MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says more changes are coming to SNAP this year, changes that include work requirements, also restrictions on what people can purchase with their benefits. This is after recipients saw their benefits disrupted in 2025. About 42 million Americans currently rely on the program. There are additional resources out there. Host of Life Kit, Marielle Segarra, talked with Kevin Curry about this. Curry is founder of Fit Men Cook, and after he left grad school in 2008, he found he needed to use SNAP benefits as a bridge. Curry spoke to Life Kit about options for finding free or reduced-cost food when it is tough to afford food.
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MARIELLE SEGARRA: The first thing we're going to talk about is places that offer free groceries or meals with no questions asked. And a good place to start is by calling the National Hunger Hotline. That's 1-866-3-HUNGRY or 1-877-8-HAMBRE in Spanish. And they will give you phone numbers for resources in your area, including food pantries, soup kitchens and Meals on Wheels.
KEVIN CURRY: The good thing about calling the hotline and going through the national numbers is that they have up-to-date lists.
SEGARRA: Let's talk about food pantries in general. You have some tips here of things that most people don't know about food pantries.
CURRY: Yeah. So the first one is just, like, the grocery stores. I go to several different grocery stores to get several different items. You can do the same thing with food pantries. You can go to multiple food pantries and grab items. And what I love about this, too, is that it does reinforce this idea of having choice, of having variety, that there is dignity in that. And so I think people just think that, all right, I just got this box from this one. This is all I get. No, you can go and visit another one.
SEGARRA: Give me a game plan. Like, if I really wanted to get some deals at my grocery store on stuff that they were about to get rid of or that they will be putting on sale 'cause they're bringing out something fresher, what are the times I should start going?
CURRY: So first off, if you're going to the grocery store, you know, like, the days where it's really full. So I would just say that on a Sunday and a Monday, the grocery store is going to be stocked. So those are the days that you're probably not going to see deals. So if everyone is shopping on a Monday, then you're saying, all right, let me go in there on Wednesday and just kind of see what they have left. The most important day, though, is right before the weekend. So I usually go on that Friday. When the stock is really low and when they're trying to sell these things, that's when you start seeing a lot of the deals.
SEGARRA: Another tip that you give about building a low-cost cart is making batch meals. And specifically, you talk about buying a small set of low-cost ingredients that you can make three or four different meals from for the week.
CURRY: I just started a brand new series on this, and it came from this idea. So what I did was I gave myself a budget of, like, $16. I bought potatoes. I bought ground turkey and onion, bell pepper, cheese, enchilada sauce and canned black beans. And I was going to say, all right, I'm going to show you how to use this for the entire week.
And so the first thing I made were these amazing stuffed burrito potatoes. So today, I'm making these crispy, cheesy waffles from that filling. The next thing after that, I'm like, hey, if you want to have, like, a get together or a party, I'm going to show you how to make this amazing, like, dual layer dip. And then the fourth thing that I'm showing how to do is we're making mini grab-and-go frittatas.
SEGARRA: Yeah.
CURRY: So it's things like that that show how you can take just these small staples and then turn them into several meals throughout the week. So that way, you're only essentially cooking just once and just doing small things throughout the week just to supplement.
KELLY: That was Marielle Segarra, host of NPR's Life kit podcast, with Kevin Curry, founder of Fit Men Cook. For more tips from Life Kit, you can go to npr.org/lifekit. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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