Tinotopia

Lentil Chili, 1/4 Cornbread Recipe (leftover from Sunday) and Cheddar Cheese

The cost for the meal:

$0.12 over on a per meal basis, but lunch and breakfast combined were only $1.02 per person, and the cheese was very welcome. Our total for today was $2.14 per person, and I’m quite full. We haven’t really needed snacks because we are eating more regularly than we usually do. Our frequent habit is to skip lunch and eat dinner early. When we do that, we have a snack later, but with the three squares, the snacking has been minimal thus far.

Tino really liked the lentils and the breakfast. I think we’re doing the egg breakfast tomorrow, but we’ll do the oatmeal again later in the week. At some point, I have to make pancakes. I’ve never been good at that, so there’s the possibility of disaster there. We’ll see.

Here’s how the lentil chili breaks down:

Macaroni & Cheese, PB&J Sandwich and Carrot Sticks

And, of course, more ice tea!

Here’s the cost:

We’re definitely using a lot of margarine, and the powdered milk is really awful. It’s just barely OK when it’s used in baking or in something else that’s cooked. I will never buy that stuff again, especially considering we’re managing to hit under the mark so far, I’d definitely buy fluid milk. We don’t go through that much of it anyway.

I’m not wild about margarine, but I have no other serious complaints.

Oatmeal with cinnamon, bananas and milk

And here’s what it cost:

Unless I wind up making something later for a snack, Day 1 will come in at $2.382 per person.

Here’s the breakdowns for the soup and the cornbread:

I forgot to pull these out to three decimal places before I marked them up, so they are to two decimal places. Also, I’m starting to think I will use all the cooking oil. It’s no big deal though — it fits within the limits anyway.

Vegetable Fried Rice

This looks terrible in the photo. It looked much better in person.

I made a pitcher of ice tea, and Tino and I also each had a stalk of celery with 1 T. peanut butter on it. We had a guest, who had the third serving of fried rice. I’m going to consider the tea as split between Tino and I.

Grand total cost per person: $0.630

Nicole and I have decided to do the Food Stamp Diet this week, from Sunday morning to Saturday night. Thus this morning’s breakfast was the first meal under the regime.

This is the ridiculous and inaccurate $21/person/week diet, so assuming three meals a day the average meal has to cost no more than $1 per person.

After one meal, we’re doing pretty well: breakfast cost $0.75 per serving.

Potatoes, eggs, toast, and tea. It would have been nicer to have some bacon or something, but Tino is a vegetarian and this would have caused a lot of budgeting challenges. Except for the fact that we don’t generally make our own bread; that we drink coffee or good tea instead of cheap tea; that we use butter instead of margarine; and that we generally don’t use powdered milk, this is basically the same breakfast we eat anyway, except that Nicole generally also has bacon and Tino has a veggie sausage thing.

All together, it’s possible to afford bacon on $21/week (and certainly possible without even trying hard to do bacon on the $35 a week you actually get if food stamps are intended to be your only source of grocery money). It’s not possible to eat complicated vegetarian soy factory products on that budget.

Breakfast:

Comments: The bread is very good, better than anything you can buy in the store. The tea is also surprisingly good; I’ve had some bad experiences with cheap tea, but this stuff is fairly tasty. It does seem pretty weak, though: 4 bags per pot would probably get better results than 3 (with PG Tips etc. we can get away with one or two bags for about the same strength).

Bread costs:

Apropos of the Food Stamp Diet:

In early 1936, George Orwell travelled around the North of England talking to unemployed miners; in 1937, his account was published as The Road To Wigan Pier. In chapter 6, part of which is reproduced below, he deals with budgeting among the unemployed in general, and particularly with expenditures on food.

So perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed, the really basic thing if you look to the future, is the diet they are living on. As I said earlier, the average unemployed family lives on an income of round about thirty shillings a week, of which at least a quarter goes in rent. It is worth considering in some detail how the remaining money is spent. I have here a budget which was made out for me by an unemployed miner and his wife. I asked them to make a list which represented as exactly as possible their expenditure in a typical week. This man’s allowance was thirty-two shillings a week, and besides his wife he had two children, one aged two years and five months and the other ten months. Here is the list:

		s.	d.
Rent		9	½
Clothing Club		3	0
Coal		2	0
Gas		1	3
Milk		10	½
Union Fees		0	3
Insurance (on the children)		0	2
Meat		2	6
Flour (2 stone)		3	4
Yeast		0	4
Potatoes		1	0
Dripping		0	10
Margarine		0	10
Bacon		1	2
Sugar		1	9
Tea		1	0
Jam		7	½
Peas and cabbage		0	6
Carrots and onions		0	4
Quaker oats		4	½
Soap, powders, blue, etc.			10
Total	£1	12	0

In addition to this, three packets of dried milk were sup-plied weekly for the baby by the Infants’ Welfare Clinic. One or two comments are needed here. To begin with the list leaves out a great deal — blacking, pepper, salt, vinegar, matches, kindling-wood, raeor blades, replacements of utensils, and wear and tear of furniture and bedding, to name the first few that come to mind. Any money spent on these would mean reduction on some other item. A more serious charge is tobacco. This man happened to be a small smoker, but even so his tobacco would hardly cost less than a shilling a week, meaning a further reduction on food. The ‘clothing clubs’ into which unemployed people pay so much a week are run by big drapers in all the industrial towns. Without them it would be impossible for unemployed people to buy new clothes at all. I don’t know whether or not they buy bedding through these clubs. This particular family, as I happen to know, possessed next to no bedding.

In the above list, if you allow a shilling for tobacco and deduct this and the other non-food items, you are left with sixteen and fivepence halfpenny. Call it sixteen shillings and leave the baby out of account – for the baby was getting its weekly packets of milk from the Welfare Clinic. This sixteen shillings has got to provide the entire nourishment, including fuel, of three persons, two of them adult. The first question is whether it is even theoretically possible for three persons to be properly nourished on sixteen shillings a week. When the dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive. So far as I remember, one school of dietitians worked it out at five and ninepence, while another school, more generous, put it at five and ninepence halfpenny. After this there were letters to the papers from a number of people who claimed to be feeding themselves on four shillings a week. Here is a weekly budget (it was printed in the New Statesman and also in the News of the World) which I picked out from among a number of others:

	s.	d.
3 wholemeal loaves	1	0
½ lb. margarine		2 ½
½ lb. dripping	0	3
1 lb. cheese	0	7
1 lb. onions		1 ½
1 lb. carrots		1 ½
1 lb. broken biscuits	0	4
2 lb. dates	0	6
1 tin evaporated milk	0	5
10 oranges	0	5
Total	3	11 ½

Please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel. In fact, the writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate all his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you had to live on three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could hardly extract more food- value from it than that. So perhaps it is possible to feed yourself adequately on the P.A.C. allowance if you concentrate on essential foodstuffs; but not otherwise.

[...] In some districts efforts are now being made to teach the unemployed more about food-values and more about the intelligent spending of money. When you hear of a thing like this you feel yourself torn both ways. I have heard a Communist speaker on the platform grow very angry about it. In London, he said, parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping- lessons to the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money. He was quite right — I agree heartily. Yet all the same it is a pity that, merely for the lack of a proper tradition, people should pour muck like tinned milk down their throats and not even know that it is inferior to the product of the cow.

[Financial Note. It is very difficult to compare prices from 1937 to prices today. Using the calculator at measuringworth.com, the £1 12s in the first table could be equivalent to £68.76 according to the retail price index, or £266.94 if we compare the amounts using average earnings. A good argument can be made for either, but the retail index is probably more accurate for this purpose. The 3/11½ comes to £8.51 now.]

This is the breakdown of where we spent the money. It actually comes out to $54.04, not $54.11, so I picked up 7 cents somewhere.

I normally do all my shopping at Martin’s. I went to Food Lion because Martin’s does not carry any ramen that’s vegetarian, and Top is better than Maruchan anyway. While I was there, I bought the other items on sale.

Before you think I went running all over town, don’t. Food Lion and Big Lots are on the SE corner of Remount Rd and South Street and Martin’s is on the SW corner of the same intersection.

I usually don’t by house brands, and I usually spend pretty indescriminately on produce. Also, I usually buy Morningstar Farms products for both of us and one kind of meat for me. Both are too expensive for this plan, but I like bean dishes and this diet is quite healthy anyway. I also wouldn’t normally buy margarine instead of butter or “vegetable” oil. I usually use peanut for cooking and olive for other things. Dry milk, of course, is not something I’d buy, and I do normally drink coffee instead of tea.

I’ve gotten a lot of money saving ideas from Miss Maggie, the Hillbilly Housewife. She really knows how to stretch a food dollar and has great, simple, satisfying and nutritious recipes. As you can see just by my groceries, I’ve gone the southern route with the food. It’s cheap AND tasty!

I am using a bread maker, but you can pick those things up at Goodwill and garage sales for not much money, so it would be a good investment for someone anyway. The general government guideline is 30% going for food spending, so that leaves 70% for a one time investment that will be usable for a long, long time.

Other than that, I’m not using any special equipment. It’s just not necessary. I’ll measure the nutritiousness of this diet on fitday.com. I will give my public address out later once I start posting over there.

Some of the congresscritters are trying to get the food stamp allocation increased and are pulling a publicity stunt.

They are trying to eat on $21 per week. That number is basically pulled out of a hat as it is an average of what a food stamp recipient spends, not what they actually get. You can get partial food stamp assistance, or, if you are truly poor, you can get the maximum allotment which is $155 for one person for one month. All the food stamp money is put on a debit (EBT) card at the beginning of the month, and it’s use it or lose it, but they do get it all at once.

Part of the stunt here is that they are trying to fail because that will prove their point. They have no idea how to cook (apparently) or shop on very little money. They are assuming they have $21 for seven days, not that they would be buying more heavily at the beginning of the month and then filling in the used up items. It’s much cheaper to buy quantities on sale, and this is what any sane person would do. No one on food stamps wants to be hungry, so they are going to try to make the most of that money. The congresscritters are NOT doing this.

Since this disgusts me, we will doing this next week (May 20 – May 26). I have purchased $51.42 worth of groceries, but this includes everything including 8 qts. dry milk, salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder, baking powder, soy sauce, 100 tea bags and 32 oz of vegetable oil. I will not use that stuff up in a week. I’ve figured unit costs and getting the actual foods used down to $42 will be a snap, I think.

We’ll be logging recipes and meal costs over at Tinotopia, so keep an eye on his site. Just to give you an idea of what was purchased, here’s the list and it’s costs:

Like I said, I don’t expect to use 15 oz of spices in week, never mind the veg oil and salt.

Recipes and other info later.

The USDA offers what they call a Thrifty Food Plan which is a guide to feeding a family of four on food stamps. They studied this in 2000 in Washington, DC by attempting to purchase their recommended foods at urban supermarkets.

This report, compiled in May of 2001 details the shopping order and the results of their urban foraging. A few factoids from this:

• Eight items were hard to find in urban markets. In order, starting with the hardest: ground pork, fudgesicles, yolk-free egg noodles, breadcrumbs, cottage cheese (!?), bagels, garbanzo beans, chocolate chips.
• During the time studied, the TFP cost was an average of $101.70 for a family of four
• The TFP market basket costs almost the same in high poverty areas ($98.26) and low poverty areas ($98.92)
• Meats and meat alternatives take the largest share of the TFP dollars at $25.98. Following a distant second is frozen fruits and vegetables at $14.70. Based on our experience so far, I’d guess that dairy has outpaced frozen vegetables by now. In 2000, dairy was at $10.40.

Here’s what was used up in the second week of the two-week TFP meals. You will note that it is impossible to purchase food in these amounts, so they are clearly going by unit costs, not the grocery bill total.

All of the information that went into this study cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. The menus were formulated at great expense, and brochures are given out to folks on food stamps, yet the congressmen trying to live on $21 a week took advantage of none of this. The only one that seems to have even taken a crack at eating a balanced diet is Congressman Jim McGovern and wife Lisa. The right way to do this would have been to go to the USDA and get the shopping lists, recipes and meal plans that they offer for free to anyone who asks.

Here are the recipes that match up to the TFP shopping lists. Reading the recipes, the food sounds a lot better than it looks on their meal plan. “Pizza meatloaf” sounds gross, but the recipe sounds perfectly reasonable. It’s a meatloaf that uses spaghetti sauce in place of catsup and adds some mozzerella cheese to the meat.

I find their effort hard to take seriously, and we will be setting out to prove them wrong starting today. I really don’t have any doubts we can get enough food on $1 per meal per person. I do have to cook everything, but if my only income were from the government or even if I were working part time, I would certainly be able to do this. I do work now and I can do it. If I were commuting, I’d do more cooking today and I would probably plan that more lunches be from leftovers.