As grocery prices and other costs of living continue to soar, feeding one’s family has become challenging and expensive for many people. Food scarcity is a tangible issue in our own community, and as such, the Harvard Public Library and Arm in Arm are working together to raise awareness.
Each month, the library and Arm in Arm host a meeting of the Cookbook Club, a group that explores world cultures and cuisines through cooking. Usually, the topic focuses on food from a particular region of the world, but during December, the focus was on food scarcity. For the potluck-style dinner and discussion at the library on Thursday, Dec. 12, members were asked to make a dish that could feed at least four people for under $10.
“When we think about this topic, we tend to think of hunger, but food insecurity isn’t just about hunger,” librarian Jill Hayes wrote to the Press following the event. “It’s about the anxiety of not knowing when you’ll be able to eat, or where your next meal is coming from. The other issue is that healthy food is not always budget friendly. How do you make sure you are getting enough nutrients when you only have $10 to spend? I really wanted our Cookbook Club members to have to consider all of these questions as they planned their dishes.”
Gathered around tables set up in Volunteers Hall, club members sampled a variety of dishes while discussing the preparation and cost that went into making them.
Hayes, for instance, brought a quinoa and black bean salad that makes for several servings and costs only $9.30 for the ingredients. This dish, Hayes explained, is her personal go-to recipe for cooking on a budget, and one that she made often when she first lived on her own.
And while the type of cuisine varied greatly among all of the dishes, a lot of the recipes followed a similar list of staple ingredients––a grain or pasta base with a mixture of vegetables.
“You can certainly cook a good meal that’s not outrageously priced, especially if it’s vegetarian,” said Eileen Kronauer, who cooked cacio e pepe pasta with leeks, a recipe from a cookbook titled “Cooking with Scraps.”
Colleen Pearce also made a pasta dish but with chorizo and white beans, as well as jalapeno cheddar scones, recipes from a cookbook titled “Cheap Eats.” Pearce said her dish ended up being slightly over the budget, but the large number of servings made up for the extra cost. “I thought it was going to be easy,” she said, “but it was hard to figure out the pricing … it was eye-opening for me.”
Choosing where to buy groceries was also a decision point in budgeting out recipes. Pam Brown said she bought the ingredients for her spinach and potato dish at Market Basket since the vegetables there are inexpensive and she could buy frozen spinach. Libby Levison, who made sheet pan barbecue tofu with bok choy, and Bonnie Chandler, who made pad thai, both said they went to the New Oriental Supermarket in Littleton to purchase their ingredients since they have good prices on fresh vegetables.
Connie Woolcock took a different approach to her contribution by purchasing prepared food, but she did so under budget and also helped to rescue food waste by ordering end-of-the-day leftovers through an app called Too Good To Go. Woolcock said she bought two bags full of prepared entrees and groceries from Crosby’s Marketplace in Concord for under $10.
After everyone explained their dishes to the group, Hayes presented a slideshow on facts about global food insecurity rates, but much of the discussion remained centered around food scarcity at the local level. “I was so glad to hear a few people at the meeting mention that shopping and cooking like this was an eye-opening experience,” Hayes wrote.
Through the Cookbook Club and the Teen Advisory Board, the library also collected donations for Open Table, a food pantry in Maynard. Woolcock, who volunteers at Open Table, said the organization serves hundreds of families across a number of local communities.
Sarah Saleh, a member of Arm in Arm and an organizer behind the Cookbook Club, wrote later to the Press, “Knowing that there is also food insecurity in Harvard, [we] wanted to provide a space where we can shed a light of what is happening in our own backyard. You may be surprised to find out that 1 in 3 people in [Massachusetts] are food insecure.”
