FRUGAL FOOD CHALLENGE
Chefs get a taste of life on a meagre budget.
Live Below the Line
Eating on $1.75 a day to end extreme poverty
April 27 to May 1 | livebelowtheline.ca
Chef Vikram Vij knows better than most the challenges of eating on a tight budget.
“Coming from a country that is so poor — where 65 per cent of Indians live below the poverty line — you have to know how (to) work within the means that you have,” he said.
That generational knowledge fuels much of Indian cuisine, but for Vij the mission is more personal. Six years ago, even as his personal star was rising in Canada, he returned to India and while soul-searching in his native country, set himself the challenge of living homeless for 10 days.
Growing up in an affluent Indian home, poverty was something he had never experienced directly. He stored his money and Canadian passport and slept rough — sometimes on train platforms — and ate in the side streets, “bad food but whatever was filling,” he said.
“I didn’t shave. I didn’t shower. I wanted to learn what homeless people feel like, and it was gut-wrenching,” Vij said. “I only lasted four and a half days, but I was humbled by it.”
The quinoa and vegetable dish that Vij volunteered for the Live Below the Line campaign is well suited to budget dining.
Live Below the Line — now in its third year — is a global fundraising campaign that challenges people to eat and drink for five days on a budget of just $1.75 per day.
A handful of chefs from Vancouver have created dishes that will help people who attempt what would seem to be impossible, to experience the kind of poverty that 1.2 billion people face every day.
“For me this means much more than just coming up with a recipe,” Vij said. “I wanted to come up with a recipe that is accessible to people who don’t have the means to prepare expensive meals.”
Like most of the ultra-inexpensive offerings by the city’s chefs, Vij’s dish contains no meat. But then neither does Derek Bothwell’s breakfast dish, which relies on chickpeas and a fried egg for protein.
Bothwell produced three recipes, one for each of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and plans to take the challenge himself with some of his staff.
“I thought this was a cool initiative when I heard about it last year and I really wanted to try it,” said Bothwell, chef for Chill Winston and Guilt & Co. Bothwell and some of his sous chefs plan to hold an Iron Chef-style competition to generate more dishes for the staffers who want to try the full five-day program.
One of the biggest challenges was making something that looked good and tasted good for around 65 cents, about onequarter the price of a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, he said.
“When you start to look at the numbers and how to put a dish together, it’s like, whoa, even garlic is too expensive,” he said.
Meat is an even bigger challenge, so Bothwell went outside of his comfort zone.
“We had to look at some ingredients that we don’t really eat a lot, like beans and chickpeas,” he said. “They make a lot of sense — lots of fibre and good protein.”
Joe Fortes chef Wayne Sych created one of the few dishes with animal protein, in this case an inexpensive white fish.
“When I first heard the budget I thought it would be easy and started thinking of the lowercost proteins,” Sych said. “But where it really adds up is the things you just take for granted as a chef, like fresh herbs.”
A pinch of this and a pinch of that all add up, making big flavours and nuance a challenge.
“I wanted to meet basic nutritional needs, but it also has to be filling enough to carry you to the next meal, so it had to stick with you four or five hours,” he said. “Bulking up the dish is really important.”
Like the other chefs, Sych turned to legumes — in his case navy beans — to provide bulk, fibre and extra protein.
“Legumes are the cost-effective way to go,” he said. “A cup of cooked navy beans was only 20 cents, far less than the cheapest animal proteins.”