Cooking doesn’t come naturally to me. Cooking a healthy meal with $7.50 worth of ingredients comes even less naturally.

In my journey to understand the daily struggles of everyday people, I joined ENCompass, a fantastic club at OSU that is opening my eyes to the health struggles in the world. I learned that many low-income families do not have enough money to buy a nutritious meal; they have to settle for greasy and cheap food, which can increase risks for medical problems. This is a large problem we as a club are trying to prevent in the local community, but today I joined a group to try and understand what it was really like to cook under these conditions. With my group of 5 people, we had to cook as nutritious and filling a meal as $7.50 can get us. $7.50 is the max amount of money SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) would give a family of 5 that receives low income.

With that money, we were able to buy two packs of pasta, two packs of hard breadsticks, tomato sauce and a couple pounds of chicken. If you think that is a lot, it’s because we got lucky. A lot of the items we bought were on a large sale, and would normally be a lot pricier. Nonetheless, we were able to cook a relatively tasty chicken pasta. You can see me mixing the chicken with the tomato sauce. I confess I had too much fun. Maybe I should cook more.

However, I bring up the price of the meal because buying the food was the most difficult part of the challenge, and the part I learned the most from. The pasta was actually our second plan; we initially decided on making tacos. However, once we began gathering the ingredients, we found that food is more expensive than we thought. $3.00 for tortillas? $3.00 for salsa? It may not seem like much on its own, but when a family only has a budget of $7.50 to feed five people, all that they can buy is essentially half a taco. That is why we got lucky, because the pasta and breadsticks were both on an 80% discount! Without the discount, we would have to sacrifice one of our food items, and we were already cutting it close. I started to realize the struggles of what these families go through because while I only have to do this challenge for one day, this is their daily reality. This fact is still hard to wrap my head around, but I think with this awareness I understand that necessities such as food are items that I can’t even take for granted.