Eating Healthy Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune: Here’s the Proof

With all of the cookbooks, food blogs, Pinterest pins and Tumblr accounts devoted to food, these days, you’d think it would be hard for a simple, free pdf cookbook to break through all the noise. Well, I guess all the backlash on cookbooks like Gwyneth Paltrow’s book, It’s All Good, and the hilariously scathing reviews of it like Healthy Eating on Just $300 a Day struck a chord with people like Leanne Brown.

While working on her master’s degree in Food Studies at NYU, Leanne Brown created, for her final project, a great, practical cookbook called Good and Cheap. It focuses on a really big problem that faces many people in America, particularly the 46 million Americans living on SNAP (or food stamps as they’re commonly referred to) how to cook healthy meals on a very limited budget.

With the average SNAP benefit being just $4 a day, it no wonder that so many poor people in this country are malnourished and ironically, over weight. According to many doctors and nutritionists, the cause of obesity among our nations poor is that nutritious foods are more expensive than the processed, sugar and preservative filled foods that are. Leanne’s solution; create inexpensive meals using whole foods that are not only easy to make but made with ingredients that can be found in almost any neighborhood supermarket. She even bases all of her recipes and prices on the items available at 4 grocery stores in Inwood, a relatively low-income neighborhood on the northern tip of Manhattan.

Her book has become so popular, she not only had over 90,000 people download it in the first week, she also started a Kickstarter campaign to get hardcopies published. To date, her initial goal of $10,000 has been surpassed to an astounding $67,000!

In her introduction she states, “Cooking on a limited budget is not easy, and there are

times when a tough week can turn eating into a chore. I hope the recipes and techniques in this book help make those times rare and tough choices a little more bearable.”

Any while many people reading this article may not need to stick to such a limited grocery budget, the book does a great job of showing us how some simple cooking techniques, simple ingredients and a little creativity can produce some amazing, healthy meals.

Actually, for a cookbook written by a food studies mater’s student, there really isn’t a lot of nutritional advice and the take-away from this book is that simple meals made from fresh, whole, readily-available foods are all most people really need to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

We encourage you to check the book out for yourself – http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/.