SNAP Challenge: Food Shopping, Menu Planning, and Coffee Withdrawal

Due to the beauty of my living situation the past two years I have had a chef present in the
house cooking lunch and dinner Monday through Friday as well as a fully stocked kitchen available for our use and enjoyment. As a result of this glorious system, I have not had to worry about the logistics of cooking for myself and planning out food shopping or a menu. Unfortunately, this fact came back to bite me during the SNAP Challenge. Last Saturday I called my roommate on a whim and asked her if she wanted to go food shopping with me to buy $21 worth of food to last me the coming week. I was so excited about the prospect of the coming process and challenge that I didn’t even bother to make a grocery list or plan out a menu or research ideas for inexpensive foods and meals. Although we were able to breeze through Winco buying food and keeping under budget it was not until early in the challenge that I realized how wrong my shopping attempt was. I did not buy enough food. I did not buy enough satisfying food. I did not buy enough healthful food. And I did not take into account the essentials like coffee which ended up costing me exponentially in physical, mental, and emotional distress. I figured that making sure I had at least something to consume for each meal every day was all that mattered. My addiction to coffee and the side effects of skipping it for a week didn’t even cross my mind as I raced through Winco. This was a huge mistake. The lack of coffee alone made the week extremely difficult because my body was not used to the lack of caffeine. This resulted in a headache that last four days. This opened up my eyes to how much I still need to learn about food and how difficult it is to plan a healthful and satisfying menu for one person for a week. It taught me that I need to start learning about food, pricing, budgeting, and cooking. This is a frightening realization to someone who is studying abroad and living alone in a foreign country in less than a year from now. It also gave me a lot of respect for those in poverty and on SNAP benefits because they not only eat on this very limited budget but they have to possibly work, support a family, or go to school all of which require a huge amount of energy and if they feel how I felt this week the likelihood their energy level is regularly high is low.