Written by Serge Muharareni
Hello! I’m Serge, if any of you didn’t read any of my previous blogs. This school year I’m working in the Nutrition and Enterprise Group and working alongside with Danielle, whom you all may know as the Mobile Market Director. She somehow came up with the idea of making us go through a budgeting lesson, not by force of course. The lesson was really education and fun.
First, what was the lesson? The lesson was about budgeting and planning meals. So in this lesson, each one of us were given a scenario where we had either a salary or food stamps, with a certain amount of family members that depended on that money for a whole week worth of food. In my case, a 6 year old and, 2 adults and, was to provide a full 3 meals a day for the adults and only breakfast and dinner for the kid in assumption that the kid eats school lunch. And all that had to be provided for 7 days/week. I had to make sure the food was balanced according to the USDA’s My Plate.
Now we only had that one day to buy what is necessary and affordable. I only had $130 for the week. Our first step was to buy food from the “grocery store”, of course the quotes should indicate that it was just an activity not actually going to the store (laughing emoji). My first items at this “store” were a dozen eggs, cereal, milk, ground beef, chicken, and pastay noodles. My plan was to focus to have the kid have one serving of cereal for the week and have the adults share the eggs and milk for breakfast the same week.
Now we only had that one day to buy what is necessary and affordable. I only had $130 for the week. Our first step was to buy food from the “grocery store”, of course the quotes should indicate that it was just an activity not actually going to the store (laughing emoji). My first items at this “store” were a dozen eggs, cereal, milk, ground beef, chicken, and pastay noodles. My plan was to focus to have the kid have one serving of cereal for the week and have the adults share the eggs and milk for breakfast the same week.
Later on, we went to the farmers market. Those of us who had some kind of welfare were given an extra $20 due to a program called double up. Double up allows food stamp recipients to get double the value of what they buy at the participating farmer's markets for up $20. While the rest of us on salary had to use whatever we had left. I had already spent $24 of the $130 I had. At the farmers market, I focused mainly on lunch and dinner. I also focused on providing balanced meals, but that didn’t really work out. For this exercise I had to provide at least one serving of dairy, grain, protein, vegetables and fruits. To learn more about a balanced meal go to http://www.choosemyplate.gov/ . I bought apples, watermelon, sweet pepper, cabbages, onions, roast beef, steak, rice, leeks, kale and sprouts. It seemed as if I had enough for the week, unfortunately I ran out of certain things and ended up with watermelon, steak, and onions for dinner the whole week.
This activity was really helpful. It helped us understand how difficult it is to shop for food for once a week and plan all of the needs on the spot. We also understood that some of our customers are probably this unfortunate or worse. This gives us more of an open mind and helps us set reasonable prices at our farm stands and mobile market sites and hopefully help those customers in the best way we can.
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