This post chronicles the first meal of my experiment. In order to obtain a brief taste of life on food stamps, I limited my daily food budget to only $3.25. A full explanation can be found in a previous post titled The Experiment.
9:15 am: I woke up Sunday morning and cursed myself for not eating a hearty meal the night before. I was ravenously hungry at this point, so I dove into the experiment and sat down for the first meal of the day. The entree: a lonely bowl of plain oatmeal.
The bowl of Kroger 100% Whole Grain Oats was, by far, the best-tasting meal of the day. Since oatmeal is renowned for being completely devoid of flavor, this is indicative of the quality found within the remaining meals.
Since I had foolishly purchased no other breakfast foods, I opted to eat a double portion (One cup). One cup of oatmeal provided only 300 calories, 12 grams of protein, 2.5 grams of fat, and 0 milligrams of sodium.
The meal itself looked strikingly similar to wet cement. In fact, it was a runny abomination of oat and water. Despite the meal’s rather horrifying appearance, it was surprisingly edible.
While I would love to proclaim my culinary expertise and condemn product’s manufacturer, I can blame only myself for the breakfast’s ugly mug. In a persistent effort to uphold the stereotype of a 20-something college student, I used a microwave to cook the oatmeal. As you can see in the picture above, Julia Child would not be proud.
Almost minutes after eating breakfast, the whole grain oats sunk to the pit of my stomach. While the oatmeal provided only 300 calories, it was quite filling, and kept me free of hunger pangs until mid-afternoon. In fact, I didn’t even think about food until 2pm. The experiment was going well at this point. I was left without my usual dose of caffeine, but I still felt good at this point in the day.
