The $15 Dinner

Good Morning America (the same one that had the Perez Hilton's non-story) is having a celebrity chef challenge where the hosts are buying groceries in New York for fifteen dollars and then giving what they purchase to a chef to prepare a meal for four. Every day another chef tries their hand at preparing the meal with whatever the host-of-the-day had purchased.

To be clear, the primary reason they're doing this is to bring attention to the needs of food banks around the country. Every day they're making a large donation to a food bank to help those in need. This is a stunt to get people to donate to the food banks.

I found this interesting because I was thinking of doing a posting on poverty and obesity; there are numerous stories out there asking why the poor tend to be so overweight. I touched on this previously but never focused on the cost of nutritional foods versus fatty, not-as-healthy foods, which is pointed to as part of the reason for the disproportionate obesity in lower-income Americans versus higher-income Americans. How timely!

So today Sam Champion gave Emeril Legasse a bag with spinach, red tomatoes from the vine, yellow onions, empire apples, dry black beans, dry pinto beans, and creme fraiche.

I saw the results after an hour of cooking and three notes stuck out in my mind. One, Sam said he didn't get meat (Emeril joked several times about asking fellow GMA guest Jack Hanna if he could borrow some of the furry friends Jack brought to the show that day for protein) because he went to an organic street market for the vegetables and because the cost of the meat would limit how much he could get. This tells me that meat, healthy cuts of meat, can be expensive...although I'm sure in the right place you can get inexpensive packages of hot dogs or some other prepared meat in pound increments.

Second, he went to a street market and haggled for the food. When I wrote about the cost of eating out versus cooking at home, I didn't even mention the possibility of going to a farmer's market environment where you might be able to haggle with the vendors to bring down the price. I concede this is a point in the favor of cooking at home; if you have the skill and time to do this, more power to you. I would also contend that this is an expense of time and effort. These are two of the reasons that Americans don't want to do this. Our society favors the selfish motivation and the quick fix. We don't like sacrificing our time for things we don't like to do. We are a society where people who say they can't afford to pay for their own kids somehow have money for cell phones with GPS tracking, implying they travel enough to justify the added cost of these features and where people with six-figure incomes are "just scraping by," meaning they can't keep up their pre-economic-slump lifestyle so they cry poverty.

Third, the challenge was not fifteen dollars. I don't remember the specifics and the recipes aren't posted to the GMA site yet, but I do know that Emeril used spices from the pantry in making some of the dishes, chicken stock in a soup, and one of his dishes was a corn bread and another had cereal crumbled on it (again from the pantry). It was more like the primary ingredients were fifteen dollars with some stuff "you should already have around the house".

So what does this mean? It means to me that while inexpensive meals are possible, I can get a double cheeseburger off the dollar menu at McD's and a drink for around a buck. I can get their salads for a couple bucks. I can get plenty of calories to survive...unhealthy, yes, but if you're poor, you can survive for the calories count...using their value meals. I can also get canned Chef Boy-R-Dee (or the knockoffs) for a couple bucks a can in bulk; if you were truly in need, that bulk can of canned pasta can last you a day, and it may last longer stored in the fridge than the fresh foods he had made.

But that's not the point they were trying to drive home. They are drawing attention to needs at your local food bank. So for that their little demonstration was nice. I just wish they could have been more realistic in what they used and did.

I did think it was amusing that one of the comments in the feedback section of the website was from someone shaming the hosts and Emeril for mocking the nearly vegetarian composition of the meal. I have been obsessed with cooking shows since the surgery (weird!), and one thing I've found in common with most of the celebrity chefs is that they advocate a meat protein in dishes they prepare. Gordan Ramsay is outrightly hostile towards vegetarians on his shows.

There are plenty of good vegetarian dishes out there and no doubt good chefs who specialized in vegetarian cuisine. But I find it hard to take it seriously when someone is criticising a chef who is NOT known for vegetarian dishes for his good natured ribbing at not purchasing the best source of protein...a meat or fish, instead of beans.

It's good for the commenter that they're in a position to not have to compromise their dietary lifestyle choices in the name of having to buy what is necessary to feed the family.