Can you eat delicious, healthy food on $4 a day?
Leanne Brown took on this challenge.
She created the book Good and Cheap: Eat well
on $4 a Day.
It began as a free download on her site.
It went viral to the tune of a half a million
downloads.
Can you do it?
Three meals on $4 a day?
I believe you can and that is not to say that
it's easy or that it is a good situation.
Really it's tough, but there are 46 million
people in this country
who are doing it every day.
Four dollars a day means something specific.
It's the amount on average that a person who
is living on food stamps has to work with.
It’s better to think about it more in terms
of $30 a week, maybe $120 a month.
It's like a budget range.
So, give me some examples.
Because its high summer, we have beautiful
tomatoes and cucumbers.
I've been really into making the Panzanella
salad,
which is this very old school Italian salad.
It’s based in day old bread, you know hard
bread that you knock on the side of the table and
would probably just throw out, but instead
you tear it up and throw it into your bowl
with juicy tomatoes, and luscious cucumbers
and you toss it all together and the hard
bread becomes this flavor sponge.
The perfect summer lunch.
Talk about your burger.
Oh, the half veggie burger!
One thing a lot of people notice is that there
isn't a huge amount of meat in the book,
and that's for totally practical reasons.
Meat can be very expensive, and we don't need
quite as much of that protein
as people traditionally think.
So, a half veggie burger is basically a way
to have that flavor that is so important for
a lot of people while stretching that out
with lentils or with ground up chick peas,
other legumes and vegetables in the burger.
You can use it a few different ways.
You'll use those patties to have burgers one
day and then the next day you might use it
for breakfast or you might throw it onto a salad.
What should we have on hand in stocking the
pantry?
Well, I think we all want to try to build
for ourselves a really great pantry of flexible
basic things like grains, dried beans, cans
of tomatoes.
I always have lemons on hand.
Lemons or lime to sort of squeeze onto things.
Garlic, these are my basics.
When you have those things around, you can
augment that with fresh, seasonal fruits and
vegetables.
It’s a great idea, and by the way for every
book sold another copy goes to someone who
needs it.
