November 21, 2009
Food blogger helping readers eat well, even on limited means
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
After a long day at the office, food blogger Kimberly Morales dishes up her “Shrimp in Smoked-Paprika Tomato Sauce” recipe. It’s “one of the most delicious, super quick dishes I’ve ever made,” she said. Luis Gris/Herald photo
In a pivotal scene in the film “Julie & Julia,” food blogger Julie writes about a fight she’s just had with her husband about cooking and blogging.
But before clicking the “publish” button on her computer screen, she hesitates. As a writer, she feels she should publish the entry, but she also wants to protect her privacy and her husband’s. After a tense cinematic moment, Julie deletes the entry.
Last April, real-life food blogger Kimberly Morales, a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento, faced a similar challenge, in which she weighed the conflicting claims of privacy and openness. Morales had not paid her gas bill, prompting the utility company to shut off the gas at her Sacramento apartment. She still had electricity, but she couldn’t use her gas stove.
Morales’ blog, “Poor Girl Eats Well,” (www.poorgirleatswell.com) had been running for eight months by then and had been featured on www.CNN.com and in the Sacramento News and Review. Interest in the site was increasing, and readers were telling Morales that they loved her recipes and her tips for budget shopping. Morales considered not mentioning the “friendly little disconnection notice” in her blog.
But the subtitle of her blog is “how to eat ridiculously well on a miniscule budget,” Morales explained in an interview with The Herald, adding that people with very little money for food also have very little money for other expenses.
Morales, who had been studying for a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at UC Davis before withdrawing when she could no longer pay the tuition, has been working as a temporary administrative assistant, most recently for the Diocese of Sacramento in the permanent diaconate/Hispanic Lay Formation Institute department. Like millions of other people nationwide, she lives paycheck to paycheck.
She’d started the blog in August 2008, to share the shopping and cooking expertise she’s learned from her parents, her Salvadorian chef father and her Columbian mother who managed a catering business.
“No matter how bad things get, I always eat well,” she noted. “I grew up cooking.”
So, reasoning that others were in similar straits, Morales pulled out an electric grill to make a steak, pepper and asparagus wrap with ingredients she had in the fridge (she buys discounted meat at grocery outlets), and despite her shame over looking like a deadbeat, she published the experience in her blog. She continued to cook and to blog about her cooking during the weeks before she could afford to have the gas restarted.
To her surprise, readers were actually encouraging when she admitted why she was using a grill rather than the stove. (She’d spent the gas money on inhalers for her asthma.) “In this economic recession, a lot of people are scraping to cover the basics,” Morales said.
The national unemployment rate stands at 10.2 percent, with an underemployment rate of 17.5 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor; in California, those numbers have reached 12.2 percent and 19.6 percent respectively, the highest in more than 70 years.
Given these statistics, it’s not surprising that five million Californians are hungry or don’t know where their next meal is coming from, according to California Food Policy Advocates.
Morales recalled that one of her readers, a single mother of four, had discovered the Poor Girl Eats Well Web site on the same day the reader had been denied food stamps. Morales, who is single, described the reader as “in that category where you make too much money on paper to qualify for help, but you still need it.”
The reader hadn’t known how she was going to feed her children that week, but realized that she had most of the ingredients for the brown rice, lentil and feta salad posted on Morales’ blog. Lacking only the feta, she fed her children well that night, despite the day’s setbacks. That reader’s story touches Morales deeply.
“I want people to know that they can eat well, even on limited means, and that eating well is important,” Morales said.
People have to stay healthy and physically strong, she noted, especially the poor, who are struggling hardest and whose health deteriorates with the cheap processed food they live on.
Morales is right. Obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes among the poor are diet-related health problems tied to high-fat, high-sodium foods, like “value meals” at fast food restaurants, that they buy to stave off hunger, according to California Food Policy Advocates, which also cites recent studies connecting obesity in poor women to their habit of periodically going without food in order to feed their children.
To demonstrate that it’s possible to buy healthy food even on food stamps, Morales spent a week in September living on $4 a day, the amount given to people on food stamps. That amount would be only $3 per day without the supplement provided this year by the federal stimulus money, she noted.
But even with all of her experience as a shopper and creativity as a cook, Morales reports that “hunger was a constant” during the week. She blogged about the experience, she says, because not having enough money for food is the reality for millions of Americans.
“I don’t pretend to be ‘poor’ because it’s the plight du jour,” she wrote on her Web site. “I truly have a hard time making ends meet most of the time.” And she’s one of the lucky ones, she notes, because she has a job and a roof over her head.
To help others stretch their grocery dollars, Morales spoke at a recent conference for parents and child care providers, sponsored by Child Action, Inc., a non-profit agency that educates parents on child care issues. In addition to providing recipes and budget shopping tips, Morales made sure to get across an equally important message: that people need to eat and cook together.
When parents at the conference asked how they were to do all the food preparation and still spend time with their children, Morales suggested that they bring the kids into the kitchen and put them to work. It seemed the most natural response in the world to her, she said, but it surprised many of the parents.
“It’s great to have another pair of hands in the kitchen, and it’s good for the kids to learn to cook,” Morales explained. “And cooking together is a great way of hanging out with kids and talking.”
The emotional side of cooking together is as essential as the economic side, she said.
And it’s important to everyone that the food looks good, too, she added.
“It’s hard enough to deal with the struggles that living on a very limited income can bring you,” Morales said. “To know that there is just one area in life that you can truly savor allows for at least one little bright spot in otherwise dismal conditions.
“We all deserve to live well, and one simple way that anyone — rich or poor — can begin to do that is with the gift of good food.”
What is a blog?
It’s a diary or log published on the Internet. First known as a “web log,” from “World Wide Web,” the term shortened to “blog, ” and inspired adjectival and verb forms.
Poor Girl Eats Well (www.poorgirleatswell.com) has been featured in The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento News & Review, and on KOVR-TV 13’s “Save with Dave,” as well as on CNN.com.
