Every day, one out of nine Americans uses food stamps.
Last year alone, 644,281 Indiana residents utilized the food stamp program.
This
week, as part of National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, two
students decided to take part in Indiana Public Interest Research
Group’s Food Stamp Challenge, which began Nov. 15 and will run until
Saturday.
The two participants are IU senior Corrin Harvey and
sophomore Alicia Cooley. Their challenge is to live on only $33 of food
for one week.
They are keeping a blog at inpirgfsc.blogspot.com/2009/11/food-stamp-challege.html that records their daily experiences.
“We
are doing it just as some people in the community did it last year,”
INPIRG Campus Organizer Stephanie Gogul said. “We wanted to see how
students would be able to manage with only $33 for a week’s worth of
food.”
She said INPIRG hopes the challenge will raise awareness
of the realities of using food stamps as well as the issues of hunger
and homelessness in Bloomington.
Gogul said this challenge is
important because hunger and homelessness are issues that affect
Bloomington residents every day, and that it is an issue for the entire
community to deal with.
“Food stamps don’t cure anything,”
Gogul said. “It is still definitely a struggle for people to live a
healthy and nutritional lifestyle.”
Harvey lives off campus and said that so far the challenge has not been too bad.
“Thirty-three
dollars is really simple if you are just feeding yourself, but if you
are a single mother raising a family of three it can really be a
challenge,” she said.
Harvey said food stamps make healthy eating habits an issue for the Bloomington community.
For
Bloomington residents on food stamps, it is a daily challenge to have
enough money to balance not only their food expenditures, but also plan
a nutritious diet on the kind of food they can afford. She said that by
being part of the challenge, she has realized what an inconvenience
food stamps can be.
“I have to pack a lunch every day,” Harvey said. “I have not been eating out – I think that is the key.”
Often,
she said she is tempted to go out and get some food with friends, but
she can’t afford it. Instead, she said she must shop at cheaper stores
like ALDI.
Cooley said surviving on food stamps while living in
the dorms has been more of a challenge for her. She said she has been
shopping at the Wright C-store for all of her groceries because of
convenience. She does not have a kitchen or a car and food is
expensive, so it’s difficult to survive on so little.
“I have
been eating bread and bologna, and that’s not really healthy for me,”
Cooley said. “You can’t really afford fresh fruits or vegetables.”
She
typically spends $15 a day on meals, so cutting back to $33 for a full
week has been hard. Cooley said she always feels hungry and that each
day it gets progressively harder.
She said when she was younger some of her relatives were on food stamps and seemed really unhealthy, but she never knew why.
“Now,
I feel like I understand,” Cooley said. “You have to eat quick foods
that aren’t very good for you – otherwise it is too expensive.”
