Flickr/Alameda County Community Food Bank
A few years ago I offered to write a column for my hometown paper promoting our weekly farmers market. It was a nice opportunity to break down some of the myths about shopping al fresco, but a big part of the job was promoting their food stamp matching program: Customers of CalFresh (federally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) could charge up to $15 in exchange for wooden market tokens, and they’d get $30 to spend. This was fun (who doesn’t like to double their money?) and also educational. The high prices charged at farmers markets—$12 a pound for salad mix? Mon dieu!—reflect the true cost of growing the food and hauling it out to sell, a far cry from the world of loss leaders and price rollbacks that supermarkets and big-box grocers use to lure us all in.
That true cost means a lot of people find farmers markets prohibitively expensive, and inherently elitist. Come out a few times, though, and it’s easy enough to figure out where the deals are. When tomatoes are abundant the price goes down; I’ve found heirloom varieties (the Paul Robeson! The Mortgage Lifter!) for half what the supermarket charges for waxy, anemic Romas. As winter squash come into season, you’ll find types you never saw before that were grown nearby. You get to see your region in a completely new light when you learn all the things it’s capable of producing. It was fun to try and help the column’s readers connect these dots, and it was an honest effort: The only way I could afford to be a regular at the market myself was thanks to food stamps.
As someone who really likes budget-friendly pinto beans prepared pretty much any way imaginable, my on-and-off experiences with free food credit may seem kind of ridiculous. Having the financial freedom to buy whatever I want for dinner isn’t something I’ve ever gotten used to, so even as a rational middle-aged adult who values her health, my choices haven’t consistently been the greatest when I’m off-leash. Overindulgence in the highest-quality organics somehow always ends badly for my stomach, scaring me back to Top Ramen for weeks at a time. I’ve also made some ill-advised side trips into food hoarding, the moral of which can be summed up simply by a Sylvia I once saw: “You can’t take it with you…so eat it now.” Amen to that. The more you sock away for hard times, the better your rodent population’s quality of life becomes. I loved Ratatouille, but I’m not prepared to keep him in trail mix for life.
When I lived in my own place it had a full kitchen, but I moved not long ago, assuming that renting a room in a shared house meant the courtesy of a shelf in the fridge and some cabinet space. Instead I was told, “Just put stuff anywhere,” in a kitchen that turned out not to have any where left. Packed with stale and expired foods, the sizable cabinets were overstuffed to bursting, but as a new arrival I wasn’t comfortable throwing out someone else’s food to make room for my own. The fridge was the same—five-year old condiments and other oddities overwhelmed it, leaving me little to no space to fit even a carton of yogurt. So I’ve had to cobble together something approximating nutrition with most of my food stored in my bedroom.
My menus have looked like this: Cereal with protein powder and water (pretty awful, though cereal with Slim-Fast powder was pleasant enough). Fresh fruit, which is not great at traveling in a backpack but worth the effort. Cup Noodles and Top Ramen and some terrifyingly spicy instant pho because the nearest supermarket I can walk to has a banging Asian food section. Rice with a can of beans dumped in, but all too rarely since the kitchen’s usually too busy for me to cook. Oats mixed into just about everything, from regular cold cereal to canned soup, and also eaten as oatmeal. Lots of Haw Flakes (China’s answer to both the Necco wafer and fruit roll combined into one strange and lovely tube of food), because they remind me of Nelson Muntz and cost next to nothing. Microwavable burritos, both dinner and breakfast varieties (the fridge was hopeless, but I forced my way into a corner of the freezer). Clif bars. Balance bars. Special K bars. Odwalla bars. Those radioactive orange peanut butter crackers. I don’t think I’ve done irreparable harm to myself, but at the end of most days I do feel a bit like a salt lick.