Thanks, @doschicos…and I agree the guidelines are ever-changing. I don’t think we should limit SNAP (is it SNAP?) on any kind of basic food that has historically been part of peoples lives …milk, eggs, vegetable oils, rice potatoes, meat, milk, cheese, grains, legumes, nuts, fruits, vegetables, etc. However, I don’t think any nutritionist alive would say "human bodies NEED Soda drinks, candy, corn-syrup, hydrogenated oils and all snack foods in pre-processed forms, in order to thrive, though nutritionists would differ in whether/how much any of these were damaging. Some pre-cooked, pre-processed foods available would be necessary (i.e. canned fish and meats, nuts, peanut butters, bread) for those situations where people find themselves without kitchens. I’m sure it would be a nightmare to know exactly where to draw the line. I feel pretty sure candy and soda would be a good place to start, though.
MomofJandL, true but I’m not sure the perception that juice is not healthy has completely filtered down to the general public, maybe I’m wrong about that. A lot of information is passed down through families and people don’t always listen to all the good information their pediatricians want to give them. As we know there is a lot of conflicting info available and people don’t always seek out the best info. Lots of reasons for that. Kudos to your pediatrician and to you for listening.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE this program, started by the local newspaper and expanded by some non-profit groups and reader donations. The reporter goes into an inner city school and teaches healthy cooking to a small group of children. Her articles are amazing - often the students have never seen a fresh butternut squash, or tasted roasted sweet potatoes, for example.
Here is a general article about the program: http://www.philly.com/philly/food/20161020_Teach_a_kid_to_cook__180_students__35_schools__70_volunteers.html
And here’s story about making cauliflower that the kids like better than KFC or cheetos. If you;ve never had access to fresh vegetables, it’s hard to develop a taste for them: http://www.philly.com/philly/food/377378241.html
I think a large part of the issue with cooking basics, besides a time element, is lack of staples. A box of mac n cheese requires milk and margerine. From scratch can be cheaper, but only after you buy staples prior, bc spices and items like cornstarch can be expensive to buy in the beginning. They are cost effective over time, but expensive upfront.
Love cauliflower…kind of expensive here tho, broccoli too:(. we buy whatever, not particularly tied to sales. I used to, but when my partner moved in, he was appalled at how much we had in the cupboard, a lot we would never use or expired. I bulked up due to sales. Now he plans all meals and shops. It costs about the same. What blows the buget is spices, large cuts of meat, any specialty items needed for recipes. I can see why people go for processed. Cheap, quick, no extras to buy.
“I think a large part of the issue with cooking basics, besides a time element, is lack of staples. A box of mac n cheese requires milk and margerine. From scratch can be cheaper, but only after you buy staples prior, bc spices and items like cornstarch can be expensive to buy in the beginning. They are cost effective over time, but expensive upfront.”
True. That’s why the box of mac and cheese is the college students “go to” as well. Now they have those cups where you don’t even need the butter and milk.
In addition to the initial outlay is the fact that, if you are poor, you are lugging home those ingredients on foot or by bus which makes it harder to stock up on a bunch of sales or on staples as well.
A few years ago I read about a program in Detroit, it may have been in all states I don’t remember, that allowed people using SNAP to buy double the value (up to a certain limit) if they were buying local produce at participating area farmers markets and some grocery stores. That seems like a brilliant way to encourage healthier eating.
Also saw a group of detroit school kids on a field trip last fall at Eastern Market, the big farmers market in Detroit.
cellomom2, That’s why I don’t want the soda machines in school…because it is the family responsibility to decide on nutrition…families that want Coke for their kids can provide it outside of school. The thing I see personally wrong, for MY family, with the soda machines in schools and places like the YMCA is the peer-pressure. If most of the other kids are drinking Coke, chances are, your own kids will want it, no matter how much they were raised with healthy eating. Hard for any kid to resist the pull of a Coke machine! The machine itself is a symbol, sends a message at school. My own kid (who loves sweets) once complained “Mom, the teachers don’t make sense. They’re always giving us lessons about how we should eat healthy food and not junk but they bring all kinds of chips and cupcakes and juice and soda for holiday parties and reward us for behavior and grades with candy. So I don’t believe they mean it.” Out of the mouths of babes.
My kid grew up with vegetables in everything. I could get her to eat any vegetable when she was a preschooler, as long as it was smothered in tomato sauce, lol. She’s OK with green. But telling her not to drink a Coke with all the other kids at school would be a recipe for resentment. Fortunately there is no machine at her school. Most kids with good habits still want to be outwardly like their peers. We have had a hard time finding lunches to pack for school that pass my standard, are packable, but not too “weird” for her to eat in front of her friends. (As I said, we don’t live in a whole foods/ethnic foods kind of town.) My kid doesn’t like to stand out (she already does, for having been internationally adopted) and wouldn’t want to add to the possible perception of oddness by being the only one who is not allowed to buy soda at school.
I agree. I think some people need to pay a visit to the [Food Stamp Challenge](The Food Stamp Challenge - could you and how would you take a stab at it? - Parent Cafe - College Confidential Forums) thread. The [Food Stamp Challenge](http://www.foodstamped.com/get-involved/take-the-challenge) is to feed your family on the average monthly SNAP benefit ($1.00 - 1.25/person per meal or ~$372-465/month for a family of 4). We tried to come up with menus that we could afford on that budget, but it wasn’t easy. You’re welcome to see if you can do any better and report back with your results. You have to follow the rules, though.
Rule 1: You have to buy every single item that goes into your dish. You can’t assume low income people start the month with anything in their cupboards. That means if you want to saute garlic and onions in olive oil to start your dish, all 3 items have to be on your shopping list.
Rule 2: You can’t assume you can buy in bulk. The cost of the bulk packaging can be prohibitive when you’re on a limited budget, and low income families often don’t have a lot of storage space. Assume they have small model refrigerators and limited shelf storage. For the sake of this exercise we’re going to assume they have both a working stovetop and an oven, but be aware that every time they turn it on it adds to the electric or gas bill.
Rule 3: You have to pay attention to the purchase quantity limitations. The SNAP site has some helpful links, such as the [sample 2 week menu](https://choosemyplate-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/budget/2WeekMenusAndFoodGroupContent.pdf) which comes with a handy [shopping list](https://choosemyplate-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/budget/2WeekMenusGroceryList.pdf). However, if you’re limited to buying 32 oz. of whole grains at a time then you’re going to have to make some hard choices. Note that the sample menu includes fruit juice as a healthy meal addition.
People who think it’s so easy to eat healthy on the SNAP budget should create some menus. Please note that the actual challenge isn’t to just to create the menus – it’s to see how long you can live on the ones you create.
I’m a pretty healthy eater. Some of it is motivated by the fact that I’m also somewhat of an exercise fanatic, but it’s a lot of work planning and preparing healthier meals IMO. If you hit the link for the pdf in post #77, you see things like quiche, caramelized bananas, cauliflower tacos, tofu hot pot, deconstructed cabbage rolls, chana masala and poutine.
Is this really what some think the answer is for the poor? It’s like a Martha Stewart cookbook, but there aren’t many Martha Stewarts living in the projects. They’re not downloading the pdf on their Macbooks and heading to the local market asking where the poutine is. Some of the things listed would require buying a lot of ingredients upfront that many people just don’t have the money for. It’s often cheaper just to buy a cheap frozen pizza because that’s what they have the money for NOW.
I remember seeing some show about a millionaire who decided to live in the projects and give himself a very small food allowance typical of what those around him were surviving on and he found it was virtually impossible to eat healthy on a regular basis. Fresh fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price were unavailable anywhere nearby, so he found himself buying a lot of cheap bulk starches to keep from going hungry. It gave him a much greater understanding of the nutritional issues facing the poor. Before he’d walked a mile in their shoes, he also felt like it should not be hard for the poor to eat healthier.
I don’t usually give money to the homeless, but I do buy meals for them and have stayed to talk with them more than a few times.
I was in San Francisco on business and there was one young black guy in front of a somewhat casual restaurant with a menu in the window, so I stopped and told him to pick out anything on the menu and I’d buy it for him. He looked a little panicked and after a long pause, he said “I can’t read.” From my bubble, that had never crossed my mind.
So I told him the food wasn’t good there anyway (I actually had no idea but was trying to keep from embarrassing him further) and I’d go anywhere he wanted to go and buy him whatever he wanted. He chose a fast food place, so I walked there with him and he told me he’d been out there all day and I was the first person who even looked at him, and the worst part about being homeless was how people avoid eye contact or look right through you as if you don’t exist. He also told me how he ended up on the streets as a young teen and all the homeless people he’d known who died there. He also opened up about why he never learned to read. It was an eye opener.
I paid for another young guy to stay in a youth hostel one night. It was a cold night and he had a sign saying it would take X number quarters to pay for a night of shelter, which I thought was an interesting way to approach it. So I asked him how much more he needed and gave it to him so he could get out of the cold, but we talked for a while and I learned that he had started college, but had to drop out and ended up on the streets through circumstances most of us can’t imagine. Still, he was determined to go back. He still had hopes and dreams and an amazingly positive attitude, but it’s hard to find a job and get back on your feet when you have nothing but the dirty clothes on your back and no place to shower. You are just trying to figure out how to survive.
I could go on with more examples, but the point is . . . . I have learned a lot from these people. Most of them just want to be treated with a little dignity. It’s definitely made me a more compassionate, open minded person with a better understanding of how much I didn’t (and still don’t) understand about the struggles they face, and have become less judgmental in the process. The most closed minded people I know are the ones who are sure they have all the answers for things they have no personal knowledge of or exposure to.
Everyone has different tax loopholes or advantages depending on what you are doing in life and what your income is.
Everyone gets money from the government one way or another.
Would you like to be told how you can spend the tax money you get to deduct from paying your mortgage interest?
My husband grew up dirt poor. Think no flushing toilet poor. At times there were 13 people living in his small, small house. His dad would come home from work and sit on the hill and smoke a cigar and have a few beers. That was his reward.
Poor people get very few chances to make their own choices. Buying what food they want shoulnt be dictated any more than it already is…
SNAP is supplemental nutrition assistance program. Not complete nutrition purchase program. It is not intended to be the only source of food money, and usually is not.
I’m not trivializing the job of feeding a family on a shoestring. DS is on a grad student stipend, using a kitchen in a crummy rental house, and eating a lot of rice, beans, lentils, sweet potatoes, and other low cost foods. It takes time and planning, and one problem many SNAP recipients have is that they don’t have the time, and often not the planning ability.
disclaimer - that’s not to say that all SNAP recipients are incapable of planning, but low cost/high nutrition meal planning and preparation is a skill many are missing, and have never seen applied in their families.
Are low income people loading up on “lobster and truffle oil and whiskey”? I hadn’t noticed. Poverty isn’t like a temporary diet you know you can be on for a limited time and stop whenever you want. It’s a long term problem. What you’re suggesting is consigning children to months, and possibly years, of a diet of rice and beans and an occasional candy if their parent(s) can scrape together the spare change to buy it. Why would you want to punish little children like that? I think in most cases, it’s not whether or not the people receiving SNAP benefits are overweight or making poor dietary choices that bother people – it’s simply that they’re receiving tax dollars and others don’t like it. Will it make you feel better if you can control whether or not a low income single mom can afford to buy her kid a candy bar? If so, that’s extremely sad.
In 2007, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service published an [article[/url] about restricting SNAP benefits to certain types of foods. They cited several reasons why it doesn’t make sense. We don’t have standards for classifying foods as either healthy or unhealthy. The 2011 version of the Food Pyramid (the [url=USDA MyPlate Fruit Group – One of the Five Food Groups]MY Plate](https://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/arra/FSPFoodRestrictions.pdf) icon), for example, still shows fruit juice among the healthy fruit group choices. Implementing restrictions would increase the cost of running the program and it would be difficult to enforce since the enforcement would fall to the clerks at your local grocery store. That will take extra time, which translates to extra money. Store owners won’t absorb those costs; they’ll pass them on in the form of higher costs to you. Enforcing restrictions wouldn’t necessarily limit the ability of low income people to get the items, so if we’re going to pretend that protecting their health is the reason for the restriction and not the cost, we have to acknowledge that it won’t be an effective tool. And there are no studies tying the SNAP program to obesity or poor diets. “Food stamp recipients,” they said, “are no more likely than higher income consumers to choose foods with little nutritional value.” We’re all paying for increased healthcare costs to cover obesity related diseases, so if we’re going to restrict what types of foods people can buy, why limit the program to low income people? The simple answer is because they’re poor.
@austinmshauri , read the part you quoted from me. I said none of those things was evil, but should not be a regular part of your diet if you are dead broke. Not a regular part. An infrequent treat, perhaps, but not a regular part.
The title post was about the percentage of food budget SNAP users spend on soda and junk food. If I make $100K a year and want to spend 20% of my food budget on junk, there is probably still plenty to spend on more nutritious choices. If I’m on SNAP, then the junk should be a smaller portion. How is that controversial? You take care of needs first and wants later, if possible. I’m pretty sure DS has a diet of mostly lentils and rice and beans, with an occasional treat.
And I’m not trying to control whether a single mom can buy candy bar. Where are you reading that?
@inthegarden that’s a good point about the peer pressure. I generally support not having soda machines in schools.
We allowed our kids to have soda as a treat, usually once a week on pizza night and now as adults they rarely drink it. I was lucky with my D that her friends were mostly runners and most of them didn’t drink soda at all. I was surprised that when my S (who has a serious sweet tooth) went to college and had unlimited access to soda in the cafeteria his first year he decided to stop drinking it at all.
My feeling is that “carrot” strategies like doubling the power of the SNAP $ for local produce work better than “stick” strategies such as prohibiting soda and candy.
Anecdotally, this xmas we sponsored a low income family through our church and when I called to ask the mother if she had any specific requests she asked for fruits and vegetables.
@doschicos wrote
This is a little off thread, but it reminded me of when we road tripped with six middle school girls up to Omaha for a robotics competition in a giant class A rv. So this is a bunch of very smart kids (this just to set the stage)
I’d bought a lot of convenience food to cook in the RV because the kitchen was miniscule, and one was mac and cheese in a cup.
All you had to add was water.
One of the girls didn’t know you had to add water and put it in the microwave.
Yep, microwave and mac and cheese in the styrofoam cup on fire as we drove down the road :)).
That stink never came out of the rented RV.
It was a good learning experience for me, since I’d assumed that all the girls would have some level of cooking knowledge, and I shouldn’t have assumed. We did some minor “how to cook” stuff the rest of the way so there were no more macaroni flambe incidents, but to bring it back around to the thread-cooking and relating to your food is really becoming a lost craft, but it doesn’t need to be.
I do get it about trying to walk the walk and not judging. @1Dreamer, You cite the example of the millionaire who moved to the projects for awhile. In my way I tried to walk that walk, to understand, from the ground up (though not entirely in the U.S.) I did two tours of Peace Corps, in Africa and South America, two years in each continent in a village, one extended year each in the capitol cities. A year traveling all told, in multiple surrounding countries looking into the eyes of hungry street children and mothers and people with leprosy begging every day. Seven years total.
My living allowance was higher than the cash income of my neighbors, but those neighbors did had land for subsistence farming, skills, tools, the network of community that formed their economic safety net. In Sierra Leone I lived on little more than a pot of lentils, rice, onions, oil, green leaves, and a pinch of curry powder for every meal (the lentils were the quickest legume to soften and cook over a wood fire…in the rainy season it would mean fanning damp logs for an hour to keep the fire lit.) Had to transport my rice and beans supplies for 35 miles over a deeply rutted dirt road, dodging busses and bush taxis on a Honda 100 dirt bike once per month, which took around 90 minutes each way. Picked bugs out of my dried rice and beans with all the other women before cooking. Popcorn and/or tinned sardines, and perhaps a single beer, purchased at the Lebanese grocery 35 miles away was a once per month treat. Pulled and carried every bucket of water for drinking or bathing from a thirty-metre well and carried across the village Am I complaining? Heck, No! It was a grand adventure for a spoiled American kid, and I always knew I could leave anytime, knowing that the local people couldn’t. (That lesson hit hard and long when Civil War broke out and, years later, Ebola.) Later, I worked (though not lived) in the projects of New Orleans with children who had had family members killed in gun violence (through my masters program at Tulane.) Have done in-home counseling in/around Chicago with foster kids and court-ordered teens on probation. I am almost sixty years old, now in a comfortable little American SAHM bubble, but I have not lived my life completely secluded from harsh realities people in the U.S, or overseas live in, while pointing fingers. I’m involved in a tiny NGO a Peace Corps successor formed in the region I once lived in, after the war:
http:// Africayes.org/
Perhaps I would be open to changing my mind about the soda debate if I happened to be involved in legislation about food supplements (am not, will never be, am not that important, lol!) and heard enough evidence. I don’t judge any individual for their food choices in the context of their lives even when I don’t agree… but I’m still not convinced food stamp-bought soda is something I would support …but would very much like to see the allocation of more money and INCREASE multiple food choices for people in other ways.
Some people in this thread might want to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s terrific Nickel and Dimed:
Sorry that post was all about ME. This thread should NOT about me. Just trying to show that not everyone who has an opinion is completely without familiarity or experience with the issue or judging totally from an unempathetic armchair.
@inthegarden I liked your post, and there are a lot of us out there who have directly experienced poverty. It was a salient viewpoint, imo.
Thanks, MOD…I would like very much to hear others’ stories. BTW, I don’t, in any way consider myself to have actually “lived poor” though I experienced temporary curtailment of some things (while gaining a world of other things.) in an effort to “get” a sense of what the world is like. My childhood dream was to be either Jane Goodall or Margaret Mead, so I did the lite version of that fantasy through these experiences. The only difficult result is survival guilt. That’s a first world problem, if you can even call it a problem, in the scheme of things.