SNAP Challenge

Debrief on the 30 day Food Stamp Challenge at $5/person/day.

We "cheated" a bunch, so this could be an interesting one to periodically circle back to and tighten the screws on the rules.

• Food already in the house was considered free.  The main motive for this challenge now was to eat down some of our less popular pantry reserves.  
• Quickly abandoned trying to track what MacGyver buys/eats at work.  So that meant our $10 daily budget covered only about 4 meals a day rather than 6.  
• "Fitness" nutrition (i.e. gels, bars, etc.) was not counted towards this budget because I already have 2 coaches very concerned about my disinterest in fueling.  
• We kinda stopped counting on day 29 because day 30 was a fun cross-continental funeral adventure and being on the road subsisting off fast food (even when air dad is able to seat you in heavily snack provisioned zones for the flights) is untenable on $5-$10 a day.  

Results

• MacGyver lost 10 lbs.  
• My weight has a lot of variance, but I think I came down 1-2 lbs.  
• Maybe a 50% reduction in random/redundant pantry inventory... still haven't found a use for surplus cricket flour.

Tips/Takeaways

• Good and Cheap cookbook was geared towards this SNAP purpose and is free in pdf form but it is more sporting to buy a glossy paperback version so the proceeds can go to a good cause.  It was helpful to have experimented a bit with this "capsule" of recipes before starting the challenge, but we didn't slavishly build menus off this book during the challenge.
• Local grocery store has overlapping promos on Weds, so I would bike there with a backpack.  The backpack reined in how much I bought (typically $25 or less).  I found it particularly discouraging to buy high liquid content, chill requirements, or excessively packaged convenience foods which also tend to be pricier...  MacGyver would say a drawback to this strategy is that I didn't get enough of his favorite foods (i.e. meat and beer) but he also thinks the cutback in beer contributed the most to his weight loss.
• CSA box-- I have a fraught relationship with these boxes.  If I load the equivalent contents into my Sprouts Amazon Now cart, it costs $6.79 but the CSA costs $17 and is much less convenient to pickup fortnightly and often requires more cleaning and prep.  It does force us to eat veggies, often ones we wouldn't select for ourselves (i.e. lettuce) and that premium pricing does go towards supporting a local food shed though.  If we were truly on austerity measures, I would cancel CSA and hope that I supplemented with an increase in grocery store trips and veggie share of my cart.  In a similar vein, I found myself opting for non-organic options with killer sale prices (bacon, eggs, etc.) when ideologically, I would rather be in the premium price for organic/sustainably harvested camp.  
• Create convenience food-- the most dangerous intervals were ones where we were exhausted, hungry, and didn't have a plan.  Filling fit packer containers with prepped or precooked "budget" items increased the likelihood we would eat them rather than skipping a meal or defecting to a fast food joint or an off-schedule calorie/nutrition light grocery run.  After a couple disasters and as our emergency snack pantry levels dwindled, I found myself doubling recipes or cooking something in parallel to eat later as an insurance policy.  I would scrutinize perishable things that didn't seem to be "moving" and try to find ways to make them more enticing-- maybe cut the grapes into smaller clusters?  etc.  That said, if you're not already in the habit of elaborate baking projects (pizza dough, bread, dumplings), it is unrealistic to anticipate you'll suddenly have time to knock those to-do's out while grappling with whatever withdrawal symptoms you have from absconding from cafes, sugary convenience foods, alcohol and other luxuries.
• "Working remotely" and traveling was perilous.  There are few places that will let you camp with a laptop for hours on end that don't also expect you to purchase something that will annihilate your food budget for the day.  Starbucks comes to mind.  I found myself trying to limit the number of days I might need to "hang out" to carpool somewhere to avoid temptation.  When I heard the siren song, I tried to choose the simplest and smallest size options to get the fix without going deeper in the hole.  But I wasn't too aggressive with maximizing my dollars here because I learned in previous frugal challenges a tall house coffee doesn't scratch that "indulgence" itch that a tall latte monogrammed with my misspelled name would and therefore doesn't trigger a "I've been bad and now need to stick to the straight and narrow" cooldown.    
• Big mason jars FTW.  I got an additional four of the gallon sized dry goods jars and six of the half gallon size wide mouth jars shipped from Ball and these are the best storage/organization investment ever (especially if you standardize on one mouth size across all your jars).  They allow you to raid the bulk bins at the grocery store and have an attractive place to store your loot.  You can also see these otherwise unglamorous rice, flour, trail mix, bean, etc. staples and that seemed to be half the battle to incorporating them into the rotation more.  As a corollary, anything dusty and shelf-stable I wanted to move, I started to push into clear glass cabinets so I could see it better as well (and because its typically gauche packaging was something I was motivated to zen out of my kitchen).