Our SNAP Challenge

The SNAP Challenge encourages participants to experience what life is like for millions of low-income Americans living on the average daily allowance of only $4! 
The SNAP Challenge

 Taking the SNAP Challenge:

Eat on $4/day for a week, a month or longer if you so choose.  Check out our sample menus to help you get started...

Experience hunger for yourself. Learn about the daily struggles faced by our hungry neighbors!

Engage others by sharing your experience. Create a blog, post to Facebook, & encourage friends to participate.

Not that long ago, our family 'participated' in the SNAP challenge. Not as willing volunteers, but rather, out of financial necessity.  As the job search stretched from weeks to months, and the dollars dropped from comfortable toward nonexistent, food became a priority.

Long full shelves emptied. Canned foods, that had sat unopened for years, were cooked up. Rice became an evening mainstay...the real, long grain, slow cooking rice. Not the delightful minute rice I had used forever. 

Our daughter, who lived near, by over bags of groceries, as did our our son at home. The younger girls just ate what was there without complaint. A surprise box of powered milk created a day of kitchen fun as we created several different homemade hot cocoas from odds and ends in the baking supplies. 

But, it can be dreary and depressing, spending day after day after day in a home waiting for some GOOD news. So we would occasionally eat out. I know! Completely shocking, appalling and unacceptable. Ask any of the so called Christians who want the poor to bury their heads in the sand, or be flogged in public. 

Being poor is a worse crime in this country than murder...just ask George Zimmerman. Or is it being black is the worse crime? I get confused.

Anyway, we learned that a family of four could eat at ARBIES, off of their Dollar Menu for $6 plus tax. Everyone would get our own sandwich. Again, with the frivolous. We would share a package of fries and a drink. Thank goodness for free refills!

Best of all, we we out in the real world, at least pretending that everything was alright. 

So, I have thought about doing the SNAP Challenge in the past couple of months, but I am not ready to go back there...yet. I didn't need to do it before, during or after our own personal challenge. Being a decent person is always the right thing to do.

And, why don't we drug test people before we allow them do donate money to uber crazy political groups that are screwing with our planet, our health, our bodies and our civil liberties?