A free cookbook for people living on $4/day
leannebrown.ca
leannebrown.ca
Do u already have complementary cooking resources; powder, garlic, oil etc? These often overlooked in a buck a day meals.
One thing with western dishes is the attempt to give food an aesthetic appeal. In places where people live on a dollar a day, they tend to be more concerned with getting full and not the appealing or garnished outlook of food.
Also, in places like Africa,food is stored! I cant emphasize this more. A peanut soup or chicken soup could last a span of 3 days to a week. It cab be served with rice, bread, or other dough meals. After taking servings, the soup is warmed and placed back in the fridge and can be eaten another day. This to me is what frugal cooking is. It is easier to tweak frugal eating this way than shopping fresh groceries every other day.
NB: Pardon my incoherence :)
Excellent point. There is a baseline capex to getting a kitchen in shape. Yes, you can go to the dollar store for cheap spatulas, or the discount supermarket for 89 cent herbs, but the point is that the startup cost is non zero. Especially for a person or family who is tired from long hours of work, microwave burritos or pizzas or other "convenience" foods are cheap enough.
Also, skills are a big factor. If you don't know how to cook, making and freezing a giant pot of chili or stew in portions is a daunting task. And if you get it wrong, and you just blew your entire food budget for the next two weeks ... good luck!
I think the idea of providing storage times in the fridge is a good one.
Bought two large aubergines (egg plants) and four courgettes (zuchinis?) and three red peppers, a couple of cans of tomatoes and a can of kidney beans from local corner shop[1]. Cost less than 4 pounds sterling.
Cut and salted the aubergines for 20 minutes and rinsed the bitter liquid. Chopped the courgettes and peppers. Put in large oven dish with four table spoons (60ml) of olive oil. Roasted on gas mark 8 (230C, 450F [1]) for 45 min, stirring once.
Added canned tomatoes and beans and a couple of garlic cloves and cooked for a further 30 min at gas mark 6 (200C, 400F).
5 meals...
1. Served a small portion with rice (cooked in my one button rice cooker). Rest allowed to cool and stored in fridge. Rice is bought in 10Kg bags from local shop for Pounds 7.50
2. A small serving cold on fresh thick white toast for breakfast
3. Fry onion in heavy frying pan and add ready made Rogan Josh sauce from the corner shop. Add substantial serving of the ratatouille. Served with rice with Tumeric/Haldi and naans from the local nan man (1 pound for four naans fresh cooked at local street side bakery). Yoghurt and cucumber (50p per half) dressing.
4. Pasta bake: boil old leftover pastas from various jars. Drain. Stir in 100g (4oz) of cheap grated cheddar cheese (£3.50 for 750g from local supermarket). Spoon in ratatouille from fridge into base of oven dish. Top with the pasta and cheese mixture. Serve with cheap Italian wine (5 pounds and let it breathe)
5. Liquid reserved from the ratatouille plus a few courgettes used in final stages of stir fry of cabbage and mushrooms (50p and 1 pound from local supermarket). Served with rice.
Next: peanut soup but I'm looking for a non-chi-chi recipe. Another local shop oriented to African Caribbean community sells yam and cassava as well as tapioca. They have harissa as well, but I find that hard to digest (burns twice &c).
Indeed. And, in savvier kitchens. See MFK Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf and the nicely written modern interpretation by Tamar Adler: The Everlasting Meal.
This comment is specifically addressed in the opening section of the book. They even lay out a strategy for how to slowly build up the basic necessities for preparing good tasting, as well as cheap food, over a long period of sprinkling in 1-2 more expensive items per trip.
EDIT: I get lot of down votes, so just to clarify:
I am objecting to being _exclusively_ vegetarian. People on $4/day have other problems. I am not saying you should buy junk food. There is lot of reasonable quality meat, for example fish if you live near sea. Also vegs such as rice or potatoes are cheap and high on energy
http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/HHFS_BEANS_KIDNE... http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/HHFS_RICE_WHITE_...
That seems like a pretty affordable meal to me. Maybe you have some information I don't and would like to share it?
Obesity and related problems are usually associated with lifestyle, medication (antibiotics!) and lack of physical activity, not the food itself.
Checkout rabbit poisoning for some interesting read.
If you want fat intake, which is good as long as your carb intake is low, disgusting and unhealthy as it is, factory produced vegetable oil can fry nearly nutritionally vacant potatoes. Dip them in corn syrup ketchup for extra vegetables or at least empty calories.
If you are diagnosed allergic to soy like my son, or think the stuff on the above list is "gross" life gets complicated and expensive rapidly if you subsist entirely on the weirdest of vegetarian supplements and prepared meals and prepared snacks.
Also I'm locked out "submitting too fast" but:
A non paleo diet of nothing but rice will probably kill you in the long term. Lets run with it anyway.
Depending on how badly you got screwed and how many middlemen stand in the way and the size of packaging, 50 cents per pound is (was?) not totally out of line for rice. So at $4/day you can afford 8 pounds of uncooked rice. After cooking it, it'll be a whole lot more than 8 pounds due to water adsorption. But the nutrient content of the uncooked rice (not much washes away) is about 3 cal/gram somewhat pessimistically aka about 1200 calories per pound of uncooked rice. And you'll be consuming 8 of those pounds... per day. so thats 9600 calories of cooked rice per day.
Given an intake of 9600 calories per day, I checked out some basal metabolic rate online calculators. I got about 9000 calories per day BMR for a 30 year old male 6 ft tall weighing a mere 1300 pounds. For out metric readers, 1300 pounds is almost exactly 1/2 the mass of my new commuter car. So pretty freaking huge.
On a very long scale, given a mere $4/day to live on (I spend $6/day long term average and eat like a king, so WTF about that) and only eat rice and somehow don't die of a deficiency or diabetes, your weight will eventually stabilize at a mere 1300 pounds given that monetary intake in the form of 100% rice.
So yeah, vegetarians probably are not going to starve to death on a mere $4/day unless they're really screwing up.
(my apologies, I checked Amazon Prime and its hard to get rice shipped to my door for less than $1/pound, although it seems like mere years ago I saw 50 pound sacks for $25 at the grocery store... At any rate, $4/day is enough to be obscenely morbidly obese)
I think you mis-typed the wrong word there, but I'm not sure what to substitute it with.
Of course mince meat is cheaper per calorie than lettuce, it's probably cheaper than tomatoes, but it's not cheaper than rice or lentils.
BTW - I live in Europe too.
Back in my old days in post communist Europe, the cheapest eatable meat was horse (kind of like a beef). Most vegetables were imported (and expensive) or scarce outside of season (and expensive) . People usually loaded their cellars with 1000 pounds of vegs for winter, but students did not had this option.
Dried beans (my favorite) tend to be much cheaper than just about any other source of protein, but I don't think I've ever seen tofu being sold for less than hamburger. Ground meat in this country tends to be really cheap, thanks to agricultural subsidies, filler, "pink slime" and the like.
In terms of calories, this is technically correct, but the metric of calories is not at all useful in a first-world context. At my local market, £1 gets you about 10,000 kcals of rice or pasta. In other words, any budget above $1 / £1 per day will be able to provide plenty of kcals. Kcals are not the problem.
What matters are the other things the body needs. I eat vegetables to provide fiber, vitamins and phytonutrients. I eat meat to provide protein and certain types of fat. In this regard, they're not fungible, because leafy green vegetables are a poor source of protein and meat is a poor source of phytonutrients.
While this book is interesting it seems to go to great lengths to create new dishes when many compatible traditional dishes exist. For example you can make Schnitzel, Spaetzle, Blaukraut and Brussel sprouts for 5 for around $10.
Also, isn't corn healthy unless you process and concentrate the sugars or powder it? I doubt one can gain weight by eating lots of raw or cooked corn unless you slather it in butter or something.
(I say that as a vegetarian who recycles nearly everything and drives a Nissan Leaf. However, I still get haircuts and work for The Man, so what do I know?)
Every week I dry 40 minutes round-trip to a grocery store that specializes in raw foods (vegetables, fruits, cheeses, etc) and get enough food for about $60 to feed myself and my friend for the full week.
Those prices just aren't available to someone without a vehicle and those in the city are probably paying more for less (for instance, the Shaw's across the street from me in Boston sells lettuce for 2.50 and I pay 98 cents for organic outside the city).
I think a "preservation" section might be useful, however, advising how long things tend to keep so that people can have a better idea of what stuff can stay in the pantry for weeks and what stuff should be devoured quickly. One of the primary pitfalls of my spending habits is buying fresh produce that I end up throwing out because I don't eat enough salad to go through the entire box of spring mix before it starts to wilt.
Would anyone send her a tweet that her book's being featured on HN? https://twitter.com/leelb Thanks!
EDIT: And thank you to the mods for moving this comment chain to the bottom! Wish I could've done it myself. I hesitated to even write this comment since it was offtopic and didn't want it to become the top one, but letting her know her book was on HN seemed important.
Maybe you can make pierogi for .2$ apiece, but especially if you're not experienced it will take you hours, so if time is part of the equation they become vastly more expensive than, say, green chile & cheese quesadillas.
There are people in a hurry. There is also a statistically provable much larger group who given the choice of starvation or homemade bread from scratch clearly have the time and motivation, although maybe not skills, to make homemade bread from scratch. They'd be better off eating a salad anyway, but you get the idea.
It is highly likely that the two groups need two cookbooks.
Someone poor and in a hurry needs to buy a $10 slow cooker, that is something I can say from experience.
This reminds me a lot of budgetbytes.com (in particular the $X total, $Y/serving nomenclature), alas without my favourite feature of pictures throughout the cooking process.
I found those extremely valuable by removing the vestigal risk at trying a particular recipe, as well as inspiring confidence throughout the process and finally in identifying things I shouldn't attempt yet.
As a criticism (and a minor one) decades ago I worked thru school at a retail food store and WIC program women would come in with a long list of very specific required products. I'm told this program still exists. So pregnant poor women must buy precisely 2 pounds of dried navy beans per week. Not 3 pounds, not lima beans, not canned, 2 pounds dried navy beans per week. Ditto cheeses and rice and specific canned fruit juice for vitamin C. My point with this anecdote is coordination with that program might help guide further recipes in the book, assuming it hasn't already been done to maximal ability. Perhaps similar coordination with food banks to match whats typically donated with recipe ingredient lists.
A non-coincidental observation I can make is the cookbook is highly non-paleo and that correlates with poor people who aren't literally starving tend toward obesity. So a bit more salad and a bit less bread products might be a healthy idea. A stir fry never killed anyone and they don't cost much of anything unless you put fancy stuff in. More recipes like the carmelized bananas and less like the cookies. Less pizza more veggies. Less noodles more salad.
On the same site the author has a vegetarian cookbook targeted at people "people just becoming comfortable in their own kitchens".
However, some (most?) of the recipes in the first veg cookbook are both healthier and probably cheaper than some of the recipes in the poverty cookbook. (some are the same, at first glance)
And re categorizing the other way, aside from offending vegetarians, in a first cookbook, it wouldn't hurt to transplant the roast chicken from the poverty book into the first cookbook. Other than cross contamination its pretty hard to screw up a roasted chicken, so its a good place for kitchen noobs to start.
On a small scale, all appears awesome, only on a larger scale is it debatable exactly which recipe belongs in which book and how much of each kind of dish belongs in each book. An editor-class of problem more than an author-class of problem. I can find no author-class problems to complain about, so far, which is impressive.
WIC is a federal-state partnership program, and the specific requirements are set by each state WIC program within federal guidelines. So, sure, it would be nice to have cookbooks that were coordinated with each state's WIC program, but its really not reasonable to expect someone to do that in a free cookbook offered as part of a degree project. Donations to food banks vary even more than state-level WIC requirements, and so present an even more dramatic version of the same problem.
That sounds like a computationally difficult, yet possible, "hard" problem. Sounds very "start-uppy" to me.
We already have book-on-demand, more or less, we need content-on-demand, and it sounds like an interesting startup.
I want a "upper-midwest" "cost is not much of a concern" "paleo-ish" hypercustomized cookbook. So given my tags a hundred or so recipes his the B-O-D printer and its under my christmas tree. My sister in law on the other hand is Kale Krazy so her tags would be similar region of the country, and every recipe must contain Kale, and like my son she's medically allergic to soy so cross all of those out, and she likes Dancing with the Stars (well, there's no accounting for taste) so thats where the background art in the cookbook will come from. And a hypercustomized B-O-D printer squirts out a cookbook for her under the christmas tree.
If its a success, I could see major publishers getting "interested" in turning it into a division of their own as an exit strategy.
Sounds easy to screw up and difficult to get right. Got startup written all over it.
> Frequent re-supply and cost-effective quality control of ingredients
> Zero-cost re-application and limited spoilage of non-consumed minium purhcase portions
> Abundant prep space, intermediate storage/refrigeration, and sanitary control
===============
Quickly glancing this book, Kale Salad on p 16
Hidden costs: Most of the nutritional of this salad comes from dried bread (1/2 loaf), leaving (1/2 loaf) in the pantry. Likewise, Fresh parmesean ($10/lb+up), anchovies ($2/tin), and dijon mustard ($3/per) leave most of their value in the pantry as well.
Hidden Nutrition: Most of the calories for the salad come from the bread, not the kale. Meanwhile, a 15% protein diet needs ~70-80g protein a day/person[4]. The only material protein in this "dinner" salad is 1 egg yolk, and 1 anchovie split by 2x people. That is 3-4g of protein per head, when a typical dinner should have ~30g (off by an order of magnitude). Twice as much protein actually hides in the cheese garnish. But to increase the protein to reasonable levels, Its tempting to double or tripple portion the cheese...thus driving up the food cost of the recipe. 4 oz of fresh-grated parmesan is at least $2.50. That would give you 25g protein/head out of the meal, but the cost for the salad would be $8 for 2x portions, blowing the daily budget in just one meal.
In any event, this is an increasingly interesting area for cooks and food authors[3].
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Yields-Purchasing-Professiona...
[1] Assume 2000 kcal/day, 15%=300kcal. 80g protein is 320kcal, 70g is 280.
p.5, emphasis added:
> This isn’t a typical budget cookbook, nor is it a nutritional guide, it’s a collection of recipes that happen to be inexpensive. Pricy ingredients are wonderful, but so are cheap ones—in fact most of our favorite foods can be had for pennies—the raw ingredients don’t cost much. Your time and skill add the value.
p. 9, emphasis added:
> In order to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption, the recipes do not feature large amounts of meat. Many recipe collections created for the American audience use meat as the central feature of most meals. My recipes celebrate the vegetables rather than the meat.
The $4/day figure is from SNAP, and so only represents food costs anyway -- yes, obviously labor costs matter too, but SNAP isn't very fungible. Few of the recipes really require much in the way of equipment or space. It's safe to assume that the typical American family in poverty has a refrigerator, stove, and microwave [0].
Regarding your analysis of kale salad, I'm unclear why you imply the value of the other half of the loaf of bread, the rest of the cheese, and etc., are lost. The author addresses minimum buying requirements by recommending that people amortize the cost of expensive ingredients. (All of the expensive ingredients in this particular recipe remain unspoiled for months, and in particular the cheese has an exceptionally graceful failure mode.) On a different note, the protein RDA for an adult male (female) is 56g (46g), not 70-80g [1].
You really lost me when you tried to double or triple the cheese. Have you ever tried to eat 4 oz of parm at once? Gross.
To recap, I think it's easy to inflate the "actual cost" of any meal when one fails to amortize costs (of all sorts) and assume unused ingredients are never eaten. I feel that the cookbook represents a meaningful and feasible improvement in the average quality of the American diet in general.
[0] http://www.census.gov/hhes/well-being/publications/extended-...
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html
(1) If I source the ingredients to "kale salad" at retail, it doesn't make the budget.
(2) If I eat 1/2 of it for dinner, its not a meal.
You can argue all you want about caveats, but people in the market for $4/day food are going to be reading for things at face value. I understand the market is not people like me--but then again, I've actually food-costed somewhat extenstively. One of the lessons of that exercise is that making a nuturtionally unsound "meal" is trivial and doing it "cheap" is even moreso. Brushing aside the major constraints of the exercise is missing the point.
The comment about parmesean is also telling. Retail for fresh parmsean--which I assume is $10--is more realistically higher. And 4 oz split 2 ways is 2oz/head. While you might "gag" at this, its not uncommon for a risotto finish to be 1/oz a person. And decent product is quite fine to eat 'straight', its quite normal actually. Parm is actually a generous assumption here because its protein density is so high per/oz. But that is precisely why it is a costly ingredient.
Lastly, pantry items are not "lost"--another mis-understanding. The issue is that they have spoilage and a cost-of carry that is not insignificant. A pro-kitchen can cost these out as overhead. A consumer kitchen on a real budget needs to pony up the working capital, and then needs to keep a speadsheet of inventory to re-use the ingredients. EG, we have 3/4 of a anchovies pack and 1 egg white now in the fridge...where does that go? In a resturaunt it will get used with 100% certainty...and most trained chefs will easily find a way manage that. Most people trying to slog out $4/day migh not have a plan for what to do with "pantry leftovers" in the same way. This is quite common affliction for people who don't cook regularly--eg college students, people with irregular schedules--etc. This is another reason why many avoid "scratch" cooking altogether as a strategy to "save money", because of food wastage issues.
Lastly, fresh ingredients are in fact quite expensive. How many calories are in an 8oz container of mushrooms? 100? for $2? A jar of Pickles? A $4/day book needs to average 500 calories per dollar. Whilst this is easy with starch, and with flour/bread, its not so easy with other types of "fresh food". Proteins and decent vegetables in particular.
Lastly, in any kind of urban environment this is doubly so. Outside of chinatown or the mission, even at farmers markets, the prices for fresh foods are typically marked up quite a bit more than preserved foods. Again, this issue is not faced by a resturaunt cook, but it is faced by the home cook who has to pay transit/taxi or time to go shopping to source ingredients in a way which makes efficient use of working capital.
None of this is personally directed at the author--it's more the nature of this exercise is that many published works in this class take certain amounts of privledge for granted.
This isn't actually a point you made. You never questioned the author's pricing scheme (which would have been a good point, by the way -- her methodology is n=4).
> (2) If I eat 1/2 of it for dinner, its [sic] not a meal.
It is completely common for people to eat salads of this size and this protein content (before doubling or trebling the cheese) as a meal that is also a part of a healthy diet.
I'm not really sure what to make of the rest of your comments. There's some good points here somewhere...?
Lets say our bunhc of kale is $3, bread $4 other stuff is "free". This leaves us with $7/2=$3.50 food cost. So we get about $1 to split for extra stuff for lunch. We can easily make egg/toast for breakfast, for $.50 cents (egg and a tbsp of jam), and get 5g protein. So now, we need to eat our lunch: 1/3 loaf of bread, 3/4 jar of sardines, and some mustard. Mix in the olive oil and its a reasonable amount of food. But there is only 15g of protein /per 100g in preserved anchovies. So, lunch plus breakfast is ~20g and 1/2 salad is 8g, total of 28... In other words, you are missing your protein intake by 50%. So, the price for eating kale salad while sticking to $4/day--even with generous assumptions--is that the rest of your meals need to make up for it. This is only realistic with a certain level of culinary sophistication. The type of basic re-purposing of ingredients illustrated above is much more likely in reality. And the tradeoffs there are you have to stomach a sandwich that some may condsider an aquited taste (although with 1/2 a lemon and some parsely not so bad) for lunch. But the real issue is scalability ans sustainability: over time missing 30g protein a day...is no problem for one day...but it is a problem as a lifestyle.
If you have the skills/education and priveledges needed to access cost-effective fresh ingredients, whilst maintaining an active pantry...and/or you are the type of person to do spreadsheets of food cost...life isn't so hard...but one is assuming away many of the difficulties that face the $4/day folks on food-stamps, IMHO.
I eat only white bread and cheese. Sometimes with a tomato. Those are the only things that parents buy. (Also meats but i'm vegetarian).
Potatoes are good and cheap (0.3$ per kg), but:
- I won't eat anything that I touched with bare hands, so I would have to buy some single-use gloves.
- Right now I don't have my own pot. And I'm saving for a phone so I don't want to spend 10$.
- It takes more than hour to prepare them.
I recently added multivitamin tablets to diet. Almost all vitamins, for 0.1$ per day.
...even has a recipe for Poutine (a defining Canadian appetizer)!
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