United Way's Hunger Action Week: April 20-24

A quick time out from all this blogging about extravagant eating in Spain and Portugal...

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email invitation from the United Way of King County, inviting me to participate in their Hunger Action Week, which starts today and runs through Friday, April 24th.

The idea behind the action week is to raise awareness for hunger issues in our local community, and the challenge is to see if you can feed yourself for only $7 a day, the maximum food stamp benefit for an individual in Washington.

I really like how they explain it on their website:

"This challenge is really an exercise of empathy—to live in someone else's shoes for one week and learn how you can help fight hunger in our community."

Here are the rules for the Hunger Challenge:

• Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner spending only $7 per day.
• Salt and pepper don't count but all other seasonings, cooking oils, condiments, snacks, drinks, and everything else do.
• Don't use food you already own.
• Don't accept food from family, friends, coworkers and others. Not even the free samples from Costco!
• Try to include fresh produce and healthy protein each day.
• Keep track of expenses, food choices, etc. and share your experiences (which you can do on United Way of King County's blog).

So please join up yourself, if you can, and consider the following:

• Can you feed yourself for only $7 a day?
• If you had to make a choice between buying groceries and paying your rent, how would you choose?
• What compromises will you need to make?
• Will you be able to provide much variety or will you need to eat the same thing all week?
• If you don't know how to cook, does this make the challenge more difficult?

After returning from an extravagant vacation abroad for the past two weeks, this challenge comes at a perfect time to regain some perspective. I'll be blogging about our meals each day at our other blog, fishes+loaves, and returning to blog about the rest of our journey through Spain after the challenge ends.

More information can be found at the Hunger Action Week Blog.