3SquaresVT Challenge: November 14th—20th as part of National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week.
Learn first hand what it is like to try to make ends meet on a limited food budget! Live on a 3SquaresVT budget for a week – spend only $38 on food to eat for the week. Then share your experience with others. Learn more, find materials and, if you haven't already, register for the challenge on our website.
3SquaresVT (formerly food stamps) is the nation’s single most important program in the fight against hunger, designed to improve the nutrition and food purchasing power of people with limited incomes. The program makes a difference in the lives of thousands of Vermonters every day, but in many cases, the benefits are too low to allow households to purchase nutritious food and feed their families healthy meals on a consistent basis. The 3SquaresVT Challenge seeks to highlight what it is like to eat on the average 3SquaresVT benefit — approximately $1.80 per meal.
Register for the challenge and check back here in November to comment on my blog about your experience.
My husband, John, and I took the 3 Squares Challenge the week of 11/1 through the 7th. And, yes, it was a challenge. We shopped together the day before we started and hid most of the non-perishables that we already had in the house in the spare bedroom. We spent most of our allotment of $38pp the first day (we had about $17 left for the week, but ended up spending down to the last penny for more milk and bread, pasta sauce, one pear; we did not have nearly enough fruit). We are used to eating local/organic food and found that we had to resort to mostly non-organic, non-local foods the week of the challenge. I went to the Williston Liquidation Center to get cheap tomato sauce: 2 16 ounce cans for 0.59! We had to make our meals stretch so we ate smaller portions.and we don't tend to eat large portions to begin with. We lasted on foods such as,turkey burgers, pasta with chicken,tofu,carrots, broccoli, green beans,kale, bananas. I ate a lot of hard boiled eggs from who knows where. My husband's diet is restricted for health reasons so the challenge was particularly difficult for him. Our lunches were usually PB and Honey on cheap bread. We found ourselves to be hungry most of the time as though we were dieting. Afternoons were the most difficult given we lacked enough snacks. I like to eat small frequent meals. I would eat a carrot stick with some hummus or a teaspoon of peanut butter in the afternoons. We filled ourselves on popcorn in the evening. By the end of the week, we both didn't feel very well (cold symptoms, weakness, fatigue, difficult concentrating). I'm not quite sure how anyone on 3 squares manages for the long term, especially big families with young children. I didn't like the idea of buying hormone and antibiotic infused chicken from the big agricultural industry. I'm glad we took the challenge; we view food and our eating habits differently: we think twice about wasting food and consider more what we can concoct with left overs for meals. We plan to re-evaluate what we truly need for food when shopping and hope we don't suffer from amnesia in regards to our experience taking the 3 squares challenge. I only hope that others take this challenge and see first hand what it's like for those who live endlessly off of a paltry government food stipend. At least we had an end in sight. Who knows, perhaps, someday we will find ourselves, too, barely subsisting on 3 Squares.
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