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:
- Start on Monday, 11/16, end on Friday, 11/20
- Total budget of $22.00. I’ll do my shopping at a grocery store I can walk to, Haggen’s Market.
- I will use some ingredients from my house, like spices and oil.
- 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.