Home Economics and How Easy it is to Think Food Costs Less than it Does

First, a picture of our first challenge Lunch, Saturday Oct 3, then some thoughts from Jasmine on economics.

Broccoli soup with cheddar cheese & the first slice of the week's homemade bread: wheat/oat.

The Food Stamp Challenge is in some ways made for me (Jasmine). Not only, as Dan pointed out, are we living on a budget and likely to do so for some time, but I’ve been practicing home economics for as long as I can remember and I am an inveterate planner of groceries and meals. Growing up, I always went to the grocery store with my mom, who taught me pretty much everything there is to know about shrewd shopping. I cannot remember a time when I  didn’t understand the principle of price-per-unit, and I also can’t remember as far back as the first time I realized that stores frequently confuse even this solid indication of price by measuring different brands of the same product in different units (one can of tomatoes in fluid ounces with another in grams: neither the same system not the same measure—this really happens!). My mom was also a throwback to the generation before her own when it came to maximizing, saving and reusing things in the home. She is a baby boomer and did not experience the want of food growing up, while her mother grew up during the Depression raising chickens that the family could rarely afford to kill for their own table. Yet my grandmother wasn’t overly economical, and my mother is. When she and my dad were first married they lived on a witheringly small graduate student stipend and food stamps with a small child; perhaps that left its mark. And although she enjoyed a period of relative comfort when my family lived in Saudi Arabia, for many years of my childhood money was tight. After they moved back it took my dad a long time to find a teaching job, and he painted houses and adjuncted while she worked full-time as a waitress. Even after he began his tenure-track job, the long payless summers in sweltering south Jersey had an unshakable drear to them and September was something she and I, sharing the problem of how to have a nice home and life without lots of resources, often openly longed for.  In September, we could go out to dinner on Fridays and buy whatever we wanted at ShopRite.

I don’t wish to falsify that I grew up poor; my family was middle class and I never experienced hunger. If we could have used more money, it was in part because I was sent to private violin lessons. We were in that kind of situation. I am unusual in that I was aware of the pinch of limited money and involved in helping to solve the problems it presents from a young age. Although I can imagine wanting to hide any sense of limitation and privation from a child, I am glad my mom let me in on these things, in part because I find household management really interesting and rewarding, and even more because there was never a time in which I didn’t know thoroughly how money works, that it is possible to get through not having a lot of it, and how that can be done.

But the situation I’ve been in, and which I am to some degree in today, is really different from what a lot of people experience. I do not know what it is like to have nothing in my pantry. My dad has stories from his childhood when there was one thing in the kitchen (oatmeal) which he tried to make into cookies but ended up ruining the last of the food; in another, he hallucinates from hunger while watching a strange Sunday afternoon tv program when his mother opens the door carrying a bag of groceries with the fronds of a bunch of celery sticking out of the top like some kind of tropical saint. I haven’t had those experiences, and I know they are on a whole other order of desperation than the challenges I’ve faced. I also recognize that the fact that I cook at all, that I bake, that I read the store circular every week, grow a garden and shop at multiple stores for the best prices, and that I know not only how to do things in the kitchen but how to do them in the way that maximizes their value, is something not everyone has. The fact that I have the time to do these things is also a privilege that not everyone has. I have heard that there is a saying in southern Italy along the lines of, “We don’t have money but we have time.” This implies that humble ingredients can be wonderful if cooked with skill and not rushed, and it also implies that time is free. But many poor people cannot afford time, and most working Americans, poor or rich, would certainly say that time is a rare and valuable commodity.

Privilege is something that it is impossible to disentangle from your life for the sake of experiencing what someone else goes through. Planning for this week has been difficult in part for that very reason: we have a garden and a CSA farm share. Because we can afford the several-hundred-dollar up-front investment in this local farm, I have to buy almost no produce for five months of the year, and we get lots of the highest-quality organic produce for an embarrassingly low price-per-unit. But what about somebody on minimum wage, for whom a share costs 2/3 of a month's after-tax income? Through that farm and our community garden, we also have unlimited herbs and for a little longer this year tomatoes, zucchini and hot peppers. We also have an Amish population here so we can get terrific eggs for $2 a dozen. Most people just don’t have access to any of these things which enable great eating for little money, and I have had to go to some lengths to create a more representative food situation for us: I have used several crops from the farm and calculated their value according to the prices our local supermarket charges. We will not have anything not available at that store (Price Chopper) or whose price wouldn’t fit the budget. In fact, we on our last night before the challenge we feasted ourselves and a few friends on perishable produce that wouldn’t fit in the budget, and I imagine that many people on SNAP, on the last night before the new week of benefits begins, end up eating the dregs of their week’s groceries rather than enjoying a final seasonal feast. Still, I am relieved that the week is beginning because it was so difficult trying to get it right ahead of time, and now we’ll just have to see if I did. I am very aware that if I misplanned, we do have other options, and that’s just what many people on food stamps don’t have.

At first I thought $58 for two people for a week sounded like a lot. I’m embarrassed about that now, but it should be said because I bet a lot of people whose endless appetite for spending cuts fixates on SNAP think the same thing: “That seems like plenty of money to me!” I rarely spend as much as $58 in one trip to the grocery store, primarily because of our farm share, but also because I buy a lot of things at multiple locations that have better prices or quality whenever I have the opportunity. When we go to a big city, we often go to Trader Joe’s to stock up on grains, pasta, meats, coffee and toiletries. When we go to Utica I buy brown Jasmine rice and Asian sauces at the Asian market there. I make a trip to our local health food store about once a month for bulk legumes and spices, which are the only things there I consider affordable. All those shopping trips assume a car, gas money, and that you are not living on a week-to-week budget. One thing a person on SNAP might be hard-pressed to finance is a big, impromptu antibiotic-free meat purchase at Trader Joes. So when I jotted down some probable meals for the Challenge week, I had to completely re-think how to shop for dinner.

I knew, for example, that we would have black beans. It’s pretty much Dan’s favorite food, and we have it often anyway. It’s cheap and it makes a lot. My mind initially went to all the things I normally buy to put in it or with it: green and jalapeno pepper, yogurt and cheese if we could fit them into hte $58 budget, some raw vegetable or salsa, and tortillas. I forgot to put the beans and rice on the list. That’s because I always have beans and rice. I never buy them acutely, so to speak. That is the essence of the privilege we need to consider in a challenge like this. Once I added those to the list, there was $4 less for everything else, and I knew this round of black beans would be a more sober version of what is often a rather lavish meal for all that it is vegetarian and relatively cheap.

Picture of Dinner from Saturday Night--a night when the fruit of the vine would always otherwise enliven our dinner and evening's entertainment. But tonight, it was not to be . . .

Note four bowls for a half-pound of pasta: two dinner portions & two pyrex dishes for Sunday's lunch