15 ms·

A free cookbook for people living on $4/day

197 points by sillysaurus3 13y ago

lamby 13y ago
Congratulations on shipping! 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.
tribaal 13y ago
That's a very good idea!
ctdonath 13y ago
Nicely done. A buck a plate is entirely doable, but there's been a lack of resources convincing people of it. ...even has a recipe for Poutine (a defining Canadian appetizer)!
- mrcharles 13y ago
  Poutine is a meal.
pitzips 13y ago
So awesome! Would love for there to be an option to pay what you want for the PDF. I wouldn't mind giving a couple bucks if you offered the options.
dmart 13y ago
Perhaps not your intended audience, but as a college student with close-to-zero cooking ability, this looks amazing.
- VLM 13y ago
  I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create something like a "first cookbook" 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.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create something like a "first cookbook" On the same site the author has a vegetarian cookbook targeted at people "people just becoming comfortable in their own kitchens". http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/ http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/
    - VLM 13y ago
      The other book also contains good recipes. 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.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  On the same site the author has a vegetarian cookbook targeted at people "people just becoming comfortable in their own kitchens". http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/ http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/
- atmosx 13y ago
  Do yourself a favor, learn to cook yourself as healthy as possible. Will help for finances and lifestyle considerably during your years in college.
mikegillman 13y ago
Thank you for this. It is very helpful to think of all the combinations I can make cheaply or quickly, with only a few ingredients. Reminds me that we don't need to go overboard to make something tasty.
mryingster 13y ago
These are amazing looking cookbooks! I love the layout and photography. I am going to have to try a couple recipes! Congratulations on publishing!
AdmiralAsshat 13y ago
Nice looking book so far. 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.
Avshalom 13y ago
... although telling people to caramelize onions as part of a snack is some kind of evil.
sillysaurus3 13y ago
I cross-posted this from Reddit (where it originally blew up) figuring that a bunch of us might benefit from the recipes. I sure did; they're amazing. But now I'm wondering if I should've let the author submit it instead, so that she could be here to answer questions or get feedback immediately (like "you should make the PDF pay-what-you-want because I'm throwing money at my monitor and it's not reaching your wallet"). Would anyone send her a tweet that her book's being featured on HN? https://twitter.com/leelb 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.
- pavel_lishin 13y ago
  Why not do it yourself?
  - sillysaurus3 13y ago
    I don't have an account since it'd probably just stagnate. I guess I could create a throwaway, but I have no idea how twitter works or whether she'd even get a tweet from a brand new account (spam prevention). Figured it's better to leave it to someone who knows what they're doing.
- atmosx 13y ago
  Ok, done.
soggypopsicle 13y ago
This looks really good. I'm currently eating for 5-6$ a day and am vegan so I'm looking forward to trying this out.
Fundlab 13y ago
I think it all comes down to what type of meal recipes or what one already has in stock. 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 :)
- 14113 13y ago
  As I mentioned elsewhere, this is also better for who this book is aimed at - poorer people. They generally have less disposable time on top of lack of money, so will prefer less time consuming, but more expensive meals (such as fast food, ready meals). If instead they could prepare a load of (say) stew that would last for a weeks worth of lunches and dinners, it would be much easier for them spend less money on food.
- theorique 13y ago
  Do u already have complementary cooking resources; powder, garlic, oil etc? These often overlooked in a buck a day meals. 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!
- keithpeter 13y ago
  I'm cooking for myself all next next week, not for the usual collection of hungry people, so I shall be making a large pot of vegetable stew. Might try pot of peanut soup as well! Oatmeal/porridge for breakfast as I have that a lot anyway. I think the idea of providing storage times in the fridge is a good one.
riffraff 13y ago
from a quick skim this looks nicely done. The only thing that missing is <time required> next to price per serving/total. 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.
- 14113 13y ago
  I think this is very important for the market they're targeting as well (people on food stamps). An often overlooked aspect of poverty is how time consuming it is. Instead of clocking off work at 5, going home, cooking and relaxing, you've got to work multiple jobs, leaving far less time to cook, and far less incentive to cook well. This leads to a downward spiral of overspending on faster to prepare, but more expensive food (e.g. fast food, ready meals), and thus a relative loss of income.
  - VLM 13y ago
    That is a very popular and heavily promoted belief for cultural reasons. And of course people like that DO exist. None the less, the "big news release" late last week / early this week was 1 in 5 American households have no one living in the household who is currently employed. At all. And labor force participation rates as a percentage of population, and adult labor force population, continue to crash from a peak a long time ago. Of the households where at least someone in them is employed, not all have multiple full time jobs etc. And at the higher end I can afford the leisure time / I enjoy cooking to my specifications and tastes. So figure an absolute minimum of 1/2 the population could participate in slow cheap cooking, which is a large target market. 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.
    - 13y ago
qwerta 13y ago
On $4/day you should avoid being vegetarian, get cheap food with as many calories as possible. Better value for money. EDIT: I get lot of down votes, so just to clarify: I am objecting to being _exclusively_ vegetarian. People on $4/day have other problems. I am not saying you should buy junk food. There is lot of reasonable quality meat, for example fish if you live near sea. Also vegs such as rice or potatoes are cheap and high on energy
- dayvid 13y ago
  Food quality is really important, though. Eating low quality food can have an adverse affect on your performance and health, costing more maybe immediately and definitely in the long run. When you're really poor in any way, your health is the most important thing to take care of.
  - collyw 13y ago
    You can make quality food cheap (assuming that you mean something along the lines of "not processed crap"). I learned to cook as a student as a big bag of potatoes was more value for money than a frozen pizza.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  This is targetted for people on SNAP ("food stamps") in the US -- there, the problem doesn't seem to be calorie deficit (obesity in poverty is quite common), so confusing calories/$ with value is a serious error.
  - hatfieej 13y ago
    While the book is quite nice, I think it really misses it's target demographic. Many people in poor areas end up buying a lot of their food from the local convenience store where there's just a selection of low quality and unhealthy food (and not anything fresh). Kids also tend to be left to fix their own meals, which will be mostly junk food or something that doesn't require any preparation. It's a very challenging problem to address. Even when you have programs to get fresh and healthy food to these neighborhoods, it's a challenge to get people to take advantage of it.
001sky 13y ago
I would simply caution that $4/day is an on-spec ingredient pricing[0] and does not account for actual cost to make these meals. A trained cook in a professional kitchen could do it, given the acess to storage and ability to re-use ingredients via a well-structured menu. But the paid-for overhead would be masking a variety of costs that weigh heavy on the target audience. > 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-Professional/dp/111812250X http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Yields-Purchasing-Professiona... [1] Assume 2000 kcal/day, 15%=300kcal. 80g protein is 320kcal, 70g is 280. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe
- thebooktocome 13y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with you, but various hyperboles in your comment make it harder to do so. Some points you make are made by the author in the introduction, which also reduces my confidence in your criticisms. 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-11.html http://www.census.gov/hhes/well-being/publications/extended-... [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html
tetristhemovie 13y ago
This is useful, but a good portion of these recipes aren't useable in an office environment. Curious if anyone has something similar, but where are you limited to, at most, a microwave and/or toaster oven.
- illegalsmile 13y ago
  making a large quantity of burritos at once can be inexpensive, last a long time and they're easy to heat up in the microwave. salads are easy to make at the office as are sandwiches. most leftovers from home can be brought in. i guess i've never seen the office as a place to get your cook on.
frigg 13y ago
I get a 403 on Good and Cheap pdf.
- joebo 13y ago
  Try this one: https://googledrive.com/host/0Bxd6wdCBD_2tdUdtM0d4WTJmclU/beyond-rice-and-beans-small.pdf https://googledrive.com/host/0Bxd6wdCBD_2tdUdtM0d4WTJmclU/be... It's what's shown on the mailing list signup
  - frigg 13y ago
    Thanks
jstalin 13y ago
Nutritional info would be helpful.
rtfgj 13y ago
4$ is expensive. 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.
- illegalsmile 13y ago
  what? i'm having a hard time even understanding what's going on here. there's no logic behind not eating anything that you touched with your own hands, doubly so when they're to be cooked. you need your own pot to boil water in? potatoes take some time but not an hour. multivitamins aren't a replacement for a poor diet.
merrua 13y ago
I came across this site years ago (http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/ http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/) and it serves the same group. Easy recipes, as low cost as possible to feed familes.

197 points by sillysaurus3 13y ago

lamby 13y ago

Congratulations on shipping! 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.

tribaal 13y ago

That's a very good idea!

ctdonath 13y ago

Nicely done. A buck a plate is entirely doable, but there's been a lack of resources convincing people of it. ...even has a recipe for Poutine (a defining Canadian appetizer)!

mrcharles 13y ago
Poutine is a meal.

pitzips 13y ago

So awesome! Would love for there to be an option to pay what you want for the PDF. I wouldn't mind giving a couple bucks if you offered the options.

dmart 13y ago

Perhaps not your intended audience, but as a college student with close-to-zero cooking ability, this looks amazing.

VLM 13y ago
I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create something like a "first cookbook" 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.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create something like a "first cookbook" On the same site the author has a vegetarian cookbook targeted at people "people just becoming comfortable in their own kitchens". http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/ http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/
  - VLM 13y ago
    The other book also contains good recipes. 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.
dragonwriter 13y ago
On the same site the author has a vegetarian cookbook targeted at people "people just becoming comfortable in their own kitchens". http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/ http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/
atmosx 13y ago
Do yourself a favor, learn to cook yourself as healthy as possible. Will help for finances and lifestyle considerably during your years in college.

mikegillman 13y ago

Thank you for this. It is very helpful to think of all the combinations I can make cheaply or quickly, with only a few ingredients. Reminds me that we don't need to go overboard to make something tasty.

mryingster 13y ago

These are amazing looking cookbooks! I love the layout and photography. I am going to have to try a couple recipes! Congratulations on publishing!

AdmiralAsshat 13y ago

Nice looking book so far. 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.

Avshalom 13y ago

... although telling people to caramelize onions as part of a snack is some kind of evil.

sillysaurus3 13y ago

I cross-posted this from Reddit (where it originally blew up) figuring that a bunch of us might benefit from the recipes. I sure did; they're amazing. But now I'm wondering if I should've let the author submit it instead, so that she could be here to answer questions or get feedback immediately (like "you should make the PDF pay-what-you-want because I'm throwing money at my monitor and it's not reaching your wallet"). Would anyone send her a tweet that her book's being featured on HN? https://twitter.com/leelb 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.

pavel_lishin 13y ago
Why not do it yourself?
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  I don't have an account since it'd probably just stagnate. I guess I could create a throwaway, but I have no idea how twitter works or whether she'd even get a tweet from a brand new account (spam prevention). Figured it's better to leave it to someone who knows what they're doing.
atmosx 13y ago
Ok, done.

soggypopsicle 13y ago

This looks really good. I'm currently eating for 5-6$ a day and am vegan so I'm looking forward to trying this out.

Fundlab 13y ago

I think it all comes down to what type of meal recipes or what one already has in stock. 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 :)

14113 13y ago
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is also better for who this book is aimed at - poorer people. They generally have less disposable time on top of lack of money, so will prefer less time consuming, but more expensive meals (such as fast food, ready meals). If instead they could prepare a load of (say) stew that would last for a weeks worth of lunches and dinners, it would be much easier for them spend less money on food.
theorique 13y ago
Do u already have complementary cooking resources; powder, garlic, oil etc? These often overlooked in a buck a day meals. 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!
keithpeter 13y ago
I'm cooking for myself all next next week, not for the usual collection of hungry people, so I shall be making a large pot of vegetable stew. Might try pot of peanut soup as well! Oatmeal/porridge for breakfast as I have that a lot anyway. I think the idea of providing storage times in the fridge is a good one.

riffraff 13y ago

from a quick skim this looks nicely done. The only thing that missing is <time required> next to price per serving/total. 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.

14113 13y ago
I think this is very important for the market they're targeting as well (people on food stamps). An often overlooked aspect of poverty is how time consuming it is. Instead of clocking off work at 5, going home, cooking and relaxing, you've got to work multiple jobs, leaving far less time to cook, and far less incentive to cook well. This leads to a downward spiral of overspending on faster to prepare, but more expensive food (e.g. fast food, ready meals), and thus a relative loss of income.
- VLM 13y ago
  That is a very popular and heavily promoted belief for cultural reasons. And of course people like that DO exist. None the less, the "big news release" late last week / early this week was 1 in 5 American households have no one living in the household who is currently employed. At all. And labor force participation rates as a percentage of population, and adult labor force population, continue to crash from a peak a long time ago. Of the households where at least someone in them is employed, not all have multiple full time jobs etc. And at the higher end I can afford the leisure time / I enjoy cooking to my specifications and tastes. So figure an absolute minimum of 1/2 the population could participate in slow cheap cooking, which is a large target market. 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.
  - 13y ago

qwerta 13y ago

On $4/day you should avoid being vegetarian, get cheap food with as many calories as possible. Better value for money. 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

dayvid 13y ago
Food quality is really important, though. Eating low quality food can have an adverse affect on your performance and health, costing more maybe immediately and definitely in the long run. When you're really poor in any way, your health is the most important thing to take care of.
- collyw 13y ago
  You can make quality food cheap (assuming that you mean something along the lines of "not processed crap"). I learned to cook as a student as a big bag of potatoes was more value for money than a frozen pizza.
dragonwriter 13y ago
This is targetted for people on SNAP ("food stamps") in the US -- there, the problem doesn't seem to be calorie deficit (obesity in poverty is quite common), so confusing calories/$ with value is a serious error.
- hatfieej 13y ago
  While the book is quite nice, I think it really misses it's target demographic. Many people in poor areas end up buying a lot of their food from the local convenience store where there's just a selection of low quality and unhealthy food (and not anything fresh). Kids also tend to be left to fix their own meals, which will be mostly junk food or something that doesn't require any preparation. It's a very challenging problem to address. Even when you have programs to get fresh and healthy food to these neighborhoods, it's a challenge to get people to take advantage of it.

001sky 13y ago

I would simply caution that $4/day is an on-spec ingredient pricing[0] and does not account for actual cost to make these meals. A trained cook in a professional kitchen could do it, given the acess to storage and ability to re-use ingredients via a well-structured menu. But the paid-for overhead would be masking a variety of costs that weigh heavy on the target audience. > 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-Professional/dp/111812250X http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Yields-Purchasing-Professiona... [1] Assume 2000 kcal/day, 15%=300kcal. 80g protein is 320kcal, 70g is 280. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe

thebooktocome 13y ago
I'm inclined to agree with you, but various hyperboles in your comment make it harder to do so. Some points you make are made by the author in the introduction, which also reduces my confidence in your criticisms. 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-11.html http://www.census.gov/hhes/well-being/publications/extended-... [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html

tetristhemovie 13y ago

This is useful, but a good portion of these recipes aren't useable in an office environment. Curious if anyone has something similar, but where are you limited to, at most, a microwave and/or toaster oven.

illegalsmile 13y ago
making a large quantity of burritos at once can be inexpensive, last a long time and they're easy to heat up in the microwave. salads are easy to make at the office as are sandwiches. most leftovers from home can be brought in. i guess i've never seen the office as a place to get your cook on.

frigg 13y ago

I get a 403 on Good and Cheap pdf.

joebo 13y ago
Try this one: https://googledrive.com/host/0Bxd6wdCBD_2tdUdtM0d4WTJmclU/beyond-rice-and-beans-small.pdf https://googledrive.com/host/0Bxd6wdCBD_2tdUdtM0d4WTJmclU/be... It's what's shown on the mailing list signup
- frigg 13y ago
  Thanks

jstalin 13y ago

Nutritional info would be helpful.

rtfgj 13y ago

4$ is expensive. 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.

illegalsmile 13y ago
what? i'm having a hard time even understanding what's going on here. there's no logic behind not eating anything that you touched with your own hands, doubly so when they're to be cooked. you need your own pot to boil water in? potatoes take some time but not an hour. multivitamins aren't a replacement for a poor diet.

merrua 13y ago

I came across this site years ago (http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/ http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/) and it serves the same group. Easy recipes, as low cost as possible to feed familes.