Some thoughts from Doug Bowen - Bailey on taking the Food Stamp Challenge:

My week has been filled with thoughts of food. On the personal level, I have wondered often if I will have enough. Starting with just $15 for the week was tough, but the challenge was also to see if I could eat in a healthy way - meaning 90 packets of ramen noodles wasn't a good option. So I did all my shopping at the Whole Foods Coop - buying bulk foods and committing to to being a creative cook with my groceries. I made chili; black beans and rice, a quart of yogurt from part of a half gallon of milk, and two loaves of bread. I have spent the week never quite full - with less energy than I usually have - but I made it.

I wouldn't have if it were not for community resources available. On Monday, I had lunch at the Damiano Soup Kitchen, and on Tuesday and Thursday, I ate at the CHUM Drop-In Center. Those full plates of food - with a bowl of soup besides - made my budget stretch significantly. Without knowing that eating there was possible, I would have worried much more about making it to Friday.

So, on this personal level, I am much more grateful for the resources that are out there to keep people from going hungry - and I am thankful to have grown up in a household with a mother who both cooked and taught me to cook. And to be living in a house with the equipment at hand to bake bread and make yogurt so that I could spend less money, but still have enough food.

The surface question of this challenge is really, "Is $15 enough to last a week?" The simple answer is "No." But dealing with hunger and poverty in our midst is not a simple thing - and I think deserves much more serious thinking. So, here are the more challenging questions I have been wrestling withl:

* Why are the CHUM Drop-in Center and the Damiano Soup Kitchen the most ethnically and racially diverse places I visited all week? Or put another way, what are the ways that race has been woven together with poverty over the years and what do we need to do to undo it?

* What are the appropriate supports for people to get out of poverty? Someone anonymously added to our blog some of his/her experience in being on food stamps and the importance of individual choice and responsibility - particularly knowing how to select healthy foods and then cook them. In looking at my week, I am certainly grateful for my cooking ability; and so I am even more thankful for programs like Opportunities Cooking, Duluth Community Gardens, and the Kids Cafe which focus on providing cooking and gardening skills. But to me, there is more than just individual responsibility. More than just getting a job - because there need to be jobs with livable wages. (I heard many people at lunches talking about going to work - so it is not at all that the people there were all unemployed.) More than that, I often wondered this week if I was living on this diet, would I have the energy to get out and try to find a job? I honestly don't know.

* Why does our society have such a strange relationship to food? I have been struck by how much food is available - and yet how much of it really isn't that healthy. On Tuesday, at the Drop-In Center, there were giant plastic bags full of doughnuts - leftovers, I assume, from some bakery. A lifetime's supply of saturated fat. So much of the calories that people take are without nutrition. As well, many people were shocked that I would spend my money at the Coop because buying organic is seen as so much more expensive than shopping in another grocery store. And it is somewhat more expensive - depending on what you buy... but it has made me wonder why we are so willing to budget more money for entertainment and transportation than we are for what we put into our bodies.

*What does it mean for me to take this challenge for a week when others do it for much of their lives? That I guess is the real challenge to me. Despite my daughter's worries that I would starve, I knew I could make it through the week. Now, though, I need to continue living a life more conscious of the reality that people spend their weeks wondering where their food is going to come from. I think it is good timing that this happened during the Islamic month of Ramadan - a holy time that Muslims around the world fast from sunup to sundown to be aware of what it is like to be hungry. I have spent the week feeling that hunger. The challenge now is take this personal experience and move forward to help shape a society where less and less people are faced with choices I had to make this week.