Food Pantry Blog Project

Friday, April 23, 2010 by Marianne 1 Comment

A group of Austin, TX food bloggers are participating in a very interesting project to raise awareness about hunger and food in this country – each of them is cooking and eating for a week using food that a family will typically receive from a food pantry and supplementing it with the amount of money provided by SNAP (food stamps) or WIC.

I heard about the project through Summer, one of my Flickr friends.  She’s participating in the project over at Something to chew on and I have been eagerly anticipating her daily updates.  As regular readers know, I was recently responsible for feeding Gist and myself on $60 a week and seeing what Summer is doing has been fascinating.  It is interesting to read about the feelings and worries that she is experiencing by being tied to such a tight budget; I felt the same way when faced with the fact that I would have to do the same.  That stress definitely lessened over time and as I got more comfortable shopping and cooking on a budget, but it never really went away.

One of the most striking differences that I have noticed is the lack of choice that a family who is depending on a food bank has: I may have been on a limited budget, but I had the freedom to buy and cook what I wanted.  I think that one of the biggest challenges would be to do meal planning around ingredients that you don’t like or normally use.  The list of items that Summer started out with is here, and it contains four, maybe five, items that I normally like and use (canned vegetables = yuck!)

You should definitely check out the project and while you’re at it, consider making a contribution to your local food bank.  Here in Lowell it’s the Merrimack Valley Food Bank.