Beautiful food for $4 a day, in a new cookbook for people on food stamps

Four dollars a day. That’s how much the average person on food stamps has to spend on food.

Considering $4 is often not enough to buy a latte in Seattle, it can be a major struggle to spin four bills into three meals.

All of this was a surprise to Leanne Brown, who was a student at NYU, getting her master’s degree in food studies. Born and raised in Canada, Brown hadn’t grown up in a culture of food stamps.

“There are 46 million Americans who are living on food stamps. Let alone seniors, students, people saving for houses,” Brown said. “People who really don’t have a lot of money to spend on food and are, as a result, food insecure.”

So for her thesis project she created a PDF cookbook called Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day for people living on food stamps.

“After I graduated I ended up putting it on my website and didn’t really do much with it for a little while. This was in April of 2014. By the end of April I came home from work one day and discovered that someone had posted the book to Reddit and 50,000 people had downloaded it in the first day.”

She realized this book was something people wanted. So with the help of Kickstarter, she set out to publish physical books. To get them into the hands of people who need them most, but who wouldn’t necessarily find the book online. Now, every time someone buys Good and Cheap, another copy is donated to one of 700 US non-profits who, in turn, give the book to someone on food stamps.

The recipes in the book are colorful, modern, international and feature lots of vegetables. Brown includes the approximate cost per serving, and the cost of the whole dish. She wants people to see that cooking from scratch can be cheaper than eating processed foods.

“So a box of macaroni and cheese might be really inexpensive and then you have a meal there. Whereas when you buy tomatoes and eggs it can seem like, ugh, it’s so expensive,” Brown said. “But each of those items you have many, many uses for. It’s not one single use item.”

“People always say, ‘Pancake mix is so cheap. Why would I make it from scratch?'” she said. “But the thing is, when you buy a box of pancake mix, it’s only ever going to be pancakes. Whereas if you buy flour and a little bit of baking soda and then add eggs to it, then you have pancakes. But you can also make muffins, you can make bread. So that’s really, long term, much more efficient, much more valuable.”

She also recognizes that a lot of people today were never taught how to cook. So recipes vary from a super simple baked sweet potato with sour cream and scallions, which costs $1.20 a serving, to slightly more challenging recipes, like pierogies with homemade dough that come out to 20 cents a dumpling.

“Every once in a while someone will think it’s, like, the $4 a day diet. It’s not that. This is not a joke. This is not a challenge. This is reality for 46 million people,” Brown said. “Plus, I want people to be empowered by cooking, to find hope through cooking. It’s really tough. Four dollars a day is not something that I would ever wish on anyone. But it’s a reality and I want everyone to be able to make wonderful food. To know that they deserve it and enjoy it.”