Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA)

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Education

Contents of this Web Page:

University Extension Education

Planning a Food Budget with Local Food

Stretching the Local Food Dollar

Sometimes there’s a perception that local food is more expensive and not accessible to ordinary families, and especially not to low-income families. Farmers who want to reach out to a broad range of consumers need to put some effort into making those connections and proving that you can eat local on a budget.

Minnesota has a lot of coordinated efforts going on in 2012 to get farmers’ markets set up to accept SNAP benefits and to publicize that to SNAP participants. See SNAP/EBT + Market Bucks at Minnesota Farmers’ Markets.

Reaching out to SNAP customers will probably involve getting referrals from county public health departments or local food shelf staff. Those folks may need some evidence that their clients will get enough food to eat for a whole month if they start using their SNAP resources to buy local food.

Then, too, local farm produce may not be in the condition that many shoppers are used to – and that goes for people not using SNAP as well as those using SNAP. Fresh produce from the farmers’ market may need to be trimmed, peeled, chopped, and cooked in unfamiliar ways. That can be a daunting challenge to many busy families.

The challenges for farmers and farmers’ markets, then, include explaining budget-friendly ways to buy local food, and family-friendly ways to prepare it.

University Extension Education

University of Minnesota

U of MN Extension Nutrition Educators work to educate low-income consumers about healthy eating and cooking with healthy foods, and shopping for healthy food on a tight budget. They aren’t necessarily focused on local foods, but they can be great allies of farmers selling local food.

U of MN Extension’s “Simply Good Eating” program

Oregon State University Extension

“Stretching Your Food Dollar”

Planning a Food Budget with Local Food

A number of individuals and groups have documented experiences of eating for a month on a food stamp budget. These efforts have often been criticized as either politically motivated, or else as “play-acting” something that is a grim reality for many people.

While we see the merit in those criticisms, a couple of documents are included here in the hope they may be useful to farmers and farmers’ markets that want to try to develop sample budget plans for local food purchases. These documents were produced by people whose intent was to learn and to educate; not to play games or play politics.

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma Food Co-op

Robert Waldrop is a Catholic worker from Oklahoma City, and founder of the Oklahoma Food Co-op. He has numerous resources on his website to help people stretch their food dollar, including sample shopping lists. These would also be good references or starting points for farmers to develop their own local food shopping list.

“Better Times” Cookbook and shopping lists

Meeting the “Food Stamp Challenge” with local food

Wedge Co-op Food Stamp Challenge

Elizabeth Archerd is the membership and marketing manager at the Wedge Co-op in Minneapolis. She and her husband ate for a month (October 2011) on a SNAP budget, purchasing all food at the Wedge. She provided a detailed report about that month.

USDA Thrifty Food Plan

Official USDA Food Plans: Cost of Food (PDF, 254 kb)

Thrifty Food Plan 2006 (PDF, 1.9 Mb; 64 page document)

These documents provide detailed information about quantities of food needed for each person in a family, and foods to be included in the "Thrifty Food Plan," which is the basis for allocation of food stamp benefits to individuals and families. This information could help develop realistic local food shopping lists that will provide sufficient quantities of food for each family member for the month.

Stretching the Local Food Dollar

Programs like “Market Bucks,” sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, can help stretch the food dollar for local food purchases. Local communities or organizations could also develop their own, similar programs in partnership with local farmers’ markets.

Examples of farmer-consumer programs

More information about SNAP/EBT + Market Bucks at Minnesota Farmers' Markets