SALT LAKE CITY — When Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox accepted the challenge to subsist for two days on no more than what a food stamps recipient receives, he anticipated there would be moments of unmet hunger.
What he didn't realize until starting was that the nutritional quality of what he did get to eat would quickly take a back seat to just filling up.
"I realized very quickly that I would be one of those not healthy eaters when it comes to the SNAP Challenge," Cox said. "It's just too easy to get some prepared box food. It felt a lot like college, those two days — protein bars, mac 'n' cheese, that kind of stuff."
Cox was one of more than 60 people statewide to recently answer the call from Utahns Against Hunger to eat only what they could buy for $4.20 per day, the average daily value allotted to an American who receives benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Calling it the Utah SNAP Challenge, the organizers called on people statewide to see how far federal food benefits can carry them through a given day. The organization instructed volunteers to sign up for up to seven days of the challenge — beginning Sept. 13 and ending Thursday — "to experience how difficult it is for families living on SNAP to simultaneously avoid hunger, afford nutritious foods and stay healthy with limited resources."
"There were definitely times when I got hungry, no question about that. That's part of it," Cox told the Deseret News. "(But) you can get filled up. The question is, what are you filling up on? You can go to McDonald's and get a burger and that's easy and fairly cheap, only a buck.
"But if you did that every day, you'd have lots of other things to worry about, too. So it's really tough," he said.
Cox readily agreed to the challenge when asked, seeing it as a way to widen his perspective on government food benefits.
"I just think it's important, especially as an elected official, anytime we get an opportunity to try to experience or get closer to whatever issue it is that we're dealing with, we're just going to make a much more informed decision, a much more empathetic decision," Cox said. "We're going to understand a little better the dynamics that are at play and what it means for people that are experiencing hunger."
He added that "sitting behind a desk on a hill in Salt Lake City isn't the best way to really feel and understand what's happening."
Gina Cornia, executive director of Utahns Against Hunger, said the intention of the challenge is to "generate a public conversation about policy about why these programs are important."
"It really is a way to demonstrate how difficult it is to rely on so few resources," Cornia said.
Utahns Against Hunger is an advocacy group that focuses on public policy surrounding food assistance programs and also provides financial and logistical support to charities in the state. The group asked participants in the Utah SNAP Challenge to refrain from accepting free food at work or using food already on hand in keeping with the "spirit" of the event, Cornia said.
Cox admitted to just an ever-so-slight fudging on that front, having added some tomatoes from his garden into his macaroni and cheese. He joked he was a "lightweight" for only participating for two days, but that he would "love to be able to do a full week."
"I don't pretend two days is anywhere close to what people have to deal with on a daily basis, but it was eye-opening for sure," Cox said.
Next time, he said, he'd like to "really plan it out," more so than this year, in choosing groceries ahead of time.
"To me that's the most eye-opening piece of it. ... You have to think through it and plan ahead if you're going to do it right, and especially if you're going to do it healthy."
Utahns Against Hunger encouraged participants to keep a record of everything they ate and drank and to share their experiences on social media using the hashtag #UtahSNAPChallenge.
"People take it really seriously and are really thoughtful about it," Cornia said.
More than 206,000 Utahns in nearly 83,000 households receive SNAP benefits, Cornia said. About 86 percent of beneficiaries live in households in which at least one person is earning income. Approximately 37 of benefitting homes are headed by a single parent.
SNAP benefits are dispensed monthly, but the average daily value to a recipient in Utah is $3.85 per day and $4.20 per day nationally. Any given household's benefit varies on several financial factors.
"I think that there's a perception that the benefits are overly generous," Cornia said. "The benefits are modest."
Families frequently become more desperate in the last few days of each month, when their benefits are stretched the thinnest, she added.
"That's when they're going to emergency food pantries and sort of trying to figure out what they're going to do," she said.
Cox said his takeaway from the experience is that "we don't want people to be on the SNAP program forever," but rather to eventually be "able to subsist on more than $4.20 a day."
"I think that's critical, too, is what are we doing to make sure that people don't have to live on $4.20 forever or even for the next two years or year or six months. What are we doing to make sure that's a very short part of someone's experience?" he said.
Cornia said she has several concerns about how SNAP funding could be drawn down when the so-called "farm bill," also known as the Agricultural Act of 2014, is up for congressional reauthorization next year. At a banquet Thursday, Utahns Against Hunger issued a "call of action" to contact Utah's congressional delegation about that issue.
"We want those people to pick up the phone and call their members of Congress and say, you know, we need to preserve those programs," Cornia said.