Is Healthy Food Affordable? How I Ate Healthy on a Budget in Columbus

When I was a college student in Columbus, I decided to find out for myself if it was possible to eat healthy on a very tight budget

Twenty-one years old, bursting with energy and high ideals, I had three goals when I moved to Columbus, Ohio, to go to college at The Ohio State University. I wanted to live as sustainably as possible, eat a healthy vegetarian diet, and live a frugal lifestyle. In my mind, all three were completely compatible. Yeah, the first two months were a bit rough—I lost fifteen pounds from walking six miles a day and not eating enough food—but by my second semester, I felt like I was doing pretty well at meeting all three goals.

I cooked all my food in my studio apartment kitchen. It was small, but it had a stove and fridge, which was all I needed.

That’s when I watched the movie Food, Inc. for the first time. I haven’t re-watched it for years, but as I recall, one part recorded the struggles of a low-income family, who bemoaned the fact that all they could afford was the dollar menu at McDonald’s. They couldn’t afford healthy food, because a head of broccoli cost more than a dollar. The implication was that low-income people are doomed to be overweight and unhealthy because they can’t afford healthy food.

I saved a lot of money by buying all my grains, beans, and other staples in bulk.

There were parts of the film that I liked, but that particular scene made me mad. I knew it cost me less to buy whole foods and cook them myself than it would to eat at McDonald’s. So, me being me, I decided to prove it. I kept track of all my food costs for an entire year. That involved buying whole grains and beans in bulk, drying and canning veggies from our garden and the CSA I worked for over the summer, and bringing frozen goat milk from home once a month. I spent less than $500 for food in the 2014 school year. OSU’s estimated food costs for the same time period were $5,280—ten times more than what I was spending!

My kitchen didn't have enough cupboards for all my home-canned fruit, but I didn't have many clothes, so I stored food in my closet. I also hung strings of garlic and onions in the closet.

Okay, I know that’s not an accurate comparison. Most people can’t grow that much of their own food, and the bulk food store was really cheap. So I priced out how much it would have cost me to buy a veggie CSA share at the farmers market and the rest of the food at the Kroger next to my apartment—$1,486. My next question was—could someone buy the food I was eating with SNAP? I looked up the maximum SNAP payment in 2014 and it was $1,201 for nine months. But wait—every farmers market I’ve ever been to has a program that doubles SNAP benefits. Accounting for that brought the grand total down to $1,067, which would be fully covered by SNAP with $134 to spare.

When I crunched the numbers, I concluded that, yes, it was possible to eat healthy on even the inadequate SNAP payments of 2014. SNAP benefits have been raised significantly since then.

When I did some research on SNAP and discovered that it can’t be used at restaurants or for prepared meals, I really started to wonder about that scene in Food, Inc. If those “poor” people could buy anything at McDonald’s, that meant they had a little extra money for food above SNAP payments. If they used that money at the grocery store for whole foods and stretched it with SNAP, they could buy everything I did and meat, too. So why did the film make it look like they were doomed to be unhealthy just because they didn’t have much money?

Whenever the topic of food insecurity came up in my classes after that, I excitedly shared my experience with eating healthy on a budget. But to my surprise, nobody took me seriously. That’s when I finally started to realize that poor dietary habits were less about food affordability and more about mindset.  As I’ve discussed in my last two blog posts, there’s a deep-seated assumption in our society—including USDA food programs, food pantries, and educators—that “poor” people shouldn’t—and can’t—eat a nutritionally optimum diet. That just plain isn’t true. As I discovered, real, whole food is affordable for anyone with careful planning. Financial struggles are real, but they are surmountable. The bigger challenge is overcoming the misconception that healthy food is a luxury.