Yellow cornmeal $1.43
2 jars strawberry preserves 4.80
1 jar chunky peanut butter 2.48
2 packages angel-hair pasta 1.54
Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee 2.50
3 cans tomato sauce 4.50
2 containers cottage cheese 3.00
1 loaf wheat bread 0.89
1 head of garlic 0.32
Tim Ryan doesn’t know how to shop worth a durn. That much for tomato sauce and pasta? Why get preserves at all?
At a dollar per meal - breakfast - oatmeal, milk, raisins, walnuts, tea - about 50 cents.
Lunch - peanut butter sandwiches or left over from dinner, piece of fruit, about a dollar.
Dinner - rice and beans with vegetables, cook Mexican or Indian for flavor, about 1.50.
Throw in a cheap multivitamin for a few pennies.
Mrs VS
Good points, and if you shor at the local dollar store, you can get your dry goods pretty cheap
You make good points about the cost of food. I suspect that many food stamp recipients are likely to have a diet of high fat, high sugar (unhealthy) foods. Just go to McDonalds and see who eats there. I sometimes stop for the senior coffee.
Go down to a good Asian store. You can live pretty cheap on rice and rice noodles, half the world is doing it now. When I was in college I ate a hell of a lot of tuna on cheap bread. I also ate a lot of noodles with cheap sauce on them. I made egg salad sandwiches for lunch on the days I couldn’t stand any more tuna.
BTW, for $1 you can buy enough rice noodles to make 3-4 meals for an adult. For $3.50 you can buy enough Jasmine rice to eat 3 meals a day for at least a week. Does it get boring? Yeah, so what? Beats going hungry.
That said, if someone is so poor that the only food they can afford to eat is paid for with food stamps, the government needs to examine their lives closely. I’d wager that not 1 in 100 recipients is trying to live only on food stamps.
I've never been on food stamps so I can't say whether they are lying or not but I'm pretty sure you get more than 21 dollars and that it is based on your income.
Shop at the dollar store for unfrozen items and canned goods and cut this daily grocery bill in half. Cut coupons and save even more. I do, and I’m not on foodstamps. I live on significantly less than they say is possible in a day and I’m very healthy and do just fine. My biggest expense is in meats, I find.
you forgot to mention that coffee is NOT a necessity. that $2.50 will buy meat or fresh veggies.
food stamps should be covering necessities not luxuries.
also there’s the fact that food stamps are meant to SUPPLEMENT a family’s budget, not pay for everything.