Cory Booker recently had a conversation on Twitter with a lady from North Carolina about free meals at schools and food stamp programs.  A challenge came from this conversation that Booker and the North Carolina woman would try to live on a food stamp allowance for a week. The federal food stamp program is called SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  Hence, the SNAP Challenge is born. So, I made up an income for Ed and myself and plugged our numbers into the NJOneApp.gov website to find out what we’d qualify for.  I knew you had to make less than $2000 a month so I said that we made $1900.  The rest of the questions I answered for real, including rent and utilities information.  After it crunched our numbers, the website said we’d qualify for about $59 a week in SNAP benefits.  We shopped for our groceries on Sunday and now we’re all ready to start on Tuesday morning.

Here’s what we’ve got for breakfast.

Ed likes to eat breakfast at work and liked these Better Oats packets of oatmeal already. They are usually $1 for a box of five packs so that’s a $0.20 breakfast each day!  I usually make some eggs for breakfast so I didn’t change my breakfast, either.  Omega3 eggs were $3.49. We also each bought two $0.88 greek yogurts for weekend breakfasts.

For lunch, we didn’t change our routines, either.  We both usually have either soup or salad in the winter.  Sometimes, we break up the soups with some Chef Boyardee raviolis when they’re on sale but not this week. So, here’s our lunch line-up.

Salad ingredients were $11 and soups were 4-for-$5.

Tuesday’s dinner (the first dinner in the challenge) is going to be two Ball Park hot dogs each along with Goya baked beans and a bag of frozen veggies.  $4.50 for dinner ingredients.

Feeling optimistic!

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