You can google salvage stores to find some in your area. If you are going to grow a veggie in a ppot…try zucchini. No Fail, produces abundantly. Also, Tomatoes. If you have a friend in the same position you can each buy a different packet of seeds and split.
Also, the “cream of something” soup addition. This is expensive. Make a cream sauce with equal amounts of a melted fat(butter, margarine, oil etc.) and flour salt and pepper and add water, chicken broth, milk etc. and you can have a cream sauce to add to noodles, rice and able to make a casserole by adding any vegetables or meat.
the other good place for free samples is the food court at a mall. They all want you to try their chicken, it may not be a meal but it is free and takes the edge off.

I remember my third year of college when I had moved into an apartment to actually get a good night’s sleep and found that my expenses went up drastically. I spent one week eating pasta, peanut butter sandwiches, and apples given to me by friends who had dining hall passes.

Remember, desperate times often call for desperate measures. No one should be shot down for doing what is in their best interest to survive. And I think that far too many people have their parents pay for everything and don’t realize that some people have to go it alone.

This is my favorite SD article! Excellent info.

For those who have criticized the chicken keeping let me just say that the chickens we kept when I was a child roamed free and layed their eggs where ever they wanted. We couldn’t gather them and the racoons etc. would devour them before any little chicks could hatch. The chickens themselves were often eaten by racoons and foxes. Check out a bloody chichen foot in your back yard before you talk about how cruel it is to keep them in a warm, dry, cage with water. I’m not sure how much fun it is to be eaten by a racoon.

Thanks again Trent for a fabulous article.

Heather

Furthermore, if you wanted to stop pointing fingers and actually educate yourselves about this, you might try actually reading about raising chickens on a smaller, non-commercial scale, or even about someone who does, so you have a better idea what it is like to own and keep a chicken. May I suggest the memoir “Still LIfe for Chickens”? In this book, the writer has multiple chickens living INDOORS and treats them far, far better than the chickens you buy at the supermarket.

Animal abuse, indeed…*shakes head*

At least the chicken in the apartment wasn’t debeaked like many commercial chickens are (cutting off their main sensory/social appendage and preventing them from exploring and interacting with their environment.)

And it was sheltered in a relatively large and clean pen.
While not a chicken heaven, I don’t think the chicken story is any kind of evidence of animal abuse.

Peace!

I was married with one child, going to college, and working 40 hours/wk comprised mostly of lugging 200 pound tanks up and down people’s basement steps.

I found that quite a few of the older people we knew received way more government cheese than they could eat. They often also got things they didn’t want to eat like canned pork. Most were happy to offer to give it away but I usually tried to do odd jobs as a way to say thank you.

Our saving grace was egg noodles which we could often get for $0.30/lb and larger bags of rice.

Combine noodles with cheese and some milk for a kind of mac-n-cheese. (The government cheese was actually damn good cheese… then again everything tastes better when you are hungry.)

The canned pork was actually a little nasty but if you heated it in a pan, added a little salt and pepper and flour to make gravy it was almost like a stroganoff. It was also edible over rice especially with some kind if cheap veggies like peas.

Generic mac-n-cheese + “some veggie” + “meat” + cream of something soup + ? = a fairly nutritious, but not always tasty, meal.

Fortunately my daughter was young and due to state aid actually usually ate better than we did. And luckily we got out of that slump pretty quickly.

Lest rico see this post and tell me I should have gotten a 2nd job… the “cost” I might have added to an already wasteful government program is negligible and far outweighed by the lost tax revenue had I taken 1-2 more years to graduate. Something I’m sure applies to Trent’s story as well. Besides you NEED a good night’s sleep doing that kind of job.

Financial Education and Literacy is a very important skill to have. It should be taught at a young age. Also it is a life long learning topic. You can never know enough. Thanks for the post. Considered yourself bookmarked.

-15 or so ketchup packets
-2-3 coffee creamer cups
-a packet of the red pepper for pizza
-enough hot water from the tee water dispenser to warm it up and thin the ketchup a little

serve with a packet or two of crackers.

Better than it sounds, helped us get through to the next supply run to town numerous times, along with other leftovers from the concessions.

Keeping a hen in the conditions described above is far more humane than the conditions they are kept in in virtually all large-scale chicken farms, including most free-range chicken farms.

It is foolish to waste your time criticizing someone who takes a chicken into their home, cleans their cage daily, provides them fresh bedding, and gives them individualized attention while thousands of chickens suffer under truly frightening conditions in large-scale chicken farms.