Living on the food stamp allotment of our renter carries many requirements, both physical and mental.
The first, and most obvious, is a stove, or at least a burner. After we asked the women to move because her rent was greater than her disability check and it became obvious she had no other income sources, she moved into one of the old motels that have been converted into efficiency apartments. The only unit available came with a microwave and bar refrigerator, but no stove.
She’s on a waiting list again and her rent will increase when a unit with a stove becomes available.
The last time I talked with her, my boss’s former tenant was searching second hand stores for a hotplate. Until then, she can’t cook her pinto beans.
For a dollar a day, she will have to eat things that require no cooking. A bag of dry cereal costs $3.00, a half jar of peanut butter is $1.00 and bread is $.88 a loaf. If she ate a third of a bag of cereal a day without milk, it would add 720 calories to the 410 she would get from peanut butter and bread.
Microwavable food isn’t an alternative. A pot pie cost $.89 in the local store, but only contains 390 calories. The cheapest frozen dinners are $1.25 and contain 260 to 280 calories. You need at least 1,000 a day to lose weight safely. 2,000 calories are recommended for most adults.
The bar refrigerator is adequate for left overs, although you can only make a couple days worth of pinto beans at a time without risking spoilage. Eggs, margarine, the citrus punch, even peanut butter, would all be fine. However, freezing food is impossible.
The choices I made for $39 a month require a larger pot for soaking and cooking beans or potatoes, and a smaller one with a lid for everything else. A frying pan is usually necessary to cook eggs. Some kind of flat metal is useful for warming bread over the burner: a toaster is a luxury. Beyond that, the woman needs a long handled serving spoon to stir the beans, a spatula for the eggs, a sharp knife to cut potatoes and avocados, a dull knife to spread peanut butter, a plate or bowl, a glass, and a fork or spoon to eat with.
One of the most critical things is a measuring cup. Although you only need to worry about proportions if you’re fussy about how your rice is cooked, you need to faithfully measure out each day’s portion of pinto beans, rice and lentils if you want them to last the time expected. That, in turn, assumes the first of the mental requirements: the ability to plan ahead and discipline oneself. Too many would eat too much too soon in the month and hope providence would provide.
The basic arithmetic requires both addition and division to divide $39 by 4 weeks. Planning for the inevitable 5-week month requires more math. Of course, one wants to end each month with nothing left on the card, and the surplus dry foods horded.
Buying the healthiest choices, and not living on pinto beans, wheat tortillas, and eggs, is trickier. Package labeling is difficult, and misleading. For instance, egg cartons carry no information. Protein isn’t mentioned on many but thiamin is, suggesting the latter is more important.
How does one sort through the deliberately obscure ingredients to know dextrose is sugar and if all forms of sodium are salt? How do you judge the benefits of what’s essentially sugar water with a dollop of juice and vitamins? How does one know riboflavin is good for you or the characteristics of potassium benzoate?
The woman is in her 50's. Even if she learned some of this in school, that was many years ago and much has changed. Xanthan gum was approved in 1968. I certainly have no idea what the food pyramid is supposed to tell me. It was invented after I graduated from high school in 1962. It was only in the late 60's that I learned protein wasn’t a simple ingredient, but required complementing sources, and that knowledge only came from a chance encounter, not much different than my meetings with our tenant.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 2
It’s possible to eat on a $39 a month food stamp allotment, but it’s only possible to do so for a short time and remain healthy.
It isn’t just the lack of calories and nutrients that’s a problem. The diet I devised is one that no diabetic could eat. In addition to the obvious sources of carbohydrates, there’s corn syrup in the citrus punch and white bread, while cheap peanut butter has another form of sugar, dextrose.
If one substituted eggs for the punch, one would add cholesterol: 62% of the daily need, based on 2,000 calories. The canned vegetables are as bad for their high sodium content. The avocado and margarine contain saturated fats.
This is a diet that could lead to obesity, heart problems and diabetes. The limited calcium and vitamin D could add bone density problems for thin women. Without the vitamin C in the citrus punch and the wide range of vitamins and minerals in the potatoes, one would be worse off.
In addition, what nutrients there are in the diet are expensive. The 128-ounce citrus punch is only 1% fruit juice. 57 ounces of regular orange juice has been on sales for months for $3.49 and is more juice. The one cost $1.50 more, but the price for ounce of juice is less.
Likewise, the cheapest peanut butter is cut with cotton seed or canola oil, which increases the actual price for the peanuts.
The other hidden price is psychological. One would spend half the day preparing food and would probably be thinking about it much of the time. If a television was broadcasting images meant to make one hungry, the cravings to eat would be worse. It’s no fun walking through a grocery store hungry without enough money.
Pinto beans aren’t just the diet of the ancestors here. They also require the lifestyle: they have to soak for eight hours and cook for four. One would have to put them in water before going to bed. While the cooking time can be shortened with a pressure cooker or lengthened with a crock pot to make it possible for someone to work, I assume such appliances aren’t available to someone living of such limited means.
The cooking time makes it impossible to have an 8-hour job, unless one gets up in the middle of the night to start the beans to cook and immediately refrigerates them for dinner or eats them for breakfast.
Lentils and rice take about 45 minutes to cook, while potatoes take at least 25 minutes to boil.
The woman is probably wrong to think the government thinks she can live on $39 a month. Food stamps are supposed to supplement income that also would include money for food. But, if there is no extra money, if one thinks like she does, then one is thrown farther back in economic times, from the time of pinto beans and subsistence agriculture, to the life of the hunter-gatherer.
To supplement this diet, one would need to search out local food banks and places that provide free meals, and hope one could qualify. Again, scavenging precludes the ability to hold a job, although an evangelistic Christian center near her house periodically advertises free food in the evenings, at the price, I suppose, of a sermon.
So, now I know the price of pinto beans, but I’m not sure I know the full costs for a child whose tastes are formed by an inadequate food stamp assignment. I can see what a treat it would be to go into a fast food restaurant and order a sandwich that contains an entire day’s calories on a single bun and leave feeling really full.
It isn’t just the lack of calories and nutrients that’s a problem. The diet I devised is one that no diabetic could eat. In addition to the obvious sources of carbohydrates, there’s corn syrup in the citrus punch and white bread, while cheap peanut butter has another form of sugar, dextrose.
If one substituted eggs for the punch, one would add cholesterol: 62% of the daily need, based on 2,000 calories. The canned vegetables are as bad for their high sodium content. The avocado and margarine contain saturated fats.
This is a diet that could lead to obesity, heart problems and diabetes. The limited calcium and vitamin D could add bone density problems for thin women. Without the vitamin C in the citrus punch and the wide range of vitamins and minerals in the potatoes, one would be worse off.
In addition, what nutrients there are in the diet are expensive. The 128-ounce citrus punch is only 1% fruit juice. 57 ounces of regular orange juice has been on sales for months for $3.49 and is more juice. The one cost $1.50 more, but the price for ounce of juice is less.
Likewise, the cheapest peanut butter is cut with cotton seed or canola oil, which increases the actual price for the peanuts.
The other hidden price is psychological. One would spend half the day preparing food and would probably be thinking about it much of the time. If a television was broadcasting images meant to make one hungry, the cravings to eat would be worse. It’s no fun walking through a grocery store hungry without enough money.
Pinto beans aren’t just the diet of the ancestors here. They also require the lifestyle: they have to soak for eight hours and cook for four. One would have to put them in water before going to bed. While the cooking time can be shortened with a pressure cooker or lengthened with a crock pot to make it possible for someone to work, I assume such appliances aren’t available to someone living of such limited means.
The cooking time makes it impossible to have an 8-hour job, unless one gets up in the middle of the night to start the beans to cook and immediately refrigerates them for dinner or eats them for breakfast.
Lentils and rice take about 45 minutes to cook, while potatoes take at least 25 minutes to boil.
The woman is probably wrong to think the government thinks she can live on $39 a month. Food stamps are supposed to supplement income that also would include money for food. But, if there is no extra money, if one thinks like she does, then one is thrown farther back in economic times, from the time of pinto beans and subsistence agriculture, to the life of the hunter-gatherer.
To supplement this diet, one would need to search out local food banks and places that provide free meals, and hope one could qualify. Again, scavenging precludes the ability to hold a job, although an evangelistic Christian center near her house periodically advertises free food in the evenings, at the price, I suppose, of a sermon.
So, now I know the price of pinto beans, but I’m not sure I know the full costs for a child whose tastes are formed by an inadequate food stamp assignment. I can see what a treat it would be to go into a fast food restaurant and order a sandwich that contains an entire day’s calories on a single bun and leave feeling really full.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 1
Do you know the price of pinto beans?
Of course, I don’t. I don’t like them, and pass the open cartons without a glance when I’m in the produce aisle of the grocery that caters to local folks.
The question only came up when I was talking to a woman who was complaining that her food stamp allocation had been cut to $39 dollars and she wanted to know how you eat on that with the high price of pinto beans.
Since an individual’s food stamp account in New Mexico is updated once a month, I assume she was asking how do you live on $9.75 a week, $8.75 if you set aside some for five week months.
The next time I was in the local store, I checked the price. A pound of beans is $.69 and contains 12.5 servings, each a quarter cup before soaking. If one reverted to the staple diet of the region for centuries and bought a package of corn tortillas at 30 for $1.18, one would have nutritious, if boring, meals for a week.
However, judging from the quantities in the store, more people buy wheat tortillas, which are also larger. However, wheat lacks the essential proteins found in corn treated with lye, and is less nutritious with beans.
One could double the amount of pinto beans, and eat them twice a day. Instead, I would buy a bag of lentils and a bag of white rice for $1.72. I know brown rice is better, but it wasn’t available in the grocery which caters to local poor people. Like corn treated with lime and pinto beans, the two are complementary proteins.
I would also buy a five pound bag of potatoes and make it last two weeks for a cost $1.00 a week. The cheapest stick margarine was $.23 a stick, and should last a week to flavor the potato, if I was careful.
My total purchase would be $4.82 for the week. It provides 800 calories. The suggested daily intake is 2000, with 1000 the minimum for safely losing weight.
If I wanted to set aside a dollar for that five week month, I still have $3.93 to spend. People here would probably buy eggs, avocados and some kind of dried or fresh chili. When the price of each is spread out over two weeks, they cost about $3.00.
An alternative is peanut butter and white bread, another pair of complementing proteins, which would cost $1.88 a week. Again, I know wheat bread is better, but the cheapest costs $.20 more a loaf and doesn’t appear to have any more nutrients than the enriched white. Brown bread isn’t necessarily whole grain.
Since I have a limited tolerance for both eggs and peanut butter, I would probably buy a gallon of the cheapest citrus punch and possibly some avocados and canned tomato sauce to flavor the pinto beans. The first cost $2.00 a gallon and has 90 calories a serving; small avocados were being sold for 3 for $1.00 when I looked and have 227 calories; tins of tomato sauce containing 3.5 servings are $.33 and 20 calories each.
I considered canned vegetables which sell for 3 for $2.00, or $4.00 for six days. Each can is supposed to hold 3.5 servings, but it would difficult to store the left overs - this budget doesn’t allow for such luxuries as plastic wrap or aluminum foil. I could eat the whole can, even though it would contain 50% of my daily salt requirement, if I were actually eating 2000 calories. After all a can of peas would add 245 calories, corn 280, and green beans 70.
Any remaining money could also be used to buy black pepper ($2.50 for a large can) to spice the bland lentils and pinto beans, or permit more margarine on the potatoes.
Choosing the citrus punch with pinto beans, potatoes, lentils and rice, avocados and tomato sauce, my daily caloric intake would be just over 1,000. I would have 74% of the protein for an adult woman (adult men require more), but 163% of the necessary vitamin C and 132% of the fiber. Based on the recommended 2,000 calories, I would also have 19% of my sodium, 27% of my calcium, 69% of my iron, and average 15 to 25% of other necessary vitamins and trace minerals.
I could make it, but it would take a while for my stomach to adjust. It would be harder on the woman who posed the question; she weighs more than I.
Of course, I don’t. I don’t like them, and pass the open cartons without a glance when I’m in the produce aisle of the grocery that caters to local folks.
The question only came up when I was talking to a woman who was complaining that her food stamp allocation had been cut to $39 dollars and she wanted to know how you eat on that with the high price of pinto beans.
Since an individual’s food stamp account in New Mexico is updated once a month, I assume she was asking how do you live on $9.75 a week, $8.75 if you set aside some for five week months.
The next time I was in the local store, I checked the price. A pound of beans is $.69 and contains 12.5 servings, each a quarter cup before soaking. If one reverted to the staple diet of the region for centuries and bought a package of corn tortillas at 30 for $1.18, one would have nutritious, if boring, meals for a week.
However, judging from the quantities in the store, more people buy wheat tortillas, which are also larger. However, wheat lacks the essential proteins found in corn treated with lye, and is less nutritious with beans.
One could double the amount of pinto beans, and eat them twice a day. Instead, I would buy a bag of lentils and a bag of white rice for $1.72. I know brown rice is better, but it wasn’t available in the grocery which caters to local poor people. Like corn treated with lime and pinto beans, the two are complementary proteins.
I would also buy a five pound bag of potatoes and make it last two weeks for a cost $1.00 a week. The cheapest stick margarine was $.23 a stick, and should last a week to flavor the potato, if I was careful.
My total purchase would be $4.82 for the week. It provides 800 calories. The suggested daily intake is 2000, with 1000 the minimum for safely losing weight.
If I wanted to set aside a dollar for that five week month, I still have $3.93 to spend. People here would probably buy eggs, avocados and some kind of dried or fresh chili. When the price of each is spread out over two weeks, they cost about $3.00.
An alternative is peanut butter and white bread, another pair of complementing proteins, which would cost $1.88 a week. Again, I know wheat bread is better, but the cheapest costs $.20 more a loaf and doesn’t appear to have any more nutrients than the enriched white. Brown bread isn’t necessarily whole grain.
Since I have a limited tolerance for both eggs and peanut butter, I would probably buy a gallon of the cheapest citrus punch and possibly some avocados and canned tomato sauce to flavor the pinto beans. The first cost $2.00 a gallon and has 90 calories a serving; small avocados were being sold for 3 for $1.00 when I looked and have 227 calories; tins of tomato sauce containing 3.5 servings are $.33 and 20 calories each.
I considered canned vegetables which sell for 3 for $2.00, or $4.00 for six days. Each can is supposed to hold 3.5 servings, but it would difficult to store the left overs - this budget doesn’t allow for such luxuries as plastic wrap or aluminum foil. I could eat the whole can, even though it would contain 50% of my daily salt requirement, if I were actually eating 2000 calories. After all a can of peas would add 245 calories, corn 280, and green beans 70.
Any remaining money could also be used to buy black pepper ($2.50 for a large can) to spice the bland lentils and pinto beans, or permit more margarine on the potatoes.
Choosing the citrus punch with pinto beans, potatoes, lentils and rice, avocados and tomato sauce, my daily caloric intake would be just over 1,000. I would have 74% of the protein for an adult woman (adult men require more), but 163% of the necessary vitamin C and 132% of the fiber. Based on the recommended 2,000 calories, I would also have 19% of my sodium, 27% of my calcium, 69% of my iron, and average 15 to 25% of other necessary vitamins and trace minerals.
I could make it, but it would take a while for my stomach to adjust. It would be harder on the woman who posed the question; she weighs more than I.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
The Sheriff Won
More than a thousand people last Tuesday refused to vote for sheriff, nearly 10% of the Democratic voters.
I can tell you it wasn’t easy not to vote for him. The easiest thing to do was vote party line, which at least 6,800 might have done.
For various reasons the Republican candidate for governor drew more votes than usual. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate attracted 1,500 fewer votes than the man running for the Congressional district who got more than 8,300 votes.
If one split one’s ticket, it was easiest to vote for offices that mattered, the ones with two candidates, and skip the ones like sheriff with only a single candidate. Many skip the oddly worded judicial votes (do you favor keeping so and so in office) which are not part of the party line option.
To vote against the sheriff one had to stand at the card board podium and tediously ink in the circle for every other unopposed candidate, no matter how trivial sounding the post. That was the only way a voter could register a protest in the disparity in the final vote tallies.
Members of the sheriff’s department have found other methods. At least two have already left since the primary to work for the city police. In October, the outgoing sheriff recommended promoting a number of his allies within the department, a move approved by one of the new sheriff’s rivals just before the election. Other deputies are threatening to sue.
The elections may be over, but the legitimacy of the sheriff isn’t settled.
Unofficial results
Congressman - 11,404 votes cast - 8,369 D and 3,035 R
Governor - 11,510 votes cast - 6,822 D and 4,688 R
Sheriff - 7,267 votes cast, 1,102 less than the most popular D, 445 more than least popular D
I can tell you it wasn’t easy not to vote for him. The easiest thing to do was vote party line, which at least 6,800 might have done.
For various reasons the Republican candidate for governor drew more votes than usual. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate attracted 1,500 fewer votes than the man running for the Congressional district who got more than 8,300 votes.
If one split one’s ticket, it was easiest to vote for offices that mattered, the ones with two candidates, and skip the ones like sheriff with only a single candidate. Many skip the oddly worded judicial votes (do you favor keeping so and so in office) which are not part of the party line option.
To vote against the sheriff one had to stand at the card board podium and tediously ink in the circle for every other unopposed candidate, no matter how trivial sounding the post. That was the only way a voter could register a protest in the disparity in the final vote tallies.
Members of the sheriff’s department have found other methods. At least two have already left since the primary to work for the city police. In October, the outgoing sheriff recommended promoting a number of his allies within the department, a move approved by one of the new sheriff’s rivals just before the election. Other deputies are threatening to sue.
The elections may be over, but the legitimacy of the sheriff isn’t settled.
Unofficial results
Congressman - 11,404 votes cast - 8,369 D and 3,035 R
Governor - 11,510 votes cast - 6,822 D and 4,688 R
Sheriff - 7,267 votes cast, 1,102 less than the most popular D, 445 more than least popular D
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