Summary
House Republicans are considering a 20% cut to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, impacting over 22 million households, as part of a $5 trillion deficit reduction plan.
The proposed changes to SNAP would save $247 billion over a decade by rolling back a Biden-era increase tied to the USDA’s “thrifty food plan.”
Critics argue the cuts could harm vulnerable populations and reduce demand for food production, while Republicans view the changes as a way to curb spending and encourage employment.
Is that amount for a family, cause I can definitely eat on $292 a month in a very expensive city. I’d need to make adjustments, but it’d easily be doable.
It’s for a household of 1, in Milwaukee. I could do it here if I cooked every meal and ate meat at most twice a week.
A person poor enough to qualify for this probably doesn’t have time to shop properly and cook for every meal, and probably doesn’t have a full kitchen.
Ya, it’d be a lot of vegetarian meals. If you can get to something like a Sams Club or Costco (although that has it’s own cost) you could get things like eggs, rice, oats, and even some spices over a few months to get you going, really cheap compared to other places.
Even being able to get something like a bulk frozen blueberries to be your fruit for the month that you can put in the oatmeal for example would go a long way, but is probably too pricey if you’re buying it in small quantities.
Trying to do that at an expensive grocery store and no access to cheaper bulk pricing would make that less comfortable.
You appear to assume everyone has a chest freezer or even a fridge with enough freezer space accommodate these suggestions.
You note the cost of club memberships but ignore the cost of transportation.
I challenge you to live on these suggested diets for a year without going over budget.
You don’t need a chest freezer for a 2-3kg bag of frozen veggies and berries. Any standard fridge will fit that with plenty of additional space.
Nor do you need a membership to even get these things at all places, but it can make it cheaper (and likely pay for itself)
I would expect a person this poor to likely have a bus pass, they probably wouldn’t be driving. So transportation costs are probably already covered, so the real issue is, is there a place they can buy frozen/bulk food within a reasonable bus distance.
Edit: E.g Krogers in Milwaukee where OP referenced has frozen peas 60oz for $5.29 (NOT on sale), as well as other vegetables. Ideally find a mixed bag. That’s your veggies for the week, and it’s only $0.75 of you’re $9.41 day for eating, and no paid membership. I’m not saying this is good, it’s poverty, but it’s doable.
Edit: In Log Angeles at Food4Less you can get 80z mixed veggies for $6.99 on sale ($1 off), that’s $0.699 a day for 10 days, even cheaper, in LA an even more expensive city! You can even get that down to $0.54 a day at Walmart.
I have a Costco membership. I don’t buy things like this or frozen vegetables there because they cost more per unit than they do at Kroger (let alone Lidl or Aldi).
Really? That’s interesting, even rice and oats?
Edit: where I’m at for spices, you can get 3-4x the amount at Costco vs the grocery store, but on a budget like this you’d probably only get 1 a month while you built up the kitchen. I’ll check rice again next time I’m out but I swear it’s cheaper as well. Haven’t bought oats in awhile, but used to have them for breakfast daily (the basic quaker oats kind, not the expensive flavored sachets)
Edit: Also I’m annoyed that you can’t see Costco warehouse food prices online. You get the online/delivery prices which are raised making price shopping more difficult.
If you want bulk spices hit up an international store. Might be slightly leaded, but they’re dirt cheap and sold by the pound
Uhhhh minus the lead you almost had me interested to try it out.
Regular grocery store prices for spices can be stupid at times.
I don’t know it’s leaded I just don’t know it isn’t. It’s dirt cheap somehow
In Los Angeles I’m paying like $50 for a barebones, mostly produce and raw ingredients shopping trip 1-2 times per week. I’m vegan so I’m not buying milk, eggs, meat, etc. but sometimes I’ll buy processed fake meat (but those prices are insane right now too).
If only this was subsidized like meat is. I find it absurd when I look at the prices for a lot of that stuff. Completely upside-down, especially given our health situation in this country. It makes it very difficult for people to start transitioning away from SAD, when it’s funded and marketed with so much money…even if some of the substitutes are often not much more healthy than the standard carnist stuff.
I’m not too concerned about the healthiness of them and always find this to be a distraction—people don’t eat hamburgers to be healthy.
But yeah, it’s upsetting. Especially restaurants that upcharge vegan products without expensive meat.
Yes, very true. I only mention it - but yes, that is a typical thing I hear from carnists - “well, it’s not even all that heathy!” - as if that is the only point.
My favorite is when the surcharge on many restaurants for something like an Impossible Burger or a Beyond Burger is something like $4 more for the carnist version. There is nothing about our current system to encourage good choices…
Not that I suggest you do this, but in the context of eating cheap, you can get that cheaper by finding a place that sells larger bags of frozen vegetables, such as the carrot, pea, green bean, corn mixes. Go for the store brand to get that cheapest. They’re just as nutritious as they get flash frozen when their nutrients are at their peak. It won’t be very exiting though.
You won’t have a lot of variety trying to eat on $292 a month.
In the first few years out of college, I was able to really stretch my dollar with dry beans and rice and a big bag of yellow onions. I had salt and pepper and sometimes I’d add some butter for flavor. I’d chuckle as people would ask “but where do you get your PROTEIN” when I was using this for a lot of my dinners: “uh, the butter and the rice and the beans? Not to mention the other meals?”. Sometimes, I would throw this in a container and take to work for lunch when things were especially tight.
Nutritional beliefs in this country are still pretty terrible, but back then, even as an omnivore for every other meal, when I’d eat only rice and beans for dinner, I’d get serious concern from family and friends about this, like I was going to die from a protein deficiency. Still makes me shake my head…I think most people have such a silly view of things that they actually assume that protein is a synonym for “beef”.
Haha, ya that is amusing. Protein is probably the easiest thing to manage in that situation as long as you can enjoy rice and beans.
Now that I’m vegetarian, I even still get this. I just don’t understand this. Something like 5% or so are vegetarians in this country and yet there still seems to be this prevailing “wisdom” that getting protein is a major and possibly even life-threatening concern.
I suppose a lot of it comes down to marketing. All these items on menus and bits of processed food have big indicators of how many grams of protein they have in them as if it’s a health food or something. That, and of course all the money behind SAD marketing that leads people to think beef and dairy are not horrible for their health, but actually good for them, possibly even necessary for survival…and of course, don’t get me started on the certain class of men that think they’ll turn gay or into women if they don’t eat meat, LOL. Now THAT is marketing.
What do you find is the actual hardest thing to get properly and do you need a supplement for it?
Like I know some people struggle with iron. But it could be various things depending on your food preferences.
As a vegetarian, absolutely nothing. I know vegans are encouraged to supplement with B-12 as there may be a deficiency otherwise, unless they eat vegetables grown in soil and don’t wash them. Which I think applies to almost no one, including vegans.
I supplement B-12 - my understanding is that omnivores probably should as well. I also add vitamin D, esp. in the winter months, but neither of those I do because of being a vegetarian.
When it comes to iron, I specifically started looking for multivitamins that explicitly say they DO NOT have iron (even if I only take one weekly typically) because apparently too much iron is very much a problem and I think the typical multi has way too much, and I’ve never had any sort of anemia. In fact, once I dropped all the meat, I had a lot more energy, so I’ve never really worried about getting too little iron.
Yeah and you’re probably getting your bulk from potatoes and rice. A lady i know is amazing at cooking potatoes and eggs because she was off and on homeless in college and when you need a lot of filling calories cheap you go for potatoes (and eggs back then)
I wish potato’s lasted longer without a dark chilled area to keep them. Sometimes the grocery store by me puts on these crazy deals for 10lb-20lb bags, but I can’t go through that that fast.
Good point. I do that to an extent for the reasons you’ve listed. I thought of produce because lately I’ve been into salads and wraps.
I have no clue why others are downvoting you for this.