Rabbi Sydney Mintz went to Whole Foods the night before she began a week-long experiment — eating on $3 a day.
She and her two sons strolled the aisles of the glossy, upscale grocery store. There, they put into their plastic basket three shiny, organic granny smith apples, a carton of milk and a jar of honey. The bill: $8.23.
The next day, she’d have to stretch that amount and spare change to feed her and her two sons for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That’s because Mintz and her family were participating in the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge, which encouraged people to experience a week in the life of the average food stamp recipient. That meant $1 per meal per day per person.
The math worked out to $9 a day for Mintz and her boys.
Mintz, the rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, was one of dozens of rabbis across the country to take the Food Stamp Challenge, sponsored purposely around the High Holy Days by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs to call attention to the inadequacy of the food stamp benefit. Several members of Congress also participated in the challenge.
Mintz clipped coupons, compared prices at different stores — Safeway, DeLano’s IGA. She checked the newspaper for specials.
“The reality was the food I could buy for $9 a day was crummy,” she said. She stuck to the staples — beans, rice, dried cereal, generic macaroni and cheese.
She recalled one day packing her son a lunch of only half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a banana.
“In some cultures, that’s normal, but if you’re a Jewish mother, you pack a nine-course meal for a school lunch and another one in case of an emergency,” she joked.
Mintz made sure to make the challenge an educational one. When she explained it to her 7- and 12-year-old sons, she made sure to frame it in a Jewish context — that a handout isn’t always enough. Sometimes, when a person has really fallen down, the ethical and Jewish way to help is to “get into the pit with them, raising yourself and the other person out with you,” she said.
The experience, which was the centerpiece of her Yom Kippur sermon, taught her the harsh reality of life on a threadbare budget. She realized it’s “nearly impossible” to feed a family or even an individual with so little money for a food budget.
It reminded her that while she and many of her friends and congregants live a life of bounty, many people do not.
“We’ve all been told, ‘Eat that plate of food because there are starving children in fill-in-the-blank.’ But it’s not just people in China or Europe or Asia. It’s people living next door to us.”