Food (in?)Security: My experience as an intelligent, hard-working, independent, low-income American

I am a 27-year-old woman living in Asheville, NC. I work full-time for a large fast-casual cafe chain. My net monthly income is about $1450. After I allocate money for my rent, utilities, car payments, phone bill, insurance (health and auto), gas, YMCA membership, and minimal incidentals, I have an average of $175 per month for groceries. Previously, I qualified for SNAP benefits in the amount of $120 per month, however, after a $.50 per hour raise, I no longer qualify. As someone who values nutrition and quality of life, feeding myself in consistency with my standards on $175 per month requires copious amounts of effort--planning bulk purchases, couponing, checking every sale, and figuring out what combinations of items to buy in a given shopping trip so as to maximize the quality of foods I can purchase.

The dietary standards I hold myself to are as follows:

The less distance my produce has to travel, and the closer to ripening I can purchase it, the better.

Local takes priority over organic in my book. I'd much sooner purchase conventional South Carolina peaches or tomatoes grown in Western North Carolina or South Carolina peaches than I would organic peppers from Holland or Argentinian garlic.

The more I know about and trust the source and growers/farmers of a food item, the more likely I am to purchase it. 

My go-to yogurts are Redwood Hill Farm Goat's Milk Yogurt (plain) for home use with muesli for breakfast or as a snack with honey and Dreaming Cow Cream Top flavored yogurts with my work lunches. Redwood Hill Farm is a family-owned operation that focuses on using minimal processing and providing high quality of life and proper nutrition to their dairy animals. Dreaming Cow yogurt is produced from cows residing in Jumping Gully Dairy, a family-owned, grass-based, rotational dairy farm only a couple hundred miles from me in Georgia.

I try as much as possible to buy only seafood whose source I find acceptable (wild-caught or sustainably farmed), and again, the more local, the better. I love salmon, tuna, trout, and scallops, and few things get me more excited than a filet of fresh NC sunburst trout.

I should add that I regularly buy both of those yogurts and the trout at my local Ingles, which for those who are unfamiliar is the dominant grocery chain in a large part of the Southeastern United States.

I would rather spend extra on high-quality dairy products than on going out or high fashion clothing.
Clothing is worn out, a night out is ethereal; health is invaluable. I think this is one of the few legitimate reasons to declare the following:

You only live once.