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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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