I would simply caution that $4/day is an on-spec ingredient pricing[0] and does not account for actual cost to make these meals. A trained cook in a professional kitchen could do it, given the acess to storage and ability to re-use ingredients via a well-structured menu. But the paid-for overhead would be masking a variety of costs that weigh heavy on the target audience.
> Frequent re-supply and cost-effective quality control of ingredients
> Zero-cost re-application and limited spoilage of non-consumed minium purhcase portions
> Abundant prep space, intermediate storage/refrigeration, and sanitary control
===============
Quickly glancing this book, Kale Salad on p 16
Hidden costs: Most of the nutritional of this salad comes from dried bread (1/2 loaf), leaving (1/2 loaf) in the pantry. Likewise, Fresh parmesean ($10/lb+up), anchovies ($2/tin), and dijon mustard ($3/per) leave most of their value in the pantry as well.
Hidden Nutrition: Most of the calories for the salad come from the bread, not the kale. Meanwhile, a 15% protein diet needs ~70-80g protein a day/person[4]. The only material protein in this "dinner" salad is 1 egg yolk, and 1 anchovie split by 2x people. That is 3-4g of protein per head, when a typical dinner should have ~30g (off by an order of magnitude). Twice as much protein actually hides in the cheese garnish. But to increase the protein to reasonable levels, Its tempting to double or tripple portion the cheese...thus driving up the food cost of the recipe. 4 oz of fresh-grated parmesan is at least $2.50. That would give you 25g protein/head out of the meal, but the cost for the salad would be $8 for 2x portions, blowing the daily budget in just one meal.
In any event, this is an increasingly interesting area for cooks and food authors[3].
I'm inclined to agree with you, but various hyperboles in your comment make it harder to do so. Some points you make are made by the author in the introduction, which also reduces my confidence in your criticisms.
p.5, emphasis added:
> This isn’t a typical budget cookbook, nor is it a nutritional guide, it’s a collection of recipes that happen to be inexpensive. Pricy ingredients are wonderful, but so are cheap ones—in fact most of our favorite foods can be had for pennies—the raw ingredients don’t cost much. Your time and skill add the value.
p. 9, emphasis added:
> In order to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption, the recipes do not feature large amounts of meat. Many recipe collections created for the American audience use meat as the central feature of most meals. My recipes celebrate the vegetables rather than the meat.
The $4/day figure is from SNAP, and so only represents food costs anyway -- yes, obviously labor costs matter too, but SNAP isn't very fungible. Few of the recipes really require much in the way of equipment or space. It's safe to assume that the typical American family in poverty has a refrigerator, stove, and microwave [0].
Regarding your analysis of kale salad, I'm unclear why you imply the value of the other half of the loaf of bread, the rest of the cheese, and etc., are lost. The author addresses minimum buying requirements by recommending that people amortize the cost of expensive ingredients. (All of the expensive ingredients in this particular recipe remain unspoiled for months, and in particular the cheese has an exceptionally graceful failure mode.) On a different note, the protein RDA for an adult male (female) is 56g (46g), not 70-80g [1].
You really lost me when you tried to double or triple the cheese. Have you ever tried to eat 4 oz of parm at once? Gross.
To recap, I think it's easy to inflate the "actual cost" of any meal when one fails to amortize costs (of all sorts) and assume unused ingredients are never eaten. I feel that the cookbook represents a meaningful and feasible improvement in the average quality of the American diet in general.
This is a lot of pedantic "correction". My basic point remains
(1) If I source the ingredients to "kale salad" at retail, it doesn't make the budget.
(2) If I eat 1/2 of it for dinner, its not a meal.
You can argue all you want about caveats, but people in the market for $4/day food are going to be reading for things at face value. I understand the market is not people like me--but then again, I've actually food-costed somewhat extenstively. One of the lessons of that exercise is that making a nuturtionally unsound "meal" is trivial and doing it "cheap" is even moreso. Brushing aside the major constraints of the exercise is missing the point.
The comment about parmesean is also telling. Retail for fresh parmsean--which I assume is $10--is more realistically higher. And 4 oz split 2 ways is 2oz/head. While you might "gag" at this, its not uncommon for a risotto finish to be 1/oz a person. And decent product is quite fine to eat 'straight', its quite normal actually. Parm is actually a generous assumption here because its protein density is so high per/oz. But that is precisely why it is a costly ingredient.
Lastly, pantry items are not "lost"--another mis-understanding. The issue is that they have spoilage and a cost-of carry that is not insignificant. A pro-kitchen can cost these out as overhead. A consumer kitchen on a real budget needs to pony up the working capital, and then needs to keep a speadsheet of inventory to re-use the ingredients. EG, we have 3/4 of a anchovies pack and 1 egg white now in the fridge...where does that go? In a resturaunt it will get used with 100% certainty...and most trained chefs will easily find a way manage that. Most people trying to slog out $4/day migh not have a plan for what to do with "pantry leftovers" in the same way. This is quite common affliction for people who don't cook regularly--eg college students, people with irregular schedules--etc. This is another reason why many avoid "scratch" cooking altogether as a strategy to "save money", because of food wastage issues.
Lastly, fresh ingredients are in fact quite expensive. How many calories are in an 8oz container of mushrooms? 100? for $2? A jar of Pickles? A $4/day book needs to average 500 calories per dollar. Whilst this is easy with starch, and with flour/bread, its not so easy with other types of "fresh food". Proteins and decent vegetables in particular.
Lastly, in any kind of urban environment this is doubly so. Outside of chinatown or the mission, even at farmers markets, the prices for fresh foods are typically marked up quite a bit more than preserved foods. Again, this issue is not faced by a resturaunt cook, but it is faced by the home cook who has to pay transit/taxi or time to go shopping to source ingredients in a way which makes efficient use of working capital.
None of this is personally directed at the author--it's more the nature of this exercise is that many published works in this class take certain amounts of privledge for granted.
> (1) If I source the ingredients to "kale salad" at retail, it doesn't make the budget.
This isn't actually a point you made. You never questioned the author's pricing scheme (which would have been a good point, by the way -- her methodology is n=4).
> (2) If I eat 1/2 of it for dinner, its [sic] not a meal.
It is completely common for people to eat salads of this size and this protein content (before doubling or trebling the cheese) as a meal that is also a part of a healthy diet.
I'm not really sure what to make of the rest of your comments. There's some good points here somewhere...?
Eating a dinner with (lets call it) 8g of protein leaves you to source (lest call it 60/per day) 52g of protein in breakfast and dinner.
Lets say our bunhc of kale is $3, bread $4 other stuff is "free". This leaves us with $7/2=$3.50 food cost. So we get about $1 to split for extra stuff for lunch. We can easily make egg/toast for breakfast, for $.50 cents (egg and a tbsp of jam), and get 5g protein. So now, we need to eat our lunch: 1/3 loaf of bread, 3/4 jar of sardines, and some mustard. Mix in the olive oil and its a reasonable amount of food. But there is only 15g of protein /per 100g in preserved anchovies. So, lunch plus breakfast is ~20g and 1/2 salad is 8g, total of 28... In other words, you are missing your protein intake by 50%. So, the price for eating kale salad while sticking to $4/day--even with generous assumptions--is that the rest of your meals need to make up for it. This is only realistic with a certain level of culinary sophistication. The type of basic re-purposing of ingredients illustrated above is much more likely in reality. And the tradeoffs there are you have to stomach a sandwich that some may condsider an aquited taste (although with 1/2 a lemon and some parsely not so bad) for lunch. But the real issue is scalability ans sustainability: over time missing 30g protein a day...is no problem for one day...but it is a problem as a lifestyle.
If you have the skills/education and priveledges needed to access cost-effective fresh ingredients, whilst maintaining an active pantry...and/or you are the type of person to do spreadsheets of food cost...life isn't so hard...but one is assuming away many of the difficulties that face the $4/day folks on food-stamps, IMHO.
> Frequent re-supply and cost-effective quality control of ingredients
> Zero-cost re-application and limited spoilage of non-consumed minium purhcase portions
> Abundant prep space, intermediate storage/refrigeration, and sanitary control
===============
Quickly glancing this book, Kale Salad on p 16
Hidden costs: Most of the nutritional of this salad comes from dried bread (1/2 loaf), leaving (1/2 loaf) in the pantry. Likewise, Fresh parmesean ($10/lb+up), anchovies ($2/tin), and dijon mustard ($3/per) leave most of their value in the pantry as well.
Hidden Nutrition: Most of the calories for the salad come from the bread, not the kale. Meanwhile, a 15% protein diet needs ~70-80g protein a day/person[4]. The only material protein in this "dinner" salad is 1 egg yolk, and 1 anchovie split by 2x people. That is 3-4g of protein per head, when a typical dinner should have ~30g (off by an order of magnitude). Twice as much protein actually hides in the cheese garnish. But to increase the protein to reasonable levels, Its tempting to double or tripple portion the cheese...thus driving up the food cost of the recipe. 4 oz of fresh-grated parmesan is at least $2.50. That would give you 25g protein/head out of the meal, but the cost for the salad would be $8 for 2x portions, blowing the daily budget in just one meal.
In any event, this is an increasingly interesting area for cooks and food authors[3].
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Yields-Purchasing-Professiona...
[1] Assume 2000 kcal/day, 15%=300kcal. 80g protein is 320kcal, 70g is 280.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe