Megan McArdle is blogging about food stamps. I was interested to find out from one of her posts that the government publishes a "thrifty food plan" -- a "nutritious, minimal-cost diet" -- as well as food plans at three higher cost levels ("low," "moderate," and "liberal") and also publishes the monthly cost of food on each plan. This is the government's suggestion of how to live healthfully on a tight food budget.
The "thrifty" plan, supposedly, costs an average of $487.90 per month (as of December 2007) to feed a couple with two small children. You can calculate it for individual familes -- the monthly and weekly cost is broken down for individuals of different ages here. (An adult female can be fed, it says, for $33.30 per week. A teenage boy, for $34.40.) The plans themselves are given as "market baskets," that is, pounds per week of certain categories of foods: in each week, an adult male is supposed to consume 2.82 pounds of whole grain breads, 0.08 pounds of whole grain cereals, 1.66 pounds of non-whole-grain cereals and breads, 1.24 pounds of dark green vegetables, and so on. To see the market baskets in the thrifty food plan, go to this pdf file and scroll to Table ES-1, which begins on page 11.
It's kind of interesting just to compare our family's food expenditures (which I don't track carefully -- I just have a general idea of how much we spend at the grocery store and local dairy each week, and I don't know yet how long the quarter-beef and half-hog we got this year are going to last, and I admit to not paying any attention at all to restaurant/coffee shop spending) to that cost. And to compare our family's food variety (which I do have a good idea of, since I plan all the meals) to the government's suggestions of how to plan a "nutritious, minimal-cost" diet. Actually, it doesn't look like a bad nutritional plan overall, considering the cost constraints. I wish they had a category for pregnant and/or nursing women, though.
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