Eating organic on food stamps

After posting the other day about low-income locavores, I came across blogger Rebecca Blood’s record of her “eat-organic-on-a-food-stamps budget” challenge. Maybe you’ve already heard about this, since Rebecca took this creative project on two years ago (April of 2007)—but it was a revelation to me. Following the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan” (a low-cost meal plan that “shows how a nutritious diet may be achieved with limited resources” and also, incidentally, serves as the basis for which the federal government allots Food Stamps), she chooses to cook for herself and her husband using only organic food. (She tries to do local—she lives in the Bay Area after all—but acknowledges not wanting to have to figure out where her rice and beans come from.)

The TFP (which, if I’m reading correctly on the USDA’s web site, has not gone up for inflation since 2006) limited Rebecca to $74.00 a week (for two adults)—which comes to $ 320.80 a month. Can she do it? Absolutely—and even finds money leftover for Two Buck Chuck and beer (though obviously alcohol is not covered by Food Stamps).

Factored into her budget is the weekly price of their subscription to Terra Firma Farm’s CSA —$12.50 a week.

Rebecca makes all sorts of disclaimers up front about how she’s naturally frugal, lives in the Bay Area, doesn’t eat much meat, and works from home—all of which help one eat healthily on the cheap. But her blog is testament to the fact that, with a little imagination and some good vegetarian recipes, you don’t have to eat a shitty diet just because you’re poor.