status on Section 8. Recently I found a duplex in south Eugene and I emailed the owner about looking at it. Well I asked if he takes section 8 and he never responded to me. It had a garage, was in a safe neighborhood, near my son’s school and it was similar in rent to what I pay now. I am used to the non-responses to section 8 requests. I also called my caseworker to see about how I would be able to move with my housing voucher. I would have to give notice to my landlord, notify them, reapply with the new numbers to see if the new place qualifies with my current income and expenses. I want to call attention to the ordering of this. I have to give notice that I am moving, before I know if I will qualify for where I want to move to. In the event that I don’t qualify, my notice is already given. I bring this up not because it has anything directly to do with food, but because it links back to my first post about the paperwork (yes, moving would require a whole new set of paperwork) and the interlocking nature of these assistance programs. In order to move to a place where my car is not routinely broken into, I would have to be able to find the energy and time to juggle even more paperwork and I do not have that energy right now. Yet, waking up to your car broken into is just another moment of stress on top of all the other things I currently juggle and it is ultimately draining. In this way it certainly detracts from my ability to put time into my food choices and is therefore deserving of reflection during this SNAP Challenge.

But, again, what about the food?!

So I promised a bit of reflection on both the local and the labor aspects of my food choices this week. Prior to starting this challenge I contacted PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union, asking about how to source my food from local farms that are organic and practice fair labor practices, unfortunately, to the knowledge of the person who responded, there is not a year round farm that fits the specifics I was asking for. They did list the few seasonal farms they work with which are: Anahuac Organic Produce LLC, Egor’s Acres, Bauman Farms & Garden, and Zena farms. I wanted to research these farms specifically, but somehow I never found the time. Pesky time, it keeps hiding from me.

All joking aside, around the time that I contacted PCUN, I also put out a call on facebook asking for the same information. One reply was that I should contact PCUN, the only other person to reply was a dear friend who has worked closely with the farmers and she responded with a sense of defensiveness and almost disbelief that I would even think the farmers wouldn’t be using fair labor practices. She told me to go talk to the farmers at the market, well by this time you could probably guess the outcome of that. I had no desire to drag my son down to market to try to talk with anyone, that is just setting us both up to be miserable. Even if I wanted to do that, you can also probably guess that I wouldn’t have been able to find the time.   Furthermore, I mentioned in my reply to her comment that there are all sorts of subtle and systematic reasons why a farmer wouldn’t just say straight up that they were not using fair labor practices. I mentioned the recent research we read about the farms on the east coast.   I don’t remember exactly her reply at this point, but it was something to the effect that I was policing the farmers and she wasn’t sure what I was trying to get them to account for and that there is a certain level of trust in their integrity that is warranted for us all to exist together. Basically the local farmers could do no wrong.   A few days later, she replied again that she talked to a farmworker who has legal papers, though many of the people he works with do not. According to her, the farmworker says that he and the others he knows are treated well on the farms here. I asked her if that means he can call in sick, if he has proper housing, healthcare, and reasonable work hours. She said she didn’t ask him those things so couldn’t speak to that. I meant to go back to the conversation to talk about how compared to where the farmworkers have come from and taking into consideration the ways they are legally and socially disempowered to change the conditions of their labor, it is reasonable for them to reflect on their situation relatively positively to her; but I did not respond any further as it wasn’t something I could spare any further time on.

Let’s start with the sausage.

So what about the labor tied to the local food I purchased this week. Let’s start with the sausage which is from Carlton Farms which is located 100 miles from Eugene. All in all I spent 30 minutes or so trying to find out about the labor conditions embedded in the sausage on my plate. I spoke with the butcher about where it is from and where it is processed, because these are two different points where labor conditions come into play. He said it was from Carlton Farms and then he asked his boss where it was processed. During that conversation I was able to come away with the fact that it was processed on site. Okay, so Carlton Farms is the source of my sausage, I asked the butcher if he knew anything about the labor conditions there. He did not. So I went to the website where I learned that Carlton Farms began in the late 50’s as a meat packing company. Okay so at what point did they become a farm? In the 70’s one of the owners’ children took over the company and “transformed it from Carlton Packing into the upscale brand known today as Carlton Farms.” So it’s a farm right? Reading closer, I am not sure it actually is.

Carlton Farms prides itself in “producing only the freshest and finest handcrafted natural meats.” Well that sounds nice, but is “producing” ultimately the same thing as “raising” the animals? Well no, not really. In order to produce their high quality product they “believe in working with a select team of handpicked local and national growers who raise animals to our exacting standards.” So they are not a farm at all. They source from Farms though, both locally and nationally. So how do I know where my sausage comes from and how do I know what the labor looks like on that farm; and furthermore, how do I know what the labor looks like in the actually processing facility in Carlton Oregon.   Well they seem to have a good philosophy, they value philanthropy and encourage community involvement with their workers. They support good causes, and of course they have “exacting standards” about how their meat is raised. They don’t say what those standards are though, but they do speak to their standards about how the meat is processed. As a company they highlight the importance they place on “running a clean, efficient, and humane facility that consistently meets or exceeds USDA standards. Humane for whom? The animals? The workers? I cannot answer these questions from the website alone, however, they go on to state that they “believe in a thoughtful, handcrafted approach that doesn’t rely on artificial flavors, colors, or chemicals.” So I can safely assume that the sausage on my plate is high quality, upscale, possibly humanely raises, maybe even locally raised, and that it is free from nasty chemicals. Overall their website tells me nothing about where they actually source their meat or even the labor they use, but their philosophy assures me that my body as a consumer is valued.

But that is just the sausage. Can you imagine the time it would take to do that type of research on all the food I purchase? Is that something the numerous obligations in my life affords me to do? When it comes to all the food I purchased at The Red Barn, none of the produce mentioned where it is sourced from so unless I asked the cashier, I would have no way of knowing where to start. The last time I asked a cashier at The Red Barn about anything it had to do with the Driscoll berry boycott. I had asked why The Red Barn would still carry that product considering the labor abuses and the boycott efforts that were happening. She didn’t have an answer for me because she didn’t really have the knowledge of how her employer sources their produce. So if you recall my previous post when I am trying to bag my groceries and attend to my son, with a line behind me and one visible employee around to help the people in line, then you can imagine why I didn’t take this moment to ask anything about the local farms they source from. I could technically look up the bag of flour that I purchased, but once again, that would take time I do not have.

So speaking of time!

On my Monday night’s post, I had logged a total of 5 hours on food related tasks. Tuesday was 3 hours. Wednesday came in at 2.5, and today which at the time of writing this is not over yet, I am clocking 1.5 hours of food related activity. That is 12 hours already and the week isn’t over. Feeding myself and my son is shaping up to be a fourth part time job. Note these hours do not include the time I spent researching my sausage. As this post is already longer than I had hoped, I will spend the next update reflecting on the types of food we have eaten this week and how the food I purchased at red barn is holding up. Hint, the squash is already rotting, I will have to cook it tonight even though cooking right now, after this week, is the last thing I want to do.

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…

SNAP challenge is going well so far. No major issues so far, although I wish we would’ve picked up more snack food and not just stuff for entrees. Lasagna lasted several days and a container of it is now in the freezer for weeks to come. Information listed below is from last night’s dinner and tonight’s dinner, both of which were quite tasty and relatively inexpensive. As expected, I am not finding this challenge to be particularly difficult as this is pretty much the way we live already. It is actually a pretty smart system, eat cheap, yet nutritious, and still have plenty of leftovers. Aside from snack food, one thing I wish we could have incorporated into the challenge is the use of more greens and veggies in general. Admittedly, you can’t find a ton of great produce at Winco. We usually end up getting most of our produce at Safeway, but of course they are a bit more expensive.

Last night: Chicken Picatta and Scalloped Potatoes ~$5.46 (doesn’t include the little bit of milk that we used or the capers that we already had on hand). Delicious! Plus leftover potatoes for the next day.

Tonight: Split Pea Soup~$6.90 – We made a whole pot which equates to about 12 cups worth. Plenty of leftovers and we froze some for later meals.

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.