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How feasible is it to eat on food stamps
Confidence level: 20 hours of research probability I missed something major >90% Felt it was pretty clearly CW since SNAP benefits are pretty CW
Food stamps recently had a proposed cut that is probably going through. Of course it's hard to know if these will actually go through or not and will it really make a major impact.
I decided to look into how much food stamps actually cover I decided to run some numbers
First I had to pick "what an actual diet might look like"
I decided to use my "standard bulking diet" which I had laying around (notably it's got nearly complete nutrition. and input the numbers into a spreadsheet.
I got to $9.30/day. in costs. slightly below half of that were the fruits and vegetables (thank wal-mart for having frozen vegetables and canned salmon.) Man fruits and vegetables are expensive!
Now you could definitely reduce costs by say going down to 1/3rd of a can of salmon, but I found myself limited by getting enough Selenium, B12 and vitamin D while avoiding getting too much folate. Replacing some salmon with some more beans is definitely an option though. Tofu is low enough in folate that you could go with that instead.
The main issue though is that I don't see how you cut down on the fruits/vegetables department very well. previously fruits and vegetables made up $4.51/day so as far as major expenses go that's the 2nd main place to look But the price of food is definitely surprisingly constraining. Though I think if someone tried to be more thrifty than me they could definitely get costs down about 40%. The main constraints are the B12, vitamin D and choline. cutting meat consumption in half and adding more split peas is a good solution there, cutting walnuts for more sunflower seeds and replacing chia with flax and some soymilk may also be wise. As long as the soymilk is vitamin D fortified you can cut down on salmon even more. We're already on frozen vegetables though cutting the few fresh ones for canned/frozen seems like a reasonable option, you'd still be at about $3 a day in fruits/veggies though.
Looking at how SNAP works, SNAP beenefits curve manages to avoid welfare cliffs! So for someone working a 20 hr/week job it covers about $5 a day. that's a little over half of all food costs absorbed by SNAP. There's probably a decent amount of room to reduce costs.
Though at the same time SNAP benefits basically give you a 30% tax on income <2k/month (roughly anyway) in fact in the state of california it seems that you'd need to be a family of many to qualify for SNAP. a single person house working full time literally cannot qualify with standard rent payments. A person working full time as the sole breadwinner of a 4 person household can get ~$400/month from SNAP if they make the minimum wage in california. Though I guess that's why it's only 1 in 8 people taht are even on the program in the first place.
Comparing this to the thrifty food plan by the us government (skip to page 38) I notice that they literally don't get enough vitamin E or D, I understand vitamin D but vitamin E? Come on sunflower seeds are cheap and have plenty of vitamin E.
Adjusted for inflation the thrifty food plan pays about $10.66/day compared to my 9.30 so my meal plan is actually a small step cheaper. (you have to divide their spending by 3 because the reference male eats 1/3rd of the calories of the family and then adjust by inflation)
Roughly speaking per day they were eating
1.7 lbs of vegetables a day 1/3rd starchy with a small amount of leafy greens also including a large amount of beans (counting those as vegetables!) 1.28 pounds of fruit per day of which 1/3rd was fruit juice. 0.67 pounds of grains a day, of which half are refined 1.97 pounds of milk a day, 3/8ths whole fat 5/8ths low/nonfat almost all from milk cartons 0,77 poudns of meat a day 0.33 pounds of misc a day
At the same time the govs plan eats about the same amount of vegetables standard bulking diet. counting the dried legumes as vegetables, I typically eat 1.5 pounds of vegetables a day, (they use a family of 4 but a male is expected to eat 1/3rd of the calories that the thrifty food plan has). They also devote most of the vegetables to the starchy variety rather than the cruciferous ones I mostly ate.
Fruit again was a deviation (as expected) I was eating a little over 1.25 pounds of fruit daily on my reference diet, while the Thrifty food plan is going on the same but the composition changed to be 1/3rd fruit juice.
They also include a good amount of pasturized milk which makes sense I guess. The protein requirements they had were also significantly lower than my standard bulking diet's requirements (70 g/day vs 120) presumably this allowed them to cut out a lot of the foods I ate.
In fact it appears that the majority of protein the Thrifty food plan gets comes from milk, as milk represents roughly 30% of the diet by weight.
I think the low amount of seafood in their plan reflects the lack of omega 3 DHA or EPA required. They only checked for omega 3 ALA which is relatively easy to obtain via Flax/Chia/Walnuts. DHA and EPA are the reasons I had to eat a whole half a can of salmon while on my bulk.
I wonder though, how far down can you actually go in cost of food while still maintaining a healthy diet? I think I could get below $6 but much lower than that and we run into b12 issues. 1 serving of canned salmon covers b12 and lentils/split peas/chia seeds/sunflower seeds can cover most of the rest. Though chia seeds are randomly pretty expensive...
The constraints would be
Must have 2300-2400 calories
must have at least 110 g of protein (I'm a lifter ok?)
must have no more than 16 grams of saturated fat
Must meet all the reccommended Dietary intakes for micros/macros on Cronometer without exceeding the upper limit (Except for the carbs/fat). Note that cronometer has no EPA or DHA requirement and only has a total omega 3 category sadly.
Some Questions about SNAP that I can't understand for the life of me even after researching it for 20 hours
Is it me or do people earning about 10k-30k/year have effective 50% marginal tax rates after transfers? Is there this weird tax range where your marginal tax rate falls down as you stop qualifying for federal aid but don't get pushed into the upper tax brackets?
Why was 30% of gross income spending on food chosen? It's such a strange number to me, A normal family of 4 should be spending like 8k/year on food? Most families I know spend <10% of their money on food, (shelter though oh god)
When I look at the federal gov's Thrifty food plan I don't see actual equations, I know they used a linear optimization program but I can't for the life of me determine its constraints. Why so much Milk? Why so many potatoes and so little leafy greens? Why nearly no nuts/seeds? Why couldn't it get vitamin D or Vitamin E and why was the USDA willing to just give up instead of manually editing the diet to incude enough vitamin A/D? (pretty easy to do with canned seafood, sunflower seeds and almonds)
This is an expensive diet. Fish and berries are very expensive and I don't think a person trying to save money would eat much of them.
I have a spreadsheet I've been working on to find the cheapest possible diet given various constraints. My current diet costs $5.95 a day. That's CAD, so it's only $4.29 USD a day. All subsequent numbers are in CAD.
As part of a challenge, I got it down to about $2 a day by relaxing some of the nutritional requirements that would take a very long time to cause any problems. However, this was a diet where almost all of the calories came from potatoes, so it would be pretty boring.
The cheapest possible nutritionally complete diet according to my spreadsheet (which doesn't yet have all food types) would cost only $4.29 a day. But I used a minimum protein intake of only 60 g a day, and allowed the saturated fat intake to be as high as 30 g (it ended up being 28.4 g) a day.
The diet is:
Note that milk is twice as expensive in Canada as it is in the US.
yeah as mentioned that was just "random diet I had lying around" but it's actually cheaper than the US governments "thrifty food plan"
It's relatively easy to make cheaper by cutting fruits/vegetables
when putting that on Chronometer you were obviously really high on saturated fat, but also missing out on magnesium and vitamin C and on Omega 3s (the main one I'm pretty oof on)
Did you know that Canned Salmon per gram of protein is actually cheaper than soybeans? Canned salmon is actually really cheap. it's about $3.15 a can and 1 can has about 330 grams of actual salmon in there, so it's literally 2-3x cheaper to buy canned salmon compared to fresh salmon.
Frozen blueberries are similarly much cheaper We're talking literally under half the cost of fresh blueberries. (still about $30 for 2k calories but much much cheaper than fresh)
Anyway salmon ends up mostly being clutch for the Omega 3 DHA, EPA and having some Selenium/Vitamin D as an added bonus. It's hard to beat.
After trying hard to reduce costs without going overboard in cutting fruits/vegetables I ended up at $6.73 a day with most of that (4.13) coming from fruits/vegetables
What doing math really shows is that most of the price of eating comes from fruits and Vegetables and other food groups are a distraction. Oats/Beans are basically free per calorie
According to my spreadsheet, this diet has 414 g of magnesium, most of it from the potatoes (you probably have to eat the skins). There's also a good amount in the milk.
It also has 99 mg of vitamin C, also mostly from the potatoes, but a little bit also comes from the kale.
The milk and eggs have a lot of saturated fat, but it's under the 30 g limit I put for saturated fat.
I don't have a omega-3 requirement in my spreadsheet, because it wasn't included in the nutrition dataset I'm working with. I plan to add that later.
That's surprising. I don't have all types of food added to my spreadsheet yet, but so far, the cheapest source of protein is actually flour.
The cheapest my grocery store sells is a 418 g can for $6 ($4.33 USD) which would be equivalent to $3.42 for a 330 g can. That works out to 16.5 g of protein per CAD. Lentils, split peas, potatoes, and pork are all much cheaper sources of protein.
However, canned tuna is cheaper than canned salmon at 19.0 g of protein per CAD (I used the drained weight, not sure if that's correct). Fresh salmon would be 5.1 g of protein per CAD. Flour is 68.9 g.
Flour is an extremely cheap source of calories. If all you cared about was getting enough calories, you could live on less than a dollar a day. I find that that starchy foods are very cheap sources of nutrients in general, but you would have to eat huge quantities of them to meet your requirements and you'd consume too many calories. Consuming foods that are nutrient dense is what makes things expensive, as that means eating vegetables.
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Be wary that 'protein' is a catchall, and over-optimized diets can be lacking in particular essential amino acids which we cannot synthesize ourselves.
This doesn't normally come up that often, but can pop up in heavily optimized diets.
110 grams is so many grams that those sorts of limitations are not meaningful. Even 110 grams of lentil protein will contain enough for all major amino acids.
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A lot of these recommended dietary intakes are basically yolo'd. They are sometimes based on typical consumption of healthy people rather than what people actually need, or are they are based on what people need in recovery but not in steady state, or they are just greatly padded. For Vitamin E for instance, U.S. says 15mg while UK says you only need 5mg. And for Vitamin D, you need much at all in your diet if you get a few hours a week in peak sunlight. There's also issues where meat and eggs might have lower amount of some vitamin or mineral, but much higher bioavailbility than a grain source or a vegetable source, but the RDA's are based on lower bioavailbility.
You eat an usually high amount of fruits and veggies. I don't think you actually need that much.
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I’ve lived for months on a dollar a day in food in the Texas suburbs, no garden- granted, this was 2019. Beef suet, flour, and greens(granted, some foraged) were 90% of my diet.
You can eat potatoes with a glass of milk a day, and be fine. You can live off of rice and beans for months at a time.
Food stamps exist to prevent malnutrition. They don’t exist to help you optimize your diet for getting swole. They don’t do a good job of either but pretending you have to eat an optimized fitness diet or starve isn’t a productive framing.
We were being LeanFIRE for a bit[1] and my waifu and kids were getting by on bulk rice, lentils, beans, flours and eggs and a quarter cow in the freezer. Also a CSA. Worked out to about $300/month.
It was fairly edible food albeit not really what you'd call American. What it did require was a lot of planning and being resourceful, and I'm absolutely positive the people on food stamps just don't have this capacity available.
People on food stamps can’t plan an optimized fitness diet either, but ‘have a ration of dairy/meat/veggies and then eat potatoes until you’re full’ is 10,000x better than what they’re currently eating, and they do have the capacity for that. Some African peasants would figure it out in about five minutes.
I can go on and on about underclass diets- they’re truly terrible- but money isn’t the issue. I remember working construction(designated bilingual guy on a white crew)and packing a lunch- nothing weird about that, lots of coworkers did- but I was considered unusual for bringing oranges, bananas, whatever in it. Some of the other guys brought sandwiches, but for most the healthiest thing was chips- and bananas are significantly cheaper than a bag of chips, cheaper than the candy and snack cakes that rounded out their lunches too. If we stopped at QT I would get a slice of pizza or a egg roll with a coke and the others got candy bars and donuts with an energy drink.
There are broad cross sections of the population that have just lost the social technology of eating a balanced diet. Not even healthy- balanced. In the mid 2010’s you could live in the US on Mexican wages- I did it- and eat a balanced diet based around potatoes, the cuts of meat Americans throw away, flour, the cheapest vegetables, etc. Poor Americans don’t do this. People from middle income countries know how to do this. Poor Americans don’t, unless they’re Hispanic and their parents/grandparents tell them.
Seriously, ‘buy bulk carbs and then add the luxury food(meat, vegetables, etc) your budget allows’ is common sense for the majority of the world’s population. But the poor in America have forgotten how to do this, and usually how to cook for themselves, and usually what a balanced diet even looks like- they drink energy drinks for breakfast, have snack cakes, soda, candy for the rest of the day unless they work at a restaurant and get a shift meal(when I lived among them you could also have added alcohol, but that’s increasingly being displaced by weed). You can’t fix this by giving them more money.
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I appreciate the effort in attempting to try "make the government numbers work." Spoiler alert: they seldom do.
Welfare programs that try to hypertarget one subdomain of life are hopelessly naive because they fail to accurately model individual financial realities as what they are - a complex system. As an analogy, it's like looking at an estuary in Mississippi that has run dry and saying "I'll solve this! By dumping this one bucket of water into the Mississippi river. In Minnesota"
Food stamps are only a part of a household's budget - yes, even for food. And it's not as if these kind of households are carefully categorizing different budget allocations. It's much more of an ad hoc "use whatever you pull out of the drawer" situation. In my experience, a poorer couple with or without kids has an income that's a mix of legal and grey market. One or other of the couple has a totally "straight" job with W-2 income or, at last, 1099 income that's being accurately reported. The other picks up a lot of cash odd jobs and semi-work and/or cash-tip heavy jobs. Sliding down the scale, you have strippers and onlyfans (I'm not really joking about this) and light "community" drug dealing.
The straight job is used on paper for a lot of these benefits programs and for apartment rental needs. The cash is used to finance a lot of the "operations" of the household - food, car and gas, clothing purchases. Savings aren't non-existent per se, but "savings" as a concept is just different. When you have leftovers from dinner, do you consider that "food savings?" No, that's just some extra that didnt' get consumed today but probably will in the next 1 - 3 days.
So SNAP and WIC are just other handfuls of money (albeit arbitrarily limited to grocery stores). They aren't conceived of or employed as the cornerstone of a family diet, or even supplement diet enhancement.
Beyond the raw numbers, this is the larger failing of government "assistance" programs. They are all built and deployed with these actuarial and academic economic concepts of complex systems of behavior. "Of course these folks will recognize the marginal benefit of this proportional 8.7% increase to their income for primary goods!" Not only is this elitist, it's stupid (a frequent pairing). The endemic illness in poverty is the mindset that sprouts within in [^1].
And this "mindset" argument is where progressive and liberal policy thinking really goes off the rails. "They need help! counseling! therapy! They've never been told how to make a budget etc. etc." You can see the surface level attraction here. People love to feel like they're doing something in the face of a problem wildly out of their control (hashtag Ukraine Flag). But run the thought experiment out; anybody who's sitting around going "Gee, I really wish there was a better way to organize my money so that I could maintain some consistency month to month" is miles ahead of the median reality - "I want food now. Food time!" Impulse control and (slightly) delayed gratification are things typically developed in later childhood and refined during adolescence. Yet the very people to whom we send SNAP and WIC "benefits" are those who fall on the sad end of the distribution of these traits!
Government cannot (and absolutely should not) be in the business of trying to re-shape an individual's character. State mandated virtue ethics? No, Thank you. This is a duty that falls to families and local communities. And, therein, we get to one of the stickier realities of poverty - it has areas of hyper concentration. Almost as if some folks revel in it. The very communities that most need to shape the character of their children are those most suffering from long term degeneracy in family formation, social and civic engagement, and long term consistent employment.
But here's $9.50 / day for Dr. Pepper and Hungry Man.
[1]: To some extent, it never totally exits a person. My father, now a boomer-multi-millionaire, stashes large boxes of raisins in odd spots around his house because he remembers what hunger felt like. It's a benign enough eccentricity we mostly joke about it, but it's plainly unnecessary - I've seen him order uber eats when he doesn't feel like cooking. This has precisely zero percent impact on his retirement budget and future year allocations.
You briefly mentioned it with "This is a duty that falls to families and local communities", and I'm interested in hearing what are the solutions you advocate for. I suppose maybe we can define the problem as "people/families/communities with food insecurity". FWIW, I'm interested to hear your opinion cause it seems you've thought quite a bit about this and because I've recently gotten involved in weekly volunteer session at the local soup kitchen. I've never really thought about the macro/root-cause-analysis/solution-space of this issue.
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From your link, see Thrifty Food Plan, 2021 Optimization Model (.zip) -> inputs/in_nutrient_constraints.csv
Their Vitamin D target is 15-100 (ug/day?) for men 20-50 years old, and I think TOCPHA is Vitamin E at 15-1000 (mg/day?). I suspect that they met their targets, without meeting your targets.
Glad I put that I probably missed something major! thanks!
Also page 36 they state " Two micronutrients are below the RDA, specifically vitamin E and vitamin D," but they did meet 85% of the RDA. Still just eat some sunflower seeds goddamnit
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I wish more upper middle class people had high school jobs. It would solve some stuff.
I worked in a grocery story in high school. I know what food stamps are like. No one is trying to figure out how much Selenium they are getting. They are buying the worst shit. Apparently, 10% of SNAP benefits go to sweetened beverages. To me that seems like an underestimate.
You can see the dividers. On this line, cookies, some cereal, a microwave dinner, and dr. pepper. On the other line, a bottle of jack. Ring them up separately please. Mom, can I have a food stamp for a donut?
I've seen it. This is the reality.
Anyone who ever worked at a grocery store knows there's another program called WIC (Women, infants, and children) that only allows stuff like whole milk and grape juice. I still have no idea why our food stamps aren't more like that. But even that wouldn't solve the massive fraud where convenience stores will give you 50 cents on the dollar for your food stamps. Nevertheless it would be a start.
At a bare minimum, can we please just ban soda with food stamps? How is anyone other than a Coca-Cola lobbyist in favor of this shit?
i work in a warehouse not in a grocery store sadly.
I know that many poor people have absurd habits, though my bubble issue was that since I was known in the warehouse as "the guy who studied nutrition in college" the guys in the warehouse ask me for advice on how to eat on a warehouse workers salary.
My bubble is Gym bros warehouse workers and upper class rationalists which uhhh defintely hurt my perception of "normal poor people" since the gym bros and warehouse workers were my "normal people"
My fellow forklift-american, have you ever written up details of your bulking diet? I've just been eating the same meat, starch, brassica meal in some combination for the last 20 years. Tuna salad for lunch, granola and yogurt for breakfast.
Could use some shaking up and probably a lot of optimization
Sure thing.
The cheapest healthy food generally is in the "1 pound bags of dry stuff" isle. Lentils, Black beans, dried barley ect. Dried oats seeds and nuts are also really cheap per calorie. (except for like macademia nuts)
The basic theory is you copy dr greger's daily dozen adding 2 servings of Canned fish, (Mackerel, Salmon Sardines, Herring, Oysters, anchovies, trout being the best, though as far as price goes Mackerel/salmon/sardines are far cheaper than the others) and adding other foods to meet the calorie goals
5 servings of vegetables, 1 cruciferous 2 Dark leafy green (for some reason broccoli counts for either leafy/Cruciferous) and 2 other (peppers onions carrots ect) Serving size = 1/2 cup cooked for each type
4 servings of beans (1/4 cup dried = 1 serving) Including 1 serving of split peas (choline)
3 servings of whole grains (sources seem to differ on if you should count potatoes as a grain) serving size = 1 slice of bread, 1/2 a bagel or 1/4 cup dried grain, 1/2cup oats)
4 servings of fruit including 1 serving of berries serving size= 1/2cup berries 1 medium fruit (2 kiwis)
3 serving of seeds/nuts (serving size = 1 ounce) 2 of Sunflower seeds and/or Almonds for Vitamin E, then 1 of peanuts or walnuts or pine nuts for Omega 6s
3 servings of Flax or Chia seeds (serving size = 1 tablespoon ground, this is 2 ounces if you use a scale)
2 servings of fish (serving size = 1 small tin or in a normal size can 1/5th of the can, I usually round up to half a can a day)
1 serving of calcium rich food (Milk, Almond milk, unncessary with chia seeds)
in general more beans is probably best if you're lacking in calories as they are cheap and have decent protein.
Is tuna officially off the list for some reason?
I basically don't eat beans except the occasional lentil dish. Or fruit aside from raisins, most of the year (fairly short growing season for it here). Most of it seemed to just be sugar?
Mercury content. The other fish on the list are smaller and don't accumulate as much mercury.
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They no longer pay enough to be worth their time- bigger ticket items got much more expensive (cars), and smaller-ticket items becoming much cheaper (entertainment and
sexporn) at the same time.The problem with that is that it's also good for society in general for them to work, and be properly rewarded for working with things they actually want; if you don't have that, the child-to-adult pipeline breaks down and... well, if you want to see the results of that, look out the window.
I suppose the car issue is a bit more complicated. I’m not so sure that cars are that much more expensive on average since back in the days, but either way the much more important aspect is that a combination of important social factors are disincentivizing teenage car use: car insurance rates becoming rather high for young men, the erosion of third places in social life, a general decline in community activity and the decline of malls in particular etc.
Back in my grocery store days, one of my co-workers was saving all his money for a used Camaro. He did eventually get the Camaro.
I thought that was stupid. Unlike him, I saved my money to help pay for college. I earned about $5/hour but the union took a lot, so I ended up with maybe $4/hour after taxes and union dues. I saved something like $3k in total.
Camaro guy had it right.
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Also meritocratic competition for upper-middle class teens and young adults is far more intense than it was back in the day. Given that you don't need the money, working in a McJob when your competition are polishing their Ivy League applications with extracurriculars/building a list of public GitHub commits/using unpaid internships to network into cool jobs is loser behaviour.
If there was an expectation among elite colleges and suchlike that a well-rounded upper-middle class upbringing included paid work then this would be different, but I don't think it ever was. Paid holiday jobs were common for upper-middle class kids in my social circle back in the day because it was worth it - the amount you could earn in a McJob was a lot more than the amount of pocket money it was socially acceptable for an upper-middle class family to give a teenager. But the ones who spent their summers travelling weren't seeing as doing anything wrong, just as regrettably broke once they got to University.
This seems like a filter bubble effect- nobody I know thinks a teenager working a low wage job is a problem.
It's not that low wage jobs on a CV are a problem - even now an elite university or graduate employer would rather see "worked at McDonalds" than "sat at home playing Fortnite" - it's that paid work is a much smaller positive than more socially prestigious unpaid activities you could be doing instead. And one-marshmallow-eaters optimise for the future value of the CV, not for disposable income in the present.
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Yeah, but if the admissions officers are in the filter bubble then the filter bubble effect becomes a real effect. The belief doesn't need to be "a teenager working a low wage job is a problem", it just has to be "a teenager who did these fancy things would make a better admit than a teenager who just didn't seem to have as many man-hours of accomplishments for some reason we don't understand".
But college admits aren’t nearly as hard as blue tribe elites think they are- good students nearly always get in to their state flagships, which are as good on a resume as any non-Harvard school.
It can’t be a real effect when the admissions officers have far less power than commonly believed.
At first glance, Harvard appears to have about a 4% salary premium over the top California state schools or Georgia Tech, 15% over U. Virginia, 20-25% over U. Michigan or UT-Austin, and about 55% over my childhood state's "flagship".
Plus, even the flagship schools aren't exactly guarantees. UT-Austin just tightened its auto-acceptance rate (the way 85% of its in-state students get in) to the top 5%. If you were only in the top 6% of your high school, I'd say you're a good student, but you didn't make the cut this year; if you were in the top 10% of your high school, I'd still say you're a good student, but you never really stood a chance.
UT Austin takes enormous numbers of transfer students, though, so good students have the option to graduate from their even if they have to do community college for the first two years.
Plus, Harvard is in a league of its own and feeds into an unusually high salary market. In purchasing power/multiples of local salary in the nearby market the numbers are probably a lot more even. Except for the very small percentage of population which can get into a top Ivy, ‘worry less about college admissions’ is the correct move.
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It seems that sometime, somewhere society arrived at the unstated consensus that high schoolers and college students who perform low-wage jobs part-time or on a seasonal basis are the sort of people who grow up to do the same sort of jobs full-time.
There are still places...
You ever visit a McDonald's in a rural area of the Midwest? All of a sudden there is a pretty blonde girl working the register, and everyone is competent and friendly.
It's like going back in time.
I wonder if there would be any way to get statistics on this.
When I went to college I moved out of a city where Burger King was staffed by teenagers managed by late-twenties workers, all of whom seemed to see this as a stepping stone to bigger things, and I moved to a much bigger city where Burger King workers were all twice my age and clearly not proud of or happy with where they were. I hoped the under-seared patties and limp lettuce were just due to heedlessness and heat lamps rather than spite and spit, but either way I found different places to eat.
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