One in eight Americans is at risk for hunger.
According to a new report, 49 million Americans are now at risk for hunger. 1 in every 6 Americans is now genuinely hungry.
Hunger is rarely due to lack of food -- it is usually due to the politics and logistics of food distribution. Feeding America works primarily by correcting food distribution errors. Mostly, they intercept edible food on its way to the garbage.
Feeding America locates regular food surplus and distributes it to food banks all over the country. Millions of pounds of food get wasted every day, and Feeding America's primary goal is to do everything they can to keep surplus out of the waste stream distribute it to hungry people. They collect from vendors, grocery stores, and restaurants all over the country. Plenty of food is out there -- the problem is one of logistics, transportation, and distribution.
Because Feeding America distributes surplus, they can provide healthy meals cheaply. Ninety five cents on every dollar that you donate here goes to food distribution. Donating your dollars to Feeding America is one of the most efficient ways that you can help aid hungry people.
Your $1 today, if you use the link we provide, will pay for 14 meals.
Donate here, and Proctor and Gamble will match you. If you like the HOPE picture above, you might consider Feeding America's new holiday greeting cards. But if you do not have extra cash, volunteering is key. In Seattle, one hour of donated time at a Feeding America food bank is worth $17. That's a lot of meals.
Meteor Blades recently wrote a diary highlighting the fact that record numbers of Americans now depend on Food Stamps. During the 2008 fiscal year, the average food stamp user collected $101 per month. This year, the Obama administration increased the benefit so that the average recipient collected $132 per month.
I have special dietary restrictions. I don't metabolize carbohydrates or some fats very well. This makes it difficult to eat cheaply, so I wondered how well I could manage to eat with my restrictions on the Obama allowance. The results are telling. While I wasn't getting enough calories on the allowance because I was eating expensive food, you will see that adjusting my diet just a little bit would create an extremely healthy diet for someone who wanted to get rid of my coffee and add a couple of servings of brown rice or quinoa every day. Legumes are also cheap and healthy (but I can't eat many of them, so they don't appear in the sample menus I am sharing here.)
Below, I list what I ate on a few of the days I was on the Food Stamp diet. I allowed myself approximately $4.25 per day. I wasn't always successful. The days I managed to stay within the allowance were pretty boring, or they included too few calories. Here I give a sampling of good to bad days...
Most of the food was organic and reasonably local (bought either at my co-op or Costco). My usual diet includes many more vegetables, so the macronutrient balance is different. My biggest adjustment at first was foregoing my veggies.
Sunday 11/8: $4.40, 780 calories, 49g fat, 60g protein, 22g carbohydrate
2 eggs $0.50
2 tbsp peanut butter $0.15
6 oz grilled lamb $1.50
6 oz (when raw) braised leek $0.90
Baby spinach $0.50
Salad dressing $1.00
**Salad dressing: olive oil, garlic, cilantro, lime, and vinegar whizzed in the food processor. About $4.00 for the entire batch of dressing, and my share was about one quarter of the total.
It turns out that my belly is not happy after a day with 780 calories. I went over budget the next day. I also had an internal wrestling match over the choice "food or coffee". I picked coffee. I should probably stop and examine that...
Monday 11/9: $6.75, 962 calories, 73g protein, 61g fat, 32g carbohydrate
2 eggs $0.50
2 tbsp peanut butter $0.15
1 short cappuccino $3.00
Salad greens $0.50
3 oz chicken breast, $1.25
Small avocado $1.00
Olive oil and vinegar $0.50
Hmmm. I'll have to eat more meals made of peanut butter and eggs if I'm going to get to drink coffee. Had I not broken down and gotten a coffee at the student center (which I couldn't have gotten with food stamps, anyway), I'd have come in under the wire.
Wednesday 11/11: $6.10, 1020 cal, 6g carb, 73g fat, 119g protein
homebrewed coffee = $0.75
4 eggs $1.00
8 oz sprouted tofu = $1.10
2 oz Swiss cheese = $1.00
3 oz chicken breast = $1.25
4 oz baby spinach $0.50
oil/vinegar = $0.50
Yeah, okay. I blew it that day. I came in $1.85 over my limit, and I couldn't blame it on stupidly buying a capuccino because I was scraping my eyeballs off of the floor. Had I eaten peanut butter instead of cheese, and gotten rid of the coffee, that would have been better.
It's a process, right? (Heh. Not if I was really on food stamps.)
Here is a list of price and macronutrient content for some of the things I ate during my week on the foodstamp diet.
1 egg = $0.25, 90 cal, 7g fat, 6g protein
2 tbsp peanut butter = $0.15, 200 cal, 7g carb, 15g fat, 9g protein
6 oz chicken breast = $2.25, 180 cal, 2g fat, 40g protein
6 oz chicken thigh = $1.50, 200 cal, 7g fat, 36g protein
6 oz lamb from leg = $1.50, 210 cal, 7g fat, 35g protein
8 oz sprouted tofu = $1.10, 210 cal, 3g carb, 13g fat, 42g protein
1 oz swiss cheese = $0.50, 115 cal, 9g fat, 9g protein
1 oz cheddar cheese = $0.50, 120 cal, 1g carb, 9g fat, 7g protein
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil = $0.25, 120 cal, 13g fat
1 tbsp grapeseed oil = $0.25, 120 cal, 13g fat
1 tbsp canola oil = $0.25, 120 cal, 13g fat
1 tbsp flaxseed/borage oil = $1.50 (on sale), 120 cal, 13g fat
1 small avocado = $1.00, 270 cal, 20g carb, 20g fat, 4g protein
6 oz leek $0.90, 50 cal, 13g carb, 1g protein
4 oz baby spinach $0.50, 20 cal, 3g carb, 2g protein
4 oz spring mix $0.50, 20 cal, 4g carb, 1g protein
1/4 red onion $0.25, 7g carb, 1g pro
1/2 cup whole milk (in cappuccino) = $3.00, 75 cal, 5g carb, 4g fat, 8g protein.
While it was extremely difficult to eat nutritiously on the Bush administration food stamp allowance, the extra dollar or so per day that the Obama allowance grants makes it possible. As I said before, if you spend your money on brown rice or quinoa in place of my coffee, you're actually doing pretty well.
I got used to having my peanut butter in the afternoon. I cannot tell you how great that heaping spoonful of peanut butter tasted. On the days that I didn't spend too much, my main protein sources were eggs and peanut butter. Even tofu was a little too expensive. The point, though, is that I could survive for some time on food stamps without violating my dietary restrictions.
There were too few calories, but I could make those up pretty easily by diving into the peanut butter. As I said before, adding some quinoa would be ideal (I'm not really allowed quinoa). It's a high protein grain though, and very good for folks that do not have much other food. If I was really on food stamps for any length of time, I would probably make up the calorie deficit by eating quinoa. Eating this little for a week is one thing. Eating that little indefinitely would be really unpleasant.
One of my biggest challenges was getting ideal amount of vegetables -- something that $4.25 will not really provide. One of the experiments I tried was sprouting. Mung beans and lentils are cheap, and their sprouts would fall into the vegetable column rather than the legume column in my list of dietary restrictions.
I soaked the beans in water overnight in a dark corner of my pantry. I drained the beans, spread them into a pan, and covered them with a towel (to keep the light away) for another day. I give you a photo of the beans off to the right. They were amazingly good, and I couldn't get my seven-year-old to stop eating them. She said they were awesome. (She liked the mung sprouts better than the lentil sprouts.)
If you want to have to highly nutritious food at a very low price, you might give sprouting a try. They taste better than you think...
In case you missed the Feeding America link above, you can still donate here!!!
Saturday, Nov 21 (all times EST):
11:00a -- blue jersey mom: Hunger in the Burbs.
2:00p -- Patriot Daily NC: Farm to School Program
5:00p -- buhdydharma: The Class War Comes Home.
8:00p -- JayinPortland: And With Our Orygun, We Shall...
11:00p -- rb137
Sunday, Nov 22 (all times EST):
11:00a -- noweasels
2:00p -- TheFatLadySings
5:00p -- Timroff
8:00p -- teacherken
11:00p -- boatsie
Update: noweasels is matching my pledge to donate $0.10 per rec in this diary!