How to Eat 3 Good Meals for Just $4 a Day (via Yahoo Food)

What started as a grad school thesis, turned into a best-selling cookbook.  An accomplishment in itself, that’s not the most though provoking part of Leanne Brown‘s story.  Brown moved to New York City to attend NYU’s Food Studies program and became fixated on a single question, “How does one restricted to SNAP, the U.S. government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly called food stamps — eat well on a budget of $4 per day?”

The answers to that question fill the pages of her book Good and Cheap: How to Eat Well on $4/Day.  There are recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, “big batch,” and dessert each broken down by ingredients and cost per serving.  Brown also offers shopping tips, advice on what to do with leftovers, and healthy eating tips.  A great manual for folks on a budget, it also offers sound advice on how to address our hunger problem.

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While many cookbooks entice with the promise of culinary escapism, few are devoted to the segment of the population that can feel most trapped in the kitchen.

But when Leanne Brown, 30, moved from Canada to New York City to enroll in New York University’s Food Studies program, she was consumed with answering a single question: How does one restricted to SNAP, the U.S. government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly called food stamps — eat well on a budget of $4 per day?

Charred Summer Salad. Photo: Leanne Brown and Dan Lazin.

After analyzing prices for groceries in the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood and online, Brown set about creating a collection of affordable, healthy, and filling recipes that could be prepared by people on a food stamp budget. Rather than relying on processed foods, the tome taught readers how to shop strategically and cook simple, wholesome dishes like corn soup, beet and chickpea salad, or vegetable quesadillas.

Then she posted the cookbook online under the title Good & Cheap and made it available to download for free.

“My philosophy is: If people want this information, they should have it,” Brown told Yahoo Food. “It was really important there be no barriers.”

The book took on a life of its own. More than 800,000 downloads later, the cookbook had clearly struck a nerve.

A subsequent Kickstarter campaign to fund printed versions raised $144,681, fueling the donation of 12,000 books to nonprofits across the United States and Canada. Nearly 40,000 more were sold at massive discounts to those same groups.

Read more here.