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.”
