Five days in to my food stamp challenge, I was seriously hangry.

To be clear, I wasn’t hungry -- I’d consumed enough calories and nutrition to fill me. But I had just finished my fifth night in a row of meatloaf, roast potatoes and frozen green beans and I had to literally choke it down. I was full but entirely unsatisfied, as if mentally I had never eaten.

At that point in my week-long journey, when my yearning for my normal food routine was at an all-time high, I blamed Gwyneth Paltrow. Poor girl got a lot of flak recently after tweeting a commitment to the food stamp challenge, along with a photo of what she bought on her $29 food budget for the week.

The photo included things like cilantro, kale and seven limes ... not exactly practical items for getting you through the week. Unsurprisingly, Paltrow lasted four days before giving up on the challenge.







Though she received mostly criticism on social media for her somewhat pathetic attempt at the challenge, I, for one, commend her. No one had been paying close attention to the food stamp challenge before that. Designed as a way to raise awareness of the difficulties of living on the budget -- a maximum of $29 a week per person -- provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps), the food stamp challenge was essentially nonexistent in national conversation before Paltrow inserted herself into the issue. Regardless that it was a personal failure for her, she managed to bring the issue to the forefront of national conversation, and that in and of itself is a success.

Because of Paltrow, as ABC News’ food writer, I was tasked with trying out the challenge and writing about my experiences on a national news website. As a food writer, I spend the majority of my life -- professionally and personally -- thinking about food, writing about food, Instagramming about food and, the best part, eating food. I derive a lot of comfort and pleasure from my favorite meals, and I relish the moment of the day when I decide what I want for dinner (Thai? American? Italian? Korean?) and not putting a ton of thought into the budget, as long as it’s under the $20 mark. This experience would be the complete opposite.

At the beginning of the week, armed with Paltrow’s mistakes, I headed to the grocery store with what I thought was a solid, realistic plan. I would have oatmeal for breakfast, hard-boiled eggs for a snack, peanut butter & jelly sandwiches with pretzels for lunch and alternating roast chicken and meatloaf with potatoes and vegetables for dinner. As someone with a big appetite, it was important to me to have not only enough nutrition, but also enough food, period. Joke was on me, though, when I found out I couldn’t afford much of what I wanted, leaving me reeling in the supermarket as I tried to rejigger my meal plan. I settled on a monotonous repeat of the same foods every day for the week (oatmeal for breakfast, a hard-boiled egg for midmorning snack, roast chicken, potatoes and green beans for lunch and meatloaf, potatoes and green beans for dinner), trying to figure out how to stretch certain items, like the eggs for both the meatloaf and snacks. The irony wasn’t lost on me that as I figured this all out I was sipping a $9 kale smoothie that was my last normal-life hurrah before the plan started.

Going grocery shopping (which took three times as long as normal since I was cost comparing and swapping ingredients on the fly) was only half the battle of getting the food ready. I then had to go home and prepare it all, which took a ton of time. I had to roast my chicken and potatoes and prepare the meatloaf, since chicken was my lunch every day and meatloaf was dinner. I didn’t have the luxury ahead of me of zipping down to the work cafeteria one day when I hadn’t had the chance to bring lunch. And, to avoid the meat from going bad on the later days of the week, I had to freeze some portions to be reheated later. All of this work was just to feed me -- I can’t imagine how much time a family on SNAP has to devote to food preparation for the week.

As the week kicked off, the eating of it all started off not so bad. The food I had prepared was tasty (thank you, culinary school!) and healthy. Days one to three breezed by. I missed some of my afternoon snacking or after-dinner dessert, but I was on a pretty solid path to success, at first.

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