A food stamp diet is eating on a crazy limited budget for a week or a month to gain first hand impression of what it is like to be poor. The hypothesis is that if you try it, you will find out that the food stamp allowance is only enough food to be chronically underfed & hungry most days and some days completely out of food.
Regular Rules (I'm not going to follow these unmodified)
- Buy ingredients at start of week.
- You can use all your pre-existing house hold gear. You can use salt and pepper.
- You can't use any other pre-existing food you have.
- If you run out of food at the end of the week, you fast. You might be eating on a daily basis a number of calories that makes you technically malnourished.
- You can drink unlimited water & don't have to drink water contaminated with raw sewage and lead like the poor do.
Lets just get people knee jerk reactions out of the way:
- Being poor isn't just eating too little, it also means being low on human capital (cooking knowledge), "micro capital" (high speed blenders, the ability to buy a 50lb bag of flour), time (the time to cook from scratch), real estate (living in a food desert). When you add in these constraints, a food stamp diet would be eating $25 worth of cheetos from the gas station because if you are poor that is your best option.
- Also, food stamps assume you have some other income that you can use for food, so using only food stamp money to buy food is not really what happens for most people who use the program. A counter response is that some of those people probably have high rent & other costs that push them towards having a food budget equal to their food stamps.
When an upper middle class person "wins" a food stamp diet, they are not simulating a life of poverty, they are just showing that if you have enough education, kitchen capital, access to stores and leisure time- you can compensate for not having enough money in your food budget. This does not mean that people who try out the food stamp diet are bad people.
- "Wait, Matt, you got kids & a nursing wife, you can't put them on a starvation diet!" So that is why I'm going to modify the challenge.
Modifications
- We spend money until everyone is fed with sufficient healthy food.
- If the final spend is "small", we "win"
- I can "buy" bulk & canned items from my existing stores of foods at grocery store prices.
- I'm not simulating poverty in any sense except insufficient cash. I will use my blender, cook like someone who went to college, shop at my four excellent grocery stores, buy a months worth of something if it makes sense.
Tactics
permutations and combinations. You buy, say five ingredients and consume them in various ways. Think of the taco bell menu.
same ole same ole. You eat the same thing every day. Someone did a video of what eating just potatoes for a week/month would be like. Not related to poverty, but for a click-bait youtube title, but same result.
micropurchasing. You buy 1/2 lb of this and 1/4 lb of that and 1 apple and 1 banana so on.
microcapital. You buy a 50lb of flour. This is actually how a lot of poor but not poorest of the poor people live. A 50lb bag of grains cost half of what it costs in 1lb bags or retail bulk. It is a strange luxury because you are committing to a staple for most of the year.
My Plan
I plan do one month. A one week time span will limit you to permutations of the same thing. In one month there is the opportunity to rotate across 3 or 4 staples. I plan to use a microcapital strategy, so I won't be simulating the poorest of the poor, but people who are poor, but get money in episodic surges.
Regular Rules (I'm not going to follow these unmodified)
- Buy ingredients at start of week.
- You can use all your pre-existing house hold gear. You can use salt and pepper.
- You can't use any other pre-existing food you have.
- If you run out of food at the end of the week, you fast. You might be eating on a daily basis a number of calories that makes you technically malnourished.
- You can drink unlimited water & don't have to drink water contaminated with raw sewage and lead like the poor do.
Lets just get people knee jerk reactions out of the way:
- Being poor isn't just eating too little, it also means being low on human capital (cooking knowledge), "micro capital" (high speed blenders, the ability to buy a 50lb bag of flour), time (the time to cook from scratch), real estate (living in a food desert). When you add in these constraints, a food stamp diet would be eating $25 worth of cheetos from the gas station because if you are poor that is your best option.
- Also, food stamps assume you have some other income that you can use for food, so using only food stamp money to buy food is not really what happens for most people who use the program. A counter response is that some of those people probably have high rent & other costs that push them towards having a food budget equal to their food stamps.
When an upper middle class person "wins" a food stamp diet, they are not simulating a life of poverty, they are just showing that if you have enough education, kitchen capital, access to stores and leisure time- you can compensate for not having enough money in your food budget. This does not mean that people who try out the food stamp diet are bad people.
- "Wait, Matt, you got kids & a nursing wife, you can't put them on a starvation diet!" So that is why I'm going to modify the challenge.
Modifications
- We spend money until everyone is fed with sufficient healthy food.
- If the final spend is "small", we "win"
- I can "buy" bulk & canned items from my existing stores of foods at grocery store prices.
- I'm not simulating poverty in any sense except insufficient cash. I will use my blender, cook like someone who went to college, shop at my four excellent grocery stores, buy a months worth of something if it makes sense.
Tactics
permutations and combinations. You buy, say five ingredients and consume them in various ways. Think of the taco bell menu.
same ole same ole. You eat the same thing every day. Someone did a video of what eating just potatoes for a week/month would be like. Not related to poverty, but for a click-bait youtube title, but same result.
micropurchasing. You buy 1/2 lb of this and 1/4 lb of that and 1 apple and 1 banana so on.
microcapital. You buy a 50lb of flour. This is actually how a lot of poor but not poorest of the poor people live. A 50lb bag of grains cost half of what it costs in 1lb bags or retail bulk. It is a strange luxury because you are committing to a staple for most of the year.
My Plan
I plan do one month. A one week time span will limit you to permutations of the same thing. In one month there is the opportunity to rotate across 3 or 4 staples. I plan to use a microcapital strategy, so I won't be simulating the poorest of the poor, but people who are poor, but get money in episodic surges.
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