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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)
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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