Recently, ShareNet had an opportunity to connect with Leanne Brown, a food studies scholar and avid home cook who wrote “Good and Cheap,” a cookbook aimed at restricted-income readers, structured around the idea of putting three meals on the table for $4 per day.

The goal was not just any meals either, but healthy, satisfying cooking. The book can be downloaded in a free pdf at www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/.

Brown’s focus on healthy choices has given her book a special response and welcome among people with this restriction on their food budget or those who work helping them.

There is a Kickstarter (online funding platform) campaign under way to fund a significant printing at lowest-possible cost. This is necessary because “Good and Cheap” hasn’t actually been published in a print edition. Brown completed the book as the capstone project for her master’s in food studies at New York University.

She has always been passionate about food, but what Brown gained over the course of her degree and in creating the cookbook was “a greater understanding of the challenges that make it so tough for many people to eat well, be healthy, and take pleasure in food.” This is a challenge ShareNet sees every day, and a heartbreaking one at that.

“I wanted to do something that brought awareness to issues of hunger, while also creating a resource that would be useful outside of academia,” Brown said.

When asked about her creative process, she said the cookbook was created in the tiny kitchen of her tiny New York apartment.

“There was a lot of trial and error with the dishes and the photography,” she said.

“A lot of the inspiration came from a farm-share program. Every week, I picked up a huge pile of whatever vegetables the farm had produced that week, so the challenge became: these are cheap in season but what can I make from them? I had done a lot of research on SNAP (food stamps) in the process of getting my degree.”

In the book, she describes starting with a pantry of basic ingredients, the ones she could create the most meals from. She then calculated an average price for each of those ingredients among a variety of stores in a low-income neighborhood of New York. Brown found that the neighborhood where she researched prices had been designated a “food desert,” but was actually mitigated by better access to fresh produce than most would be.

“Food Desert” is a term initially coined in urban environments for neighborhoods where major grocery chains did not find it profitable to locate, leaving residents with no alternative but convenience-type stores or a long transit out of their neighborhood to a better one for shopping. Now, the term has been extended to rural and semi-rural areas as well where choices and bargain-shopping are severely restricted.

Brown also consulted with the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and the Food Trust in Philadelphia, both of whom were very supportive of the project. In the unexpectedly large-scale response to “Good and Cheap,” Brown learned “the appetite for information on how to use limited funds wisely is almost limitless.”

Brown’s dream would be for the book to be distributed with every single EBT card issued. “Money to buy food is essential, but that money will have much greater impact if recipients use it to cook meals that give them enough energy and health to pursue their goals.”

Another is to start a community kitchen program, a kind of “cooking library” with access to a central kitchen space and equipment folks might otherwise not have.

For those clients without online access or ability to print the whole cookbook pdf, ShareNet will obtain some donated copies.

— Mark Ince is executive director of ShareNet. Contact him at director@sharenetfoodbank.org.