After a week of living on a lot of pasta, rise and oatmeal, Elizabeth and Ian Parker have returned to the wider variety of food they enjoyed before being part of the Family Food Challenge.

The challenge was organized by the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition and Whitehorse Food Bank. It saw six families spend a week living on the food budget a family on social assistance would normally receive for food.

The challenge was done last week in an effort to raise awareness about the challenges families face in affording healthy food options. It's part of this week's Poverty and Homelessness Action Week.

"It was a good learning experience," Elizabeth said in an interview this morning.

Over the course of the seven days, the couple gleaned a good understanding of what people have to live through on social assistance rates that amount to $93.80 for the couple (at 46.90 per person).

"It was tough," she said, noting their consumption of fruits and vegetables went down.

Where the couple might make spaghetti with vegetables on the side for supper, dinner was often the pasta with cheaper tomato sauce and no vegetables.

Knowing they couldn't just come home and eat what they wanted since they couldn't afford to run to the store and stock up brought some stress and meant little variety in their diet along with more planning of meals and snacks.

"It was definitely more bland," Elizabeth said.

While meals usually consisted of pasta and rice, Ian's evening snack was limited to oatmeal.

Elizabeth doesn't know a lot about welfare system policies and such, but her experience showed her how difficult it is to live on such a limited food budget.

"There should be food security," she said.

While the Parkers and a number of other participants found themselves eating starches, organizer and participant Jennifer Eskes was tired of chili by the end of the week.

Eskes made the batch of chili. While she'd normally freeze the leftovers and eat something else at subsequent meals, the money wasn't there to do that, leaving her with chili at lunch and dinner many days.

"You don't really have that back-up," she said this morning.

Going through the results of the experiment, Eskes, a registered dietitian, found participants like the Parkers ate a lot of starchy foods that filled them up for longer, were cheap and non-perishable.

Cheaper options like apples, carrots and bananas were the top choices in the fruit and vegetable department.

What seemed to suffer the most was the participants' protein intake.

Many seemed to stay away from buying protein-rich products. Where they did, they were the cheaper options like ground beef, peanut butter and canned tuna fish.

Another participating family saw the two adults giving up some of their own food to ensure their child could go to school with a good lunch.

"That's a pretty common experience," Eskes said of families on social assistance.

For Eskes, the challenge has been a success, with participants gaining a new level of understanding of what it's like to try to eat in healthy ways on social assistance rates.

"That is a real important indicator of success," Eskes said. She didn't want the project to come across as something where participants were "tourists" in the experience.

It's been suggested that if the project goes ahead again next year, that it be expanded so participants have to live on a full social assistance budget for up to a month.

With food being one of the more expendable costs, following the need for heat and housing, Eskes was quick to note there are a number of welfare recipients who end up spending some of the food allotment elsewhere.

It would be interesting for people to experience what it's like to live on an entire social assistance budget, she said.

Poverty and Homelessness Action Week will wrap up Saturday.