I started volunteering at Fishline, our local food bank, in August of this year. Since I started I have been interested in the people who use it and wondering if my husband and I could manage to eat healthily using only food stamps and the local food bank. I noticed that many of our customers are older and on Social Security and since we are the same age I decided to try the experiment. If we were living on our Social Security Benefits we would qualify for $49.00 a week in food stamps and would also qualify for all of the food services that our local food bank provides.
So starting November 1 and lasting all month my pantry is out of bounds. What we eat must have been paid for with the amount for money we would get in food stamps and what we could get if we used the food bank. I will purchase all food at my local supermarket but only buy what is available at the food bank and use the $49.00 for food not available there.
Our food bank has three different types of food aid. There is the front market, which is our version of grocery rescue. It carries produce, dairy, meat, bread and other perishables gathered from our local grocery stores. The front market is run like a grocery store in that everyone gets a fixed number of “Fishbucks” that they can spend anyway they choose. A family of 2 gets 25 “Fishbucks” a week. At the end of the week unused “Fishbucks” go away and start again the next week. The second type is called an Emergency Box ( or EBox) and contains staples, i.e. canned fruit and vegetables, flour, sugar and the like. We can have one of these a month. EBoxes are adjusted for the size of your family. The third type is called a Commodities bag and it comes from the government and contains an interesting assortment of things, mainly rice, pasta, canned beans, dried potatoes but sometimes you can get a 16 pound frozen turkey or cranberry sauce. It all depends on “what gets shipped,” I think. Commodities do not consider the size of the family and contain the same amount of food for everyone and they are available once a month.
So here we go. I have no idea if we can do this and I am sure there will interesting problems and am already looking at my Grandmother’s recipes and some of my Great Aunt’s and my Mother’s.
Loaves and the Fishline 