New Cookbook Provides Affordable Recipes for Low-Income Families
Let’s be honest, we’d all like to eat well, but quality, homemade meals belong to a realm of the culinary world accessible only to the rich and completely off limits to anyone with a limited income … right? WRONG! Don’t let the naysayers and pessimists get to you. Living on a budget does not mean you have to settle for fast food and microwavable dinners and food studies scholar, Leanne Brown, can prove it.
Her latest book, Good and Cheap contains over sixty delicious and nutritious recipes tailored for those who make do on a $4 daily food budget (a struggle which 47 million Americans currently face). Those skeptical that such financial restraints could yield much versatility should note that the book contains recipes for shrimp and grits, vegetable jambalaya, banana pancakes, melon sorbet and four different smoothies just to name a few.
Brown, an advocate for a better food system focused on a return to home cooking, wrote Good and Cheap as her final project for her masters degree in Food Studies at New York University. While she laughingly admitted in an interview with SuperChangeYourLife.com that it’s “a little unusual” to published a cookbook for a masters thesis, she went on to explain her inspiration for the project.
“I really was bothered … by the fact that I felt that the poor don’t really have a voice in the food movement,” she said. “And so when it came down to doing my thesis I really wanted to do something genuinely useful that could have a life outside of academia … I just sort of said ‘this is where my skills, I think, would be best used.’”
Brown currently has her cookbook available for free in PDF form on her website and had a Kickstarter Campaign (now closed) to raise funds for printed copies that she could distribute free of charge to low-income families who don’t have computers and can’t afford to purchase the cookbook themselves.
For more information about Good and Cheap and where to find it, check out Brown’s website at http://www.leannebrown.ca/