I tried to survive a week on food stamps. I failed

Is $23 a month in food stamps enough to survive? Not in San Francisco

In 2008, the federal “food stamp” program was rebranded as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in an effort to peel away the stigma of food stamps by emphasizing the “supplemental” purpose of the funds. More than 41 million Americans rely on these funds to stay fed, including 4.8 million Californians. Over the course of the pandemic, the federal government boosted SNAP with an emergency allotment that skipped over the program’s means testing and automatically granted everyone the maximum for the size of their households. If you were in a household of one or two people, that means you’ve been receiving $262 per month since March 2020.

Now, however, that amount has been reduced to $23.

This month, the federal government cut off those additional funds. And California joined the rest of the United States in restoring prepandemic food benefits for recipients of its CalFresh SNAP program. This reduced the monthly grocery budgets of many Californians to a mere 76 cents per day. That minimum applies equally to one- and two-person households, which include many older and disabled people.

On paper, these funds aren’t supposed to be anyone’s whole grocery budget. But that’s less the case in places like California, where housing costs eat up so much of people’s paychecks. No, there’s no cost-of-living adjustment for those who live in the pricier parts of the country, including San Francisco.

But if that’s what the feds and the state want to give us, it must be doable, right?

I’m a trained chef who has worked in fine dining and casual restaurants for the majority of my whole adult life, so I’ve devoted a lot of sweat and blood to the art of squeezing maximum flavor and value out of all types of ingredients, from sodium alginate to rabbit guts. And I’ve survived on SNAP before while living in New Orleans as a young line cook years ago, relying on it for the meals I didn’t eat at work. (There, the program is cheekily called “Louisiana Purchase.”)

If I can’t make the new CalFresh minimum benefits pencil out, I’m not sure who can. So, I tried to do just that for one week.

Here’s how it went:

On my first day, I made the strategic decision to downgrade breakfast and lunch, because surely that would free up more money for the rest of my meals. Instead of eating, I went to the office and filled up on free coffee and water: the fashionista’s diet, sans cigarettes. I lucked out in that I showed up during a rare team-building pizza day at The Chronicle — and sandbagged with an extra slice. It felt a little gross, but the additional calories were going to be helpful for later.

Usually, when I go grocery shopping, I don’t spend much time at the store. But on this week’s trip, I ended up walking up and down the aisles, frantically tallying numbers in order to make the total work. I tried to rely on my previous experience with being on SNAP. It’s all about optimizing: calories, nutrients and price, divided by how many servings you can squeeze out of everything. If the closest grocery store is miles away and you don’t have your own vehicle, add on the mental calculus of how much you can physically carry or how much you need to spend to make the delivery minimum.

But nothing of what I remembered from my experience in New Orleans applied to Safeway in San Francisco in 2023.

In the span of two hours, with my phone’s calculator as my constant companion, I managed to put together a basket of lentils, chicken, rice and onions, plus a few bags of frozen vegetables, for $40. I’d already blown through my budget for the entire month! And I hadn’t even glanced at the eggs.

In “Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day,” a 2014 cookbook tailored to SNAP recipients, author Leanne Brown issued some advice to keep in mind at the store. “Don’t buy drinks,” she wrote. Drink tap water instead.

Can do.

But eggs, praised by Brown as a cheap source of protein, have become more than twice as expensive on average since 2020. If, like 1-in-5 CalFresh recipients, you are only getting the minimum amount of food benefits, a dozen eggs would eat up a quarter of those monthly funds. According to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, the price of groceries, in general, rose more than 10% over the past year alone.

There is something particularly despair-inducing about the American grocery store when you’re on a strict budget. Its design is centered around plenitude: the idea that food is infinite, but you can’t have it.

“The amount of raw anxiety you have to deal with because of rising food costs is so significant,” Brown told me when I asked for some 2023 advice. “That makes everything not only uncertain but puts so much pressure on everything.”

Thankfully, I had some ingredients stored in my freezer and pantry at home. I justified using them by noting that I would have received advanced notice that my benefits were being reduced to $23 and would have used the generous emergency benefits while they lasted to build a buffer.

I used my modest Safeway haul and grocery reserves to make stewed lentils and Ethiopian doro wat with a mixture of spices I already had and lots and lots of minced onion. Three big yellow onions are $4 at Safeway and are full of fiber and vitamin C. I anticipated a lot of onions this week.

Breakfast for the next few days was oatmeal with some frozen strawberries from my Safeway haul, doled out in a miserly fashion. When I ran out a few days later, I sprinkled spices on top to add some enrichment, which felt akin to giving bears at the zoo a car tire to play with.

The other produce I had petered out in the same fashion — over the week, dinner got much less colorful. As a treat, I tinted a pot of rice yellow with curry powder and dotted it with frozen green peas and the last of my kale. For my lunches, I ate dinner leftovers and drank more coffee.

Fresh produce is flavorful and packed with vitamins, but it doesn’t max out the calorie count the way potatoes, beans and rice do. While it might seem tempting to spend the food budget on nutrient-rich salad greens and citrus, the vast majority of low-wage earners do more intensive labor than writing opinion columns. They need calories to get through the day.

To address this disparity, California has put together a pilot this year to give CalFresh recipients in certain counties a little bit of extra money to buy locally grown produce at a small number of participating farmers’ markets and shops.

State Sen. Caroline Menjivar of Los Angeles, meanwhile, recently introduced a bill to increase the CalFresh minimum to $50 per month. In an interview, she dismissed the idea that these funds were merely “supplemental.”

“We have to adjust how we’re thinking about that additional income because it’s just not there,” she said. “The rent has gone up, gas fluctuates, out-of-pocket medical expenses have gone up.”

Even if Sen. Menjivar’s legislation passes, which her office projected will impact 1-in-7 CalFresh recipients, the extra funding isn’t going to kick in until next year. In the meantime, the senator said, the pilot program will have to suffice, alongside Meals on Wheels programs and food banks.

But multiple Bay Area food banks have already sounded the alarm on what they see as an oncoming hunger catastrophe. The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, which provides pop-up pantries, pre-bagged groceries and home delivery to tens of thousands of people in the region, is now serving double the number of people since before the pandemic; in the same amount of time, the cost of each pound of food has gone up by 174%. Others, including the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, have also reported persistent growth in costs and need. According to Keely Hopkins, a spokesperson for the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, donations of goods and volunteer labor have dropped by a third; fundraising is going strong, but they’re spending so much more on actual food.

With the drop in CalFresh benefits, “we know people are going to come to the bank,” said Meg Davidson, the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank’s policy director. “We are the safety net’s safety net.”

Turning anyone away would be the bank’s last resort; until then, each household will likely receive less food and people may have to travel farther and wait in longer lines to get it.

I’ll be honest — by the end of this week, I was losing it. I dreamed about herby scrambled eggs; I was so sick of onions and increasingly thin smears of tuna salad on gummy sandwich bread. On the last day of this home cooking experiment, I discovered that my husband had accidentally left the yellow rice sitting in the microwave overnight. The black cloud that had hovered over me all week darkened even more as I listened to the golden granules cascade into the garbage.

This whole thing was ridiculous — but not as ridiculous as trying to feed a household on $23 a month.

Paul Kuroda/Special to The Chronicle 2022 Fresh produce is distributed at a food bank site in Oakland. The reduction in federal food benefits will force more people to rely on food banks.