Eating Vegan on $3/Day: An Introduction

This past August a member of the St. Louis FaceBook group Arch Vegans posted an article about eating vegan on a "Food Stamp Budget" of $21/week. The point of the article was to draw attention to the difficulty of eating vegan on what was considered a Food Stamp budget. I'm not sure how that figure was determined, since food stamp benefits vary by state and are affected by whatever resources the recipient may or may not have, but that is the figure that was given. The author took up the challenge to eat vegan on $3/day and posted her food diary. I was relieved that I wasn't the first to point out that her diet for the week appeared to lack protein and on some days appeared to lack adequate calories. I thought it was possible to come up with something more balanced within the parameters the author was working with. In other words, I thought I could do better.

I am a proponent of putting up or shutting up. It's easy to say you can do better, but until you do it, it's just words. So, my curiosity and my conscience got the better of me and I set out to see if I could eat a balanced, healthy, tasty, interesting, sustainable vegan diet on $3/day.

This is the article that inspired this experiment:

https://www.veganmainstream.com/2010/09/02/eating-vegan-on-21-00-a-week-the-food-stamp-budget/

I want to emphasize that in no way is anything written here meant to be a personal criticism of Jessi Stafford, the author, for whatever choices she made. I think it was gutsy of her to do it and even more gutsy to put it out there for everyone to see. When you do that, you set yourself up to be a target for criticism. However, I think it is an American fallacy that one cannot live frugally and live well. Many people have demonstrated that it is possible. Besides having done it myself, one of my early heroes was Amy Dacyczyn, author of The Tightwad Gazette. Although I am not, in fact, committed to a vegan diet, I have followed a vegan diet in the past, sometimes because I lived with vegan housemates and most often because it was the cheapest way to eat well. A lot of my diet still is plant based and I think there are a number of good reasons for favoring that. I know from experience that a mostly vegan diet is the cheapest way to eat well. The real question was: could I demonstrate that it was possible, in real life, to eat a decent vegan diet on $3/day?

I spent a week preparing for this experiment. Under normal, ongoing circumstances, were I restricted to $3/day I would be refining shopping and eating habits over time. In this case, I had to come up with with a plan with some pretty tight restrictions in a short period of time. I'd mentioned in our FaceBook group discussion in the past I'd bought beans and grains in 25# or 50# sacks to get the best possible price, storing them in 5 gallon buckets. However, the author did not have a car and had to shop at groceries within walking or bicycling distance.  Transporting a 50# sack of beans would be difficult and some folks on food stamps might not have a car.  So I decided to restrict myself to groceries within a 2 mile radius of my apartment though I did not, in fact, walk or bicycle to the grocery. Four groceries fell within my radius: Aldi's, Ruler (a newly opened discount grocery), Schnucks (our local mainstream grocery), and a small international grocery that is generally pretty economical. I thought about what I might eat for the week, made a list of potential grocery items, got out a sheet of ledger paper and a clipboard, and began tracking the prices of items on my list at the various stores. Ruler has an ongoing special of dry pinto beans for $.50/lb. and when I saw that, it immediately altered my meal plan for the week.

I'm in the habit of having cereal and soy milk for breakfast. Although I hadn't made soy milk in years, I bought some soybeans and made a quart of soy milk as a test. It was not that difficult and turned out well. I decided I would make my own soy milk.

The guidelines in the author's article had a couple of "rules" that I thought were arbitrary. If you used spices or condiments that you already had on hand, they expected you to deduct $3/week for spices and $3/week for condiments. Same for oil or other things on hand. I know I don't use $3/week of these items so I calculated the actual cost of the items consumed, using current prices at the grocery. If I used a teaspoon of chili powder, I would weigh it on the gram scale and calculate the cost based on the price of chili powder at the store. I probably spent more time weighing and calculating than I did cooking or eating but I wanted an accurate accounting. By the end of the week, I was really tired of all this record keeping! But it was also very interesting and I was doing it for the sake of having accurate data for the experiment. I would not normally do this.

Finally, one weekend I made a pot of chili, a pot of black beans, a pot of dal, and a quart of soy milk and set out to see if I could eat vegan for a week on $3/day. I was nervous. I announced my intentions on FaceBook on both my own wall and the vegan group. I was prepared to fail miserably in front of dozens of people.

In following posts, I'll put up my daily food diary, costs, and my thoughts for that day.

You can see the original running commentary in the FaceBook Arch Vegan group here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/367964060602/permalink/10155935617040603/


I want to thank Jessi Stafford for having the courage to engage in this experiment and for having the courage to share it with us. It was inspiring and I've continued with some of the habits I developed during that week. I also want to thank Peter in our FB group for posting the article. Both of you made a positive impact on my life.