Ellen Jaffe Jones is an author, personal trainer, coach and teacher of vegan cooking classes. For 11 days she is working with Vegan Mainstream to help people go vegan and STAY vegan! From November 11 to November 22 she is available at 11 am and 11 pm on the Vegan Mainstream facebook page to answer your questions about veganism! Join Ellen Jaffe Jones, in celebrating a positive relationship with food, putting joy back into cooking, and never worrying again about your food budget.
During this promotion Sign up for a free copy of Ellen’s book, Eat Vegan on $4 a Day, that will be given away on November 13th, 15th, 18th, 20th and 22nd just in time for the holidays! Read on to find out more about Ellen and her book…
I wrote Eat Vegan on $4 a Day after seeing too many stories on the news showing obese food stamp recipients loading carts with Twinkies and mac and cheese saying you can’t eat well on a budget. Since I’ve eaten veg/vegan for most of 30 years, I knew this wasn’t true. As a former Emmy-winning TV investigative reporter for 18 years, and high earning (for my clients only) Smith Barney financial consultant, I’ve crunched the numbers to show you can do this. Dr. John McDougall has been saying this for years, by the way…actually saying recipes in his book total $3 a day.
Eat Vegan on $4 a Day is one of only two books I’m aware of that dares to attach an approximate price to each recipe. My publisher rounded to the nearest quarter to give us inflation wiggle room. Even if my prices don’t match yours, I live in a touristy area in Southwest Florida so I’m hoping my prices will be more expensive than yours. I believe that these recipes create some of the least expensive vegan meals on the planet.
Why do people think that eating a plant-strong diet is more expensive? They think you have to shop at a health food store or buy organic to buy healthy food. Not true. 99% of the ingredients in my book came from Walmart. I tracked prices there for 3 years, the same way I tracked the US Consumer Price Index as a reporter in Miami and St.Louis. Besides recipes, my book provides tips on how/where to shop for cheap vegetables, how to avoid expensive traps at stores etc.
In my talks around the US, I show a finished version of my “Chocolate Surprise Cake” after I show several slides of glow-in-the-dark expensive cupcakes and cakes from the big box stores. Then I ask the audience to guess what is in my cake, and they never get all the ingredients right…zucchini, carrots and beets. Point being, nutritious can be well hidden in decadence. Getting enough calories and good nutrition is no problem. I ran my first marathon last year on this diet, and continue to place in 5K races for my age group. I just did so again last Saturday. My husband marvels at how I often eat way more than he does. I’m as active as you get.
How? To keep it simple, I up the beans and grains if I need more calories. Beans are about $.05/ounce, or a dime for a serving of cooked beans. Compare that to the cheapest form of hamburger meat which is 30% fat, and $.60 - that’s 6 times as expensive for meat burgers as it is for an equivalent serving of beans. Tenderloin by comparison does break the bank. Beans have gone up a penny or two per ounce in the 3 years I’ve tracked prices. Milk has gone up a dollar a gallon, meat has also skyrocketed. The cheapest grains are about $.05-$.15 an ounce…2 ounces cook into 4 ounces. When this is the bulk of your diet, you have plenty of money left over to buy the more “expensive” vegetables. Although I last tracked broccoli at $.11/ounce, which is $.88 if you eat an entire cup or 2 servings worth.
I follow and recommend in my book the daily servings of the four food groups recommended by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, if you are trying to maintain your current weight: 3 or more servings per day of fruit, 4 or more servings per day of vegetables, 2 or more servings a day of beans/legumes and 5 or more servings per day of whole grains. Because I’m a runner, I’ve studied what the famous Kenyan marathon runners eat, and it is a diet of 70-80% whole grains/complex carbs and the rest greens. If you’re not training for racing, you may want to tweak that a bit. I’m an AFAA certified personal trainer and RRCA running coach. I am the assistant volunteer coach for our local high school cross country team. I work with clients on a very individual basis to figure out what has worked or hasn’t worked in the past to design a program that makes sense for them going forward. What worked at 28 may not work at 58.
Please note that the book title is not “Eat Organically on $4 a Day.” As a cooking instructor for The Cancer Project, I was instructed by the doctors/RDs there that research clearly says it is way better to eat conventional produce than a meat diet. Toxins are concentrated in animal fat, which doesn’t only reside in fatty deposits. Fat also accumulates in muscle, so a lean cut of meat is still not as good as eating produce directly. Animals eat plants, and pesticides in plants become more concentrated in animal fat than in or on plants. That said, the book has 3 pages of resources on where to buy, and what to get. My favorite link is www.organicharvest.org where you can find a local CSA (community supported agriculture) farm near you. I belong to one of 2 locally and get mostly organic produce…4 grocery bags full…for between $15-20 a week. Many of these farms don’t pay for organic certification to keep prices down for consumers. But if you spend any time there - and I encourage that because they need all the volunteer help they can get – you can observe that how and what they plant are often close to acceptable organic practices.
Eat Vegan on $4 a Day was a snapshot at the time of publication. I wrote it to offer a lone voice to reporters who were constantly assuming you can’t eat well on a budget. The key is buying beans in bulk in the largest bag you can find and use. My book includes tips on how to cook beans from scratch, so don’t stress if you’ve never done that. For the price of one Twinkie (currently) you can eat 3 servings of fiber and protein-rich beans. My mantra is beans, whole grains and greens. Shop in bulk, shop the perimeter. Don’t buy much, if anything in boxes. As a media consultant who has trained many individual how to design a :05 soundbite, that is my soundbite, story and I’m stickin’ to it! 
As a society we need to focus on how cheap it can be to eat vegan, not only through what you save at the store, but by how much you save by avoiding diseases and hospitals. A bypass surgery in the US costs 100-200K. So, factor that into the $5 restaurant burger, and that burger costs about $1000 or more, depending how many you eat over your lifetime. It doesn’t matter if you, me or the government pays for that surgery. Preventable disease is not sustainable and will bankrupt many, and may bankrupt this country if we don’t get at the real causes of disease.
It took me 3 years to research the book, and a year to find a publisher who would take chance on a first-time author, who wasn’t already a celebrity. Suffice it to say, I love my publisher! It has never been about making money for me, but just to get the word out. My mom, aunt and both sisters had breast cancer. Plus most adults had major heart disease and diabetes and Alzheimer’s. By the time I had kids, my parents were so sick that they couldn’t lift my kids, let alone babysit them. No one should experience the kind of suffering I’ve seen in my family. Many generations are losing so much, and in some cases have no clue that this has happened or why. Tragedy doesn’t even begin to describe the loss.
Be sure to check out VM’s 11-11 Promotion with Ellen Jaffe Jones today! Fina out more about Ellen at www.vegcoach.com.
