02401 Meeting the Food Stamp Challenge with Local Foods: Slow Food for Low and Moderate Income People

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of. — Confucius

This chapter is an essay I wrote in 2004. Prices are 2004 vintage.

---

In November Sharon Gordon posted a "food stamp challenge" in the Community Food Security listserv: eat for a week on a food stamp budget. We decided to do this using as much food as we could from local farmers. We expanded the challenge to show how the combination of (1) frugal supermarket shopping, (2) preparing meals from basic ingredients, (3) buying local foods, (4) gardening, (5) food storage, and (6) home preservation of food could add up to a healthy, affordable, practical, and environmentally sustainable meal plan, even though the local meats, eggs, and dairy products are more expensive than typical supermarket fare. And the food had to be satisfying and taste good too, otherwise, what's the point? Call this the Slow Food for the Poor Challenge.

We succeeded on all accounts. Here's the summary of our results:

Total spent on food for week — $60.43

Food stamp allowance, 2 people 1 week — $61.87

Amount under budget — $1.44

Food cost average amount per day — $8.63

Amount bought from farmers — $44.18

Amount from supermarket — $16.80

Percent of local foods — 73%

Percent of supermarket foods — 28%

Besides coming in under budget, we ended with at least 2 more meals of leftovers in the fridge and apple pie filling in the freezer for later. The detailed table, showing the meals, ingredients, and prices, is document 31001 in this week’s readings.

The meats we ate during the week were buffalo, 100% grass-fed beef, and pork. Yes, we ate a lot of ground meat (sausage, beef, and buffalo). We also had a great pot roast for a festive weekend meal. The meats ranged in price from $2.95/lb (ground buffalo wrapped in butcher paper) to $4.50/lb for the buffalo round roast.

We ate ground meat nearly every day, and some might ask, "Wasn't that boring?" No, because we fixed it different ways. We had Redneck Salisbury Steaks (ground buffalo patties browned in a skillet, and cooked in gravy in the oven), homemade spaghetti sauce with ground buffalo and pasta, rice pilaf with ground buffalo, and beef stew made with hamburger.

Ground meat can take on different flavors, depending on the herbs used with it, and we made liberal use of our garden-grown dried herbs this week. If we had tried to eat unseasoned hamburger patties for a week, that would have gotten boring fast. Instead one day we were south of the border, and the next we ate in Italy and the day after in southwest Oklahoma. We were liberal with our use of herbs, onions, garlic, hot red peppers, habanero pepper salsa, and chipotle peppers, all from our garden with us-ens doing the processing (smoking for the chipotles, boiling water canning for the habanero pepper salsa, dehydrating for the peppers, curing for the onions and garlic). We did all of that work, in the summer and fall. Now we get to eat these items all year thanks to a couple of hours of work in the summer or fall.

Our eggs were from certified organic, free-ranging hens, bought directly from a farmer through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, costing $3/dozen. As the week went on, I slowly scaled back the number of eggs we ate for two reasons. One was to stay in the budget, the second was we were running out of farmer eggs and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative monthly delivery was more than a week away. On Sunday, Sean and I were a bit dubious about 1 scrambled egg each. It turned out fine. The sausage we scrambled with it added to the bulk, and the homemade hashbrowns made with leftover baked potatoes further filled out the meal, and the apple cobbler for breakfast dessert was a true treat.

Every day we had home baked rolls or biscuits made with 100% certified organic stone ground flour, made with Oklahoma wheat. I used the opportunity to try a couple of different recipes and we decided that the most recent version was undoubtedly "our best 100% whole wheat rolls ever". (Recipe is included below, of course.)

We baked biscuits or rolls every day, even though I only made dough twice during the week. Each time I made enough dough for several bakings, and kept the unused dough in the refrigerator.

We made intelligent use of leftovers, by design. Sunday's supper was a delicious hearty winter soup. It had leftover cabbage and the broth from cooking the cabbage, leftover beans and bean soup, some of the rice pilaf, and the gravy from the pot roast, simmered for a couple of hours, and served with fresh baked whole wheat rolls.

There's enough of that soup left for today, and we're glad about that because it was good, rich and complex flavors.

We would not have had such nice treats (apple pie and apple cobbler) if we had not preserved apples given to us by a friend during the summer. She had picked and preserved so many for her family she was out of room in her freezer. We sliced, dipped, and froze several bags of apples and each month we have apple treats.

We did not cut any corners on quality. We used olive oil and butter, not shortening and margarine. We buy olive oil at a locally owned supermarket for $10/gallon. They don't have it at that price all the time, so when it is cheap we buy several, and then we don't have to buy it for quite a while.

Our garden and home preservation skills made a major contribution to our diet. Home grown and/or preserved items we used during the week included spaghetti sauce, corn on the cob (bought from a farmer in the summer and frozen), green beans, peach and plum jam, chipotle peppers, habanero salsa, dried herbs, cured onions and garlic. We had fresh greens (chard) from the garden. Food processing techniques that contributed to our menu this month included jam making, boiling water canning, dehydrating, freezing, smoking peppers, and curing of alliums. .

We bought our meats through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, pork from a family in Okemah and buffalo from the Stepp family of Hinton and Dennis Garret of Eufaula. I think it is likely that folks in other areas would have a hard time finding locally produced meats at these prices. That of course was one of the reasons I started the organizing process to form the Cooperative. Oklahoma needed a way to conveniently buy food from farmers, and voila, the Oklahoma Food Cooperative was born. Our meat and egg prices are higher than supermarket fare. They are lower than what is found in health food stores and natural groceries.

Supermarket items included pasta, white flour (for thickening gravies and sauces), sugar, salt, rice, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, celery, dried beans, canned tomato sauce (we used the last of our frozen sauce this week, sigh), butter, and milk. We hope to add carrots to our list of "we grow all we eat" items next year. In the meantime we buy them at the supermarket.

Food storage proved its utility, in that I didn't have to buy anything except cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and celery, everything else was on hand. I did make an extra trip to the grocery store to check some prices, however, as I “charged myself” for the supermarket items I had on hand based on the price this week at Buy for Less at NW 23rd and Penn in Oklahoma City for the items.