Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.State Sen. Heath Mello bought a loaf of wheat bread, a half-gallon of skim milk, peanut butter, jelly and Frosted Mini-Wheats from the grocery near his midtown Omaha home last Sunday.
Those five items, which rang up to less than $16.85, have constituted his entire diet this week.
Mello and Beverly Neel, an assistant to State Sen. Dave Bloomfield of Hoskins, are trying to subsist on the food allowance of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly known as food stamps — in order to draw attention to the lack of healthy food available to low-income families.
State Sen. Jeremy Nordquist, also of Omaha, plans to join them in the exercise next week.
“Even with benefits, we know families who qualify for food stamps make difficult choices,” Nordquist said. “They're often forced to make unhealthy choices to stretch money.”
The idea to live on food stamps for a week sprang from debate on Legislative Bill 543, which expanded partnerships between government entities and private nonprofit agencies in funding the program. It passed 42-0 on final reading, and Gov. Dave Heineman signed the bill into law April 14.
Guidelines limit the program that is used by 31 million Americans to households that make less than 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $28,668 annually.
A 2008 USDA estimate placed the average benefit for food stamps at $101 per person per month, which equates to roughly $3.37 per day and $1.12 per meal. With those parameters, Mello said, careful shopping can easily be undone by hunger.
“Knowing I had to ration out food for a whole week — I hadn't done that since college,” he said.
By Friday he'll be down to a single slice of bread plus what remains in the jars of peanut butter and jelly.
While shopping for those five days, Mello said, he was dismayed by the lack of healthy foods he could afford. His choices of skim milk, wheat bread, reduced-fat peanut butter and low-sugar jelly reflected the difficulty he had squeezing healthy food into his tiny budget.
The least nutritious food is often the cheapest, he said, and food stamps can be used on products such as soda and cookies.
“My wife asked, ‘Why didn't you get cheaper white bread?' We know unhealthy foods can cause diabetes.”
Nordquist is in the planning stage for his grocery run.
Right now, he's considering, like Mello, peanut butter and jelly as well as eggs and canned vegetables.
“On that amount, fresh foods are off the table,” Nordquist said. “A bag of apples would eat that up.”
Neel, who lives in Wayne, has no stove, microwave or hot plate in the room in which she lives in Lincoln while the Legislature is in session. She's relied on a steady diet of chef salads for dinner each night.
Her trick for affording fresh vegetables? Grocery shopping at Dollar Tree.
Living within her seven-day budget of $23.59 hasn't been too difficult, she said, but then she hasn't had to feed her husband or three grown children.
“For a family, I don't think it's very possible,” she said.
On Saturday morning, when this “teaching moment” concludes, Mello plans to eat an apple or banana.
Without the nutritious food to which he's accustomed, the fitness routine fo the normally active Mello has suffered. Basketball and biking came to a halt, and an overall lack of energy limited him to just one trip to the gym.
Nordquist said: “Next week, we can always go back to our normal routine, but for some families, this goes for months on end.”
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