HEALTHY ON A DIME
A DIETITIAN FINDS INSPIRATION FOR GOOD-FOR-YOU RECIPES FROM AN UNEXPECTED SOURCE.
IT WAS A FEW MISSING INGREDIENTS THAT STARTED MARY ALICE CAIN ON HER JOURNEY TO HELP FIGHT HUNGER.
While visiting her parents in Fairhope, Alabama, she’d set out to bake a
Derby pie, but was missing the chocolate chips, pecans and pie crust. Her dad, Lewis Shreve, suggested a trip to a nearby Dollar General.
“I hadn’t been to too many Dollar Generals and was pretty skeptical,” says Mary Alice, but she found everything she needed.
Lewis had one more inspired idea for his daughter: “You’re a registered dietitian—what if you went to Dollar General, took all the healthy ingredients you could find and showed people how to make nutritious recipes?”
Mary Alice filed that thought away until she needed a project as part of her master’s degree work at Georgia State University. She focused on practical ways to help families facing food insecurity in “food deserts.” As part of the project, she developed 30 nutritious “Better For You” dishes using affordable ingredients found at Dollar General stores. She tested each of the dishes in her home kitchen and compiled the recipes into a cookbook.
Cooking healthy food is “not so much about taking things away,” she points out. “It’s about adding ingredients, like incorporating more seeds or fruits and vegetables.”
When Mary Alice sent her recipes—like Chicken Spaghetti and Apple Oatmeal Breakfast Bars—to executives at Dollar General, they asked her to work with a team of chefs to develop nutritious recipe ideas for the company’s website.
Mary Alice posted the recipes on Facebook, and a friend passed them on to Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee. Caroline Pullen, a registered dietitian with the organization, says she includes “Better For You” recipes in senior nutrition boxes and in nutrition education. All the ingredients are easy to find in remote rural areas.
“If you can just get people cooking at home instead of grabbing fast food, it’s a step in the right direction,” Mary Alice says.b