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: