we have to pick the families for the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. There are guidelines for submitting your family as follows:

1) Must have contact information – telephone number and address

2) An accurate number of family members is needed

3) A typed summary of why the family should be chosen

I live in the midst of a large number of illegal immigrants. There are now four houses on one piece of property right next door that contain at least 6 families. They do not speak English and cannot legally work. They can get free schooling for their children (I do not) free health care and free food. Yet I worked and put money from my checks into Medicaid and social security.

My husband works very hard and puts quite a bit of money into ‘the system.’ We will never see that money, though. It goes to pay for others. We pay large school taxes as did my parents (for 30 years on 4 pieces of property) yet they never used the schools and neither will we. We are just using a bit of that money we put in to feed our children, how is that wrong?

I absolutely do not think that getting some government assistance while you are struggling to feed your family is wrong. I do think that people who break the law to get it is wrong. I believe that people who eat steak and shrimp and buy new cars should not be getting assistance. I do not get WIC because I am trying to get free stuff, but because my credit card debt is increasing to the breaking point while I try to feed and care for my special needs children.

So for those who are not living lavish lifestyles or taking advantage of the system, I think it is just fine to get assistance while it is needed.

Stepping down from my soap box,
Sarah

My children are on a special gluten free diet and two of us are allergic to milk. They do not pay for gluten free cereal. The nutritionist has repeatedly told me that she will be happy to give us lactaid, but lactose intolerance is not the problem- it’s an actual milk allergy. she doesn’t seem to understand that and WIC doesn’t pay for non-dairy milks anyway.

The really awful thing is that if they would give us the money allotted towards our choice of products, we could actually get organic and GF products. Right now I have three children on WIC, but we had five on it until this February.

Each child receives $8.55 towards the purchase of 1 1/2 gallons of milk which equals $25.65 per month times 3 is $76.95 per month in milk. I could easily buy organic milk and rice milk with that if it were allowed. They also pay $8.05 per child for cereal- $24.15 per month. I could buy GF cereal with that. $27 per month is allotted for cheese. I get $15 for eggs, which I could spend on cage free organic eggs. $21 a month is allotted for juice and $9 for peanut butter (which would also easily pay for the good stuff.)

The only reason I am on WIC is because the GF diet is so expenisve. But they make it so hard to be CF too as they have no GFCF options for milk, cheese and cereal.

I hope that they will come to see that to have healthy women, infants and children, they must be more open with their allowed products!

Sarah, mom to four children on the autism spectrum

As far as the peanut butter on WIC, I was able to get the store brand natural peanut butter. It does not have hydrogenated oils or sugars.

Secondly, do you have health concerns that require different foods? Several of our family members require GF/CF diet and other food. Our bread, which I can not find a recipe for is $8.00 a loaf, our “milk” is about $10/gallon. Anyway, if it is doctor ordered for a health issue, you can take it off your taxes as a medical expense.

Lastly, for good organic produce. Do you live near an Amish community? We are blessed to live close to an Amish produce auction. We are able to get extra produce for canning here for a reasonable price. I don’t think they take food stamps. I don’t know though.

Another thougt is the SHARE program or Angel Food Ministries. You get half a month’s groceries for $30.
I’m not sure if it’s organic. Maybe you could just start out by replacing conveinence foods with foods cooked from scratch. Scratch cooking is much cheaper. It still eliminates many additives, dyes, etc.

We put out a half acre garden to provide us with organic produce. I know not everyone can do this, but you can utilize square foot gardening or container gardening. I can enough food to last our family all winter.

Get a book out of your library. You would be surprised at the weeds/flowers that are foods. Our family loves dandelion greens in our salads, and picking fresh berries from the woods.

Feeding your family better can be done on a budget. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic to your situation, but I have been there, done that! We work very hard with gardening, gathering, and cooking from scratch.