The point she also missed is the mother that has small children. She has to take those kids with her or pay a babysitter with her small funds that she receives from the welfare department when she goes shopping. You can bet that by the end of the month she is at the food bank to get enough groceries to feed her kids. And during the summer it is even more difficult because there is no free breakfast or lunch at home like there is in school. And she doesn't get more in her SNAP benefits because the kids are home all day, every day. Throughout Boston there are day camps in all the parks and community centers. The kids get free lunch and snacks there. Those programs are filled to the max just for the sole purpose of the free lunch and snacks. But this is not the case in other cities and towns.
Unless you are actually living it, an experiment of make believe proves nothing. That melon that she had in her fridge that was on the verge of going rotten doesn't count. She didn't purchase it with her imaginary SNAP money. She didn't go to the section of the store where there are dented cans at a reduced price. Or to the produce dept. where the food was no longer appealing to the eye and priced to sell. Did she look for manger's specials in the meat department? You get them home and into the freezer as fast as you can.
If the author really wanted to try to live on a SNAP budget, then she should have followed a real SNAP recipient around a store and bought like her. Then she would have had a real lesson in how to budget. Personally, I think her experiment was just a lot of hooey. She needed to write an article and decided to try and live poor. No wonder she failed.