Living on $21 a week

Photo by Meghan Erkkinen

STAMP ACT. Tacoma City Councilmember Lauren Walker cooks up spaghetti and tomato sauce for her family. She is participating in the weeklong Food Stamp Challenge, which limits participants to $21 for groceries.

What would you eat if you only had $21 a week for groceries?

That is the challenge the Pierce County Food Coalition is issuing to Tacoma residents this week – $21 is the average weekly food stamp benefit.

The idea is to encourage elected officials at the federal level to continue to provide food stamps and to consider increasing the amount allocated to individuals and families, said Gina Breukelman, director of the Emergency Food Network.

“There’s a big issue of hunger in our community,” Breukelman said. “For the most part families who are on food stamps don’t have enough money the whole week.”

The Food Stamp Challenge is officially slated to happen April 14-20, but organizers are encouraging those who wish to participate to schedule their own challenges.

To garner even more attention for the challenge, organizers have spoken with local elected officials to encourage them to participate as well. Tacoma City Councilmember Lauren Walker accepted the challenge.

“I thought it sounded interesting and fun,” Walker said. “I hoped to get an awareness of what people on food stamps experience.”

Before her challenge, Walker shopped around to get an idea for where some of the best deals were. Although she said there have been times in her life when she had to clip coupons and count pennies to afford necessities, those days have passed.

“While I’m still looking at ads, I don’t have to be as cautious as I was before,” she said. “It’s important to give credit to people on food stamps.”

She began shopping with her 17-year-old son Henry, who opted out of the challenge but helped his mom calculate the best deals. Walker, who usually eats a low-carb diet and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, learned early on she had to put aside her usual diet in order to succeed.

For breakfast, Walker opted for plain oatmeal every day. She said it was a good option because not only was it cheap, but it was relatively filling.

For her lunches, she found inexpensive tuna, canned soups and celery and a grapefruit – the only fresh produce she could afford – and an assortment of canned fruits and vegetables.

For dinner, Walker selected an assortment of pastas, rice, lentils and inexpensive meats – which, she noted, were all high in fat. She cut out snacks and dessert items, and, on the second day of the challenge, admitted she was hungry.

Even on the second day, Walker said she suspected she would be out of money before the week was up, and would need to visit a food bank – as organizers encouraged – to keep her fed.

The biggest challenges were finding affordable, fresh produce and filling her diet with enough protein. Her budget required her to cut out dairy and push whole grains to the side – the only affordable bakery item was white bread.

“You think about having kids and you think about giving them good-quality foods,” she said. “We need to make sure everybody, but especially children, get enough to eat.”

Overall, Walker said the challenge had a huge impact on her.

“It’s been a tremendously powerful experience because the time I’ve spent trying to figure out how to get enough food has given me tremendous respect for people who use food stamps,” she said. “I’d say it’s time to raise the food stamp allotment. It’s long overdue.”

Walker said she will write members of Congress about her participation in the event and her observations. She also said she plans on becoming more involved in programs to assist people and will research whether the city gives money to those programs.

These are the kind of results organizers hoped for, and Breukelman has invited other participants to submit journals of their experiences, which they can submit for posting on the Emergency Food Network website at http://www.efoodnet.org.

“We hope that this event will help raise the community’s awareness of the effects of hunger in our community, and will spark a community-wide conversation about effective short-term and long-term responses to reduce hunger in Pierce County,” said Kevin Glackin-Coley, director of the St. Leo Food Connection and co-chair of the Pierce County Food Coalition.

For more information on the Food Stamp Challenge, visit http://www.efoodnet.org.

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