Buying meals without wheels

Once a month, Amanda Ridgeway writes out her grocery list and then figures out how to get to the store.

It's no easy task.

Since December, the 21-year-old and her 2-year-old daughter Angel have lived in a Volunteers of America shelter, tucked on a quiet country road in Glassboro.

Like many families here, the Paulsboro native doesn't have a car, so she relies on a patchwork of transportation options.

If she's lucky, her federal SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits come on a Tuesday or Thursday, when the shelter van can ferry her to a nearby bus station. If she can spare the cash, she calls a cab or finds a ride.

Sometimes, she'll pack her toddler in the stroller and walk.

"Where there's an issue, there's a solution," she said, while curled on a couch in the shelter's living room.

"That's what I was raised up on."

About 18.5 percent of New Jersey's children are food insecure, meaning they don't always know where they will find their next meal. That's a little better than the national average of 21.6 percent, according to Feeding America.

Though New Jersey is prosperous, its higher-than-average unemployment rate ranks it 47th in the nation, a troubling indicator.

Even with federal assistance, households making less than $24,000 annually are more than twice as likely to report difficulties accessing healthy food, according to a report by the Food and Research Action Center. For low-income households without a car, grocery shopping is a challenge.

That's true at Robins' Nest, a children's services agency in Glassboro that offers efficiency apartments for young women aging out of the foster system.

Kim Wallace, who directs the Life Link Homes program, said her agency gives bus tickets to residents who want to visit a grocery store and organizes weekly trips to ShopRite or Walmart.

"Our young people can be very creative," Wallace explained. "A few of our residents have vehicles, so sometimes a resident with a vehicle will take a group to the grocery store to shop."

Ashley Cully, a ShopRite dietitian, offers free nutritional counseling for shoppers at the chain's stores in Marlton and Cherry Hill. For a fee that varies by store, the grocery chain also offers an online ordering service that includes delivery.

But it's not clear how often low-income families take advantage of such amenities. Cully steers bargain hunters toward frozen fruits and vegetables (they keep longer), bulk packages and private-label items.

"Generally, the more you can cook from scratch, the more money you will save," she offered. "But it depends on the customer's ability to cook."

Cooking is Ridgeway's forte. Since she left her mother's house at 18, Ridgeway has stayed in shelters or friends' homes. She doesn't have to shop or cook. The VOA shelter provides meals to its residents, but she mostly caters to her daughter's tastes — and her own.

"She's very picky," Ridgeway sighed. "She won't eat already-made hamburgers. She wants me to make them."

At the store, she calculates her purchases so as not to exceed her monthly $346 food budget. She stuffs the basket under her daughter's stroller with her grocery bags, and sometimes piles things on top of the stroller's awning.

"I love to bargain. I'm going to be 'Coupon Suzy' when I get my place," she joked.

Ridgeway shares a refrigerator with other residents at the shelter, filling her section with meat and frozen vegetables she buys at Bottom Dollar. Milk is expensive, she explained, and she and her daughter don't eat cereal.

A self-taught cook, she uses the shelter's huge kitchen to fry chicken or pork chops, whip mashed potatoes from scratch and offer her daughter macaroni and cheese or canned fruit without the syrup. Still, cooking in a shelter kitchen is a cinch, compared with making spaghetti in a skillet and microwave. One day, after she gets her own apartment ("I don't want a small kitchen"), she wants to come back and teach other women how to cook.

"With me getting pregnant, it really changed me a lot," Ridgeway said softly. She is working on her GED and wants to become a certified nursing assistant. Ridgeway could have continued living from one couch to the next, but she didn't want that for her daughter.

"You need to work hard for what you want," she noted. "That's why I'm here. I didn't want to go into a shelter ...

"You got to fight for what you want, or else you're not going to get it."

Reach Kim Mulford at (856) 486-2448 or kmulford@cpsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @CP_KimMulford