Food Stamp Challenge: Reflections

Today I can buy and eat food with reckless abandon again!  Well, not quite, but at least the Food Stamp Challenge is over for my organization.  I am still on a very strict budget, still relying on the Direction card for assistance, but the weight of this challenge has been removed.

The light at the end of the tunnel is something that helps me plow through these challenges (I found this similar to my experiences with the 30 Hour Famine).  To steal a line from A Knights Tale, "Hope guides me. It is what gets me through the day and especially the night."  I only have to do this for a week, and then I'm home free.  I absolutely cannot imagine the psychological weight of living this life (with food insecurity).  The stress day in and day out from thinking about food:  how much you have or don't have, how much you can afford, where your next meal is coming from.  When something is deliberately taken away from you, like your freedom to buy what you want when you want it, that something consumes you.  It seemed to be a fairly common topic in the office this week:  We can't eat normally, so we think about eating a lot.  We can do food stamp challenges, work alongside people and hear their stories, but there is not way to add the most critical piece of the puzzle: hope (or the debilitating lack thereof).  I am so blessed to always have a way out, to have family and friends to fall back on in times of need.

For the people that don't have that support network, who have lost hope, who are burdened daily with food insecurity, I can only keep coming to work.  Life isn't fair, but I believe in making certain parts of life more fair, and attempting to even the playing field one Ohioan at a time.

Peanuts and Obesity

Not only am I earning peanuts (read: low wages) at my job, I am eating them too.

Lunch on my first day of the Foodstamp Challenge:

My lunch with a friend at Subway was canceled, so I stuck with my peanut stash for sustanance.   And when I say stash, I truly mean that I keep baggies of peanuts and wheat thins in my desk drawer for my snacks.  I feel like one of the older ladies from church when I was growing up, they always had a drawer in their house with some hidden stash of goodies.

So now my snacks have become my meals, which I think is also a relevant concept for those trying to buy food cheaply.  Some people may see a disconnect between obesity and hunger, but I believe (and bet you can find many more reports on) they are linked.  Compare the price of a gallon of milk and a liter of soda.  If you were strapped for cash and had thirsty children, what would you do?  Some people would consider pop, junk food and fast food special treats, but to others it becomes a regular diet.

With this challenge, we are limited to one dollar per meal.  Where would you go to get a meal for one dollar?

How many of you thought of the McDonald's Dollar Menu as your solution?  When I worked at the Boys and Girls Club in Hamilton, parents (strapped for cash and time) would send their children with McDonald's takeout for lunch.  While I grew up with my mother packing chipchop ham sandwiches, carrots, a Little Debbie snack, and a thermos of chocolate milk, some kids' bodies have to deal with processing McDonalds, pop, and other foods that can be very filling but very unhealthy.  Hence hunger + no money = obesity.  Kind of strange, but it looks like the reality of the situation.

I am making the decision to truncate this train of thought on hunger.  It's cruel to record and analyze food in society when I am hungry.