Food Stamp Challenge -- Day Five

My week on a food stamp budget is finally winding down. I still have plenty of food left to make it through my seven days, although I don't know if my "side dishes" -- apples, oranges, carrots, and celery -- will last until the end.

Today's breakfast was oatmeal with peanut butter, apple slices, and a cup of tea with lemon. Adding the peanut butter to the oatmeal made it so filling that I wasn't hungry at lunch time, which was probably just as well since I had a meeting from noon to 3:00. I cut up a carrot to take to the meeting, along with a bottle filled with the rest of the iced tea from the pot I made the night before Day One. By the time I got home, I was pretty hungry but didn't want to eat a full meal so close to dinner time. So I ate four celery sticks stuffed with peanut butter instead to tide me over. I also made a new pot of tea so I'll have iced tea for the remaining two days of the challenge.

That meant I was starving when dinner time rolled around. So I had an enormous plate full of leftover pasta with mushroom sauce and half a Valencia orange. It may not look pretty in the picture at the top of this blog post, but I wolfed it right down.

I've been surprised by the level of interest shown in the topic of following a vegan diet on a food stamp budget. The number of page views this blog has recorded has sky-rocketed. It used to be that on a good day following a new post, I might have 200 page views. In the past 24 hours, however, I've had well over 700 page views. If anyone has a theory about why this is such a hot topic, I'd love to hear about it!