Dish 1: Sleek

Sleek is not a terribly well known dish, which is a shame. I first tasted it at Ali Baba in Pittsburgh and spent years trying to find a recipe in a cookbook. I reverse engineered the thing in the end. I have lately found a couple of recipes online, but none I like better than my own:

1 15-oz can black eyed peas
1 bunch chard or kale, chopped
6 c. onions, sweet, sliced
1.5 c. bulgur wheat
2 T. lemon juice
4 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
24 oz (or so) water or broth
1 t. salt (less if using broth)
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil as needed for skillet

Carmelize 6 c. onions in a little olive oil in a big skillet. This takes 30-45 minutes. Toward the end, when the onions are looking brown and delicious, add garlic and brown it too. Add the greens and lemon juice, and cover. Cook just until wilted. Add bulgur, salt, and your broth/water. Cover and simmer until cooked, about 15 minutes. Add black eyed peas and heat through. Add black pepper and any additional salt to taste, maybe additional lemon juice to liven it up.

Forgot a Lemon!

Glad I left some money for contingencies. While making my sleek, I realized the recipe calls for the juice of 1/2 a lemon. Oops! Add $0.69 to my total to make $28.10 spent, and $4.04 is what I have left for the rest of the week.

Sleek, aka lunch for the next 7 days....

Shopping Trip #3 and some totals

Got back from my third shopping trip and came in under budget for

Supermarket shopping: $20.99

my food for the week. I was able to afford my serrano chile, some tea, a sweet potato, and some carrots, and I feel a little better about the nutritional reality with some orange vegetables in the mix. I am keeping the $4.73 leftover to see how I want to spend it to supplement what I have. I might buy some eggs to enhance the gallo pinto later in the week, or I might save it for some kind of treat. Tortillas are not out of the question.

Folks from the South may recognize that I shopped at a Harris Teeter, a supermarket that is thought of generally as being more upscale and more expensive. But my other options were Whole Foods and two different Safeway stores. DC nicknames its Safeways and my options are the Soviet Safeway known for its limited selection and bare shelves, and the Sandinista Safeway known for catering to Central Americans in the neighborhood. Sounds promising for someone trying to make gallo pinto, but in fact based on my online exploration (and in keeping with earlier in-person experiences) it was actually much more expensive for what I needed to buy (1 lb bag of black beans was $1.99 there as opposed to $1.29; and they did not have one-pound bags of rice, effectively pricing me out). Your mileage may vary.

At Harris Teeter, I weighed everything, when I would have approximated before. I bought only what I needed, when I would have gotten a little extra to be sure I had enough. I could not be tempted by weekly specials on pineapple or stock up on staples.

When I went to pick up my milk I noticed I could have switched from lactose free milk to soymilk to save a dollar; I pondered it for a long time, but stuck with the milk. Similarly I pondered for a long time between my ginger root and packaged tea; in the end my need to take teabags to work pushed me toward the more expensive item.

As I put the items on the conveyor I recounted everything in my head to make sure I was on budget. Nervous as the clerk rang me up, she said the total, $20.99, and I felt a wave of relief. Then the question came, I've heard it before but it sounded so different today: would you like to make a donation to the food bank?

Why yes, yes, I would. Perhaps you would too.
And that was my privilege as a SNAP Challenge participant rather than a SNAP recipient.

After all this, I still have the cooking ahead of me today, then the challenge actually begins tomorrow. I hope I am up to it.


Here's how the shopping worked out across my three trips overall:

Miles walked to do the shopping: 2.8
Time spent: about 2 hours
Money: $20.99+$6.13+$2.74=$27.41
Leftover (for now): $4.73

My SNAP Challenge Shopping List

                                                       Estimated  Actual

Breakfast : Homemade muesli  

2 qt generic fat free lactose free milk   3.79        3.79

Box generic corn flakes                        2.49        1.97 (on sale this week)

2 c generic oats                                   1.99        1.35 (bulk food at organic market; 3.5 c)

Raisins                                                1.99        1.97 

Dish 1: Sleek

Blackeyed Peas                                    0.77          0.77

Collards                                               1.99          1.25 (farmers' market double dollars)

Bulgur Wheat (1.5 c)                            2.99          1.39 (bulk food at organic market)

Onion (3 lb bag)                                   2.47          2.47

Garlic                                                  0.50          0.50 (farmers' market double dollars)

Dish 2: Gallo Pinto

Black Beans  (1 lb)                                1.29          1.29

Rice (11b)                                            1.29          1.29

Green Bell Pepper                                 1.49          0.75 (farmers' market double dollars)

Tomatoes                                            1.00          0.88

Onion and Garlic (see above)

Bonus: Serrano chile!                                            0.21

Snacks:

7 bananas                                             2.42          2.23

7 apples                                                5.01          3.63 (farmers' market double dollars)

Bonus: 7 carrots!                                                   1.02                          

Bonus: Sweet potato!                                             0.65

Total                                                  $31.48       $27.41

Shopping Expedition #2

With SNAP dollars doubled at my local farmers's market,
this bounty cost $6.13

I have returned from the farmers' market with some good savings. My original strategy was as follows:

Savings strategy #2: Farmers’ Market!  

Thanks to local food activists, SNAP dollars go twice as far at my Farmers' Market to encourage fresh local organic produce consumption and its nutritional benefits. However they only double the first $10. Still, if I can buy $20 worth of produce at the farmers' market, I can stretch my total allotment to as much as $42.14.

		Price to beat	Need	Up to
collards		$4/bunch	1 bunch	$4
Pepper		$3/ea	1 pepper	$3
Onion		$1.64/lb	3 lbs	$5
Apples		$5/lb	7 (2-3 lb)	$10
Garlic		$1.00/ea	1 fist	$1
				$23

The onion was too expensive at $3/lb, and the garlic came in right on target.  I got good savings with the pepper ($1.49 for 2), the apples (2.8 lbs for $7.25), and the collards ($2.50/bunch). I spent $12.25 in all, but  because my SNAP dollars were doubled at the farmers' market, my total came in at just $6.13.  

I realized on my way to the farmers' market that I had forgotten to check for bulk tea options at the organic market yesterday. I went back there, and found they don't have bulk spices at all. I need a new option, and I am thinking about buying ginger root for ginger tea. Stay tuned as I see what my supermarket has to offer. 

My total spent so far is $8.87.  If I am able to find everything I need at the supermarket within my price estimate, I will have over $5 left. if it goes well, I will pick up some carrots to enhance my snacking, and the ginger root. More soon...stay tuned. 

Shopping Report #1

3.5 c oats and 1.5 c bulgur wheat: $2.74 at Yes! Organic Market

Last night I went for my first shopping trip in keeping with one of my strategies: bulk foods. As I posted earlier:

Savings Strategy #1: Bulk Foods

I will go to my local organic market to see if I can save money on some items. I am not sure they will be cheaper than the supermarket, but I know what to look for in the bins: 

Bulk Foods		Price to beat
rice (1 lb)		1.29/lb
black beans (1 lb)		1.29/lb
bulgur (1.5 c)		3.00/lb
oats (2 c)		2.00/lb

   

Especially with the oats and bulgur, where I don’t need to buy a whole pound, I might find some savings over supermarket packaging that starts at one pound. If I save money here, I might be able to afford a small amount of bulk tea costing much less than the $3 the supermarket will charge.

The organic market involved walking 1.2 mi. round trip, for four items. In my day to day life I would have paid more for these items at my regular grocer for convenience.  It was exactly as I predicted: rice and beans were each substantially more than $1.29/pound ($1.99/lb for beans; cheapest rice was $1.49/lb but the kind I want to use for gallo pinto is $1.99).

The good news is that I was able to obtain my 1.5c of bulgur wheat for $1.39. The even better news is that I nearly doubled my oats purchase and bought 3.5 c for $1.35. This should help me feel more full in the mornings before lunch. I spent $2.74 of my $32.14. I have saved $2.24 over my original spending plan, which gives me a little breathing room. 

But I am anxious that my grocery store won't have a 1-pound package of rice to sell me, or that prices will be higher than posted online. I can go back to the organic market if need be for the rice and beans, but other items don't have cheaper alternatives. More later from me as I head to the farmers' market and the grocery store with my $29.40. 

The SNAP Challenge in STEM Education

I am taking the SNAP Challenge this week – pledging to live on the average per person SNAP benefit for my state (not a state, actually -- DC), which comes to $32.14 per week. I do this in part because I work in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education, and I want to raise awareness in this community about the effects of racial and economic inequality on minority and low income student access to STEM education and STEM careers. 

For decades well-intended STEM educators have sincerely wondered why the participation numbers for minorities have been so low and moved so little. We are just beginning to ask the same questions about socioeconomic status and the under-representation of poor students in STEM at the baccalaureate level and higher. At the same time, effects of poverty in K-12 education are well known; a recent article in the Washington Post  documents how poor children have become the majority in schools in the South and in the West, and how we need to shift our focus from No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top to really meeting students' needs. One of those needs, increasingly, is hunger. The data are staggering. With 15 percent of the country living below the poverty line, 50 million Americans, or 1 in 6, is food insecure – meaning they do not know where their next meal is coming from at some point during the year.  Nearly 1 in 4 children lives in a food insecure family, and more than a quarter of children under age 5 live in poverty.

These are averages across the population. Within the African American community, 38.8 percent of children under age 18 and 42.7 percent of children under age 5 live below the poverty line. A quarter of African American households and just under a quarter of Latino households are food insecure, compared to about 1 in 10 Caucasian households.  1 in 3 American Indian children are food insecure. The STEM meritocracy pretends this is of no consequence. With double or triple poverty and food insecurity rates in Black, Latino, and Native American communities compared with non-Hispanic whites, we must begin to imagine differently the challenges of minority participation in STEM, develop a deeper understanding of the life contexts of 25-40% of the students we seek to welcome from under-represented groups, and incorporate into our strategies an analysis of how social inequality is reproduced within the education system to limit access to STEM fields and other pathways to economic security.

Overpreparing for the SNAP Challenge

With three days to go before the SNAP Challenge, I find myself bringing all my privileged resources of education and technology to bear on this problem. I am an engineer, and it seems I just can't help myself; I created a spreadsheet. I used online shopping data to gather price information and optimize among various healthy recipe options. I also have the experience of having been a graduate student, when I lived on a limited budget but always with the safety net of family. I definitely had low grocery store bills then compared to now, where low meant around $50/week for two people, but that was 20 years ago. $25 per person then went easily twice and probably three times as far as my $32.14 will this week, in today’s dollars, for a household of one in Washington DC.   I bring a privileged knowledge of cooking and nutrition, and  access to a full kitchen, stocked with condiments I am allowed to use as part of the challenge.

I know the limitations of my analysis: I have based my spreadsheet off a grocery store in Arlington, VA, the same chain that is within walking distance of my home in DC, but the prices are probably higher here, and my local store does not have online ordering, so I can’t get information on local pricing. I can’t go to suburban stores with lower prices because I do not have a car and already plan to invest weekend time in shopping and cooking for the week. This Herculean effort is possible because I know it is a one time thing, something I could not sustain on a regular basis. 

Even with all these tools and resources, and all the strategies of people who have taken the SNAP challenge before and blogged about it, all my spreadsheet solutions fail in some way.  I know there are many strategies: Ramen. Peanut Butter and Jelly. Eggs. Canned tuna. Mac and Cheese. I chose the beans and rice strategy, prioritizing high fiber so I feel full, and complete protein so I can hopefully sustain brain power at work.  One of my problems is there are no economies of scale for a household of one. I have to buy at least a can of beans, a bunch of collards, a pound of rice. It is not cheaper for me to buy individualized packs of processed food except for ramen, on sale this week for 12 cents a packet, but which I consider a last resort nutritionally.So here is what I worked out:

My SNAP Challenge Shopping List

Breakfast : Homemade muesli  

2 qt generic fat free lactose free milk   3.79  

Box generic corn flakes                      2.49

2 c generic oats                                  1.99

Raisins                                               1.99

Dish 1: Sleek

Blackeyed Peas                                  0.77

Collards                                             1.99

Bulgur Wheat (1.5 c)                          2.99

Onion (3 lb bag)                                 2.47

Garlic                                                 0.50

Dish 2: Gallo Pinto

Black Beans  (1 lb)                             1.29

Rice (11b)                                          1.29

Green Bell Pepper                              1.49 (yes this is the outrageous price of a single pepper in DC)

Tomatoes                                           1.00

Onion and Garlic (see above)

Snacks:

7 bananas                                           2.42

7 apples                                              5.01

Total                                                  $31.48

Now there are two important things missing: a serrano chile for the gallo pinto and tea. The chile I might be able to afford, but not the tea unless something changes. I will really miss drinking tea. I worry about my own hydration, as I am bad at drinking cold water in cold weather. I know, cry me a river.  Still, it is important to me, but it costs at minimum $3 in my grocery store and can't possibly be worth 10% of my budget. I'm not trading my apple a day for tea. So I think about other shopping venues near me. There is an organic market that accepts SNAP as well as a weekly farmers' market. I am eager to see what I can do there, and develop my strategies. 

Savings Strategy #1: Bulk Foods

I will go to my local organic market to see if I can save money on some items. I am not sure they will be cheaper than the supermarket, but I know what to look for in the bins: 

Bulk Foods		Price to beat
rice (1 lb)		1.29/lb
black beans (1 lb)		1.29/lb
bulgur (1.5 c)		3.00/lb
oats (2 c)		2.00/lb

   

Especially with the oats and bulgur, where I don’t need to buy a whole pound, I might find some savings over supermarket packaging that starts at one pound. If I save money here, I might be able to afford a small amount of bulk tea costing much less than the $3 the supermarket will charge.

Savings strategy #2: Farmers’ Market!  

Thanks to local food activists, SNAP dollars go twice as far at my Farmers' Market to encourage fresh local organic produce consumption and its nutritional benefits. However they only double the first $10. Still, if I can buy $20 worth of produce at the farmers' market, I can stretch my total allotment to as much as $42.14.

		Price to beat	Need	Up to
collards		$4/bunch	1 bunch	$4
Pepper		$3/ea	1 pepper	$3
Onion		$1.64/lb	3 lbs	$5
Apples		$5/lb	7 (2-3 lb)	$10
Garlic		$1.00/ea	1 fist	$1
				$23

This adds up to $23, not $20, so I am hoping for additional savings somewhere in here that bring my total down to $20.

I am feeling pretty good about this optimization, even as I am aware how close to the edge this takes me. It is just barely there. I think about the recent cuts, about what it would mean to go down thirty cents a day, $2.10 less for the week. What would I give up? Probably the corn flakes, leaving me with oatmeal (cold or hot) for breakfast.

I am satisfied with my plan, until I  lay it out as a week's menu:

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Breakfast	Muesli	Muesli	Muesli	Muesli	Muesli	Muesli	Muesli
Snack	Banana	Banana	Banana	Banana	Banana	Banana	Banana
Lunch	Gallo Pinto	Gallo Pinto	Gallo Pinto	Gallo Pinto	Gallo Pinto	Gallo Pinto	Gallo Pinto
Snack	Apple	Apple	Apple	Apple	Apple	Apple	Apple
Dinner	Sleek	Sleek	Sleek	Sleek	Sleek	Sleek	Sleek

NO VARIETY. Yeah, I can switch the banana and the apple, or the sleek and the gallo pinto, but…this is going to get very old very fast. Maybe I can dress up the gallo pinto with a banana, ersatz maduros, but now the second guessing begins....

Why did I spend so much on breakfast? It is the most important meal of the day! And this is where my variety will be for the week: I can have hot oatmeal, or corn flakes some days for a change.  If I have any left over it might make a kind of dessert one night. 

Maybe I will sub in a pear or two for a couple of apples, but apples travel better to work. If only I had money for an egg, or a sweet potato, or a mango. Mangoes cost a dollar each, but bananas are much cheaper at about 35 cents!   I could trade a banana for a mango, but I would rather have tea and a fresh chile.  The cheapest I can get an egg is a half dozen for $1.69. The debate in my head rages on. I had an alternative meal I considered instead of the sleek that involved a dozen eggs ($2.19) and frozen O'Brien potatoes with onions and peppers ($3.75). With various arrangements of omelets, frittata, and hash I could liven things up a bit, but I realized that eating 2 eggs 6 nights in a row was really not very healthy, and I would still need one more meal to round out the week when I finished the dozen.While not as bad as eating eggs every day, I am sure my monotonous diet is still nutritionally deficient long term. I realize there are no orange fruits and veggies, and I may buy a carrot or two if I have money leftover.  My half serving of dairy a day doesn't come close to meeting my nutritional needs, but being lactose intolerant I can't see being able to afford any more lactose-free or soy products. 

These are my tradeoffs to make. While I can afford some fresh veggies with planning, hustle, and determination, I still can't afford the variety nutrition demands. There is only one of me, and it is very hard to beat the monotony on $32.14. I imagine with a second mouth to feed and $64.28, I could have more variety and mix things up more. But that is someone else’s SNAP Challenge, not mine.