Feeding Your Family Healthy Meals on A Food Stamp Budget

The following guest post is from Denise of WholesomeMommy.com:

Are you finding it harder to make ends meet?  Do your grocery dollars run out before the month does?  I have been in this situation.  I’m a real mom who has been faced with many challenges including not knowing how the next round of bills would get paid.  As many families have seen their food stamps/SNAP being cut this month, food insecurity is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.

As someone with a background in couponing and deal seeking, I am frustrated at seeing junky, processed foods more easily accessible for families on tight budgets.  So, with that in mind, I decided to be part of the solution. I’m Denise Sawyer from WholesomeMommy.com, a a blog about REAL food for REAL families.  As I’ve read comments on my blog and my facebook page it has become apparent that there are a couple things that keep families from preparing REAL, fresh foods:

1. SKILL = Many women/men never learned to cook. Several women that I am friends with even, don’t know basic food preparation skills. The extent of their cooking knowledge is preparing hamburger helper or microwaving a vegetable.  It’s not that they don’t WANT to cook, they just don’t know how and they don’t know where to look to learn that information.
2. TIME =  Many families feel that they don’t have TIME to prepare nutritionally dense, FRESH foods. {If this wasn’t true the processed foods industry or fast foods industry wouldn’t be booming businesses.}
3. MONEY = Many families feel that they don’t have enough money available to them to purchase REAL, wholesome foods.

The more conversations I have with other women- online and off, the more I have come to realize that most of these families WANT to eat fresh, REAL food but just aren’t sure where to start on a limited budget. They don’t have the extra money to play around  with until they “figure it out.”

One of the reasons I started Wholesome Mommy was to show women how to make changes one step at a time. I wanted women to see it was doable and to build a community in the process that would support one another in making these changes.  But I’ve decided to take it a step further and really put my money where my mouth is.

Last week, I announced the “REAL food on a Food Stamp Budget” challenge. Basically, I’ve set out to buy a month’s worth of groceries for a family of four for $400, or $100 per week.

Why $400? The federal government would give a family of 4 with NO income about $630 a month in SNAP benefits. Most families on food stamps/SNAP are receiving much less because they report SOME income or assets.  The amount of benefits you receive depends on that figure. So that means the federal government expects that if you aren’t receiving $630 per month in benefits, that you are making up the difference in your own income. Now, that said, many families with limited income don’t have the extra to contribute to groceries.

After talking with several women on my facebook page – both those on SNAP and those who are not, the consensus seems to be that a limited budget would be about $400 per month.

That comes to about $1.19 per person, per meal, for 3 meals a day, 7 days a week. That might be easy to do if you were picking up chemical laden, non-nutritious foods, but I promised these would be REAL food menus- full of organic dairy, antibiotic free meats, and other items not normally synonymous with a low income budget.  EVERY SINGLE INGREDIENT used will be included in this budget – I’m not using what I already have on hand to build my meals around.

I’ll be offering a monthly meal plan FOR FREE along with a printable grocery list so you’ll know exactly what to buy. What’s more is that I promised that I’d help you get organized and keep it simple enough for the working parent to prepare, or for families with more obligations than time.

Why for free? This has been my passion all along – to help people eat well. Following the Lord’s promptings I know that this is something that many families on low incomes need NOW and that the families I want so desperately to reach do not have the extra funds to purchase this kind of help. If we want to see a change, we have to be willing to be part of that change.

Regardless of what your income is, if you are someone on federal assistance or just someone who has a really tight grocery budget, or even someone who just wished that they could save a bit of their hard earned dollars so they could pay off debt or use it for other necessities, I hope you’ll take advantage of this and follow along. And, if you know someone who is in a desperate situation, I hope you’ll share.