I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create something like a "first cookbook"
As a criticism (and a minor one) decades ago I worked thru school at a retail food store and WIC program women would come in with a long list of very specific required products. I'm told this program still exists. So pregnant poor women must buy precisely 2 pounds of dried navy beans per week. Not 3 pounds, not lima beans, not canned, 2 pounds dried navy beans per week. Ditto cheeses and rice and specific canned fruit juice for vitamin C. My point with this anecdote is coordination with that program might help guide further recipes in the book, assuming it hasn't already been done to maximal ability. Perhaps similar coordination with food banks to match whats typically donated with recipe ingredient lists.
A non-coincidental observation I can make is the cookbook is highly non-paleo and that correlates with poor people who aren't literally starving tend toward obesity. So a bit more salad and a bit less bread products might be a healthy idea. A stir fry never killed anyone and they don't cost much of anything unless you put fancy stuff in. More recipes like the carmelized bananas and less like the cookies. Less pizza more veggies. Less noodles more salad.
> As a criticism (and a minor one) decades ago I worked thru school at a retail food store and WIC program women would come in with a long list of very specific required products. [...] My point with this anecdote is coordination with that program might help guide further recipes in the book, assuming it hasn't already been done to maximal ability. Perhaps similar coordination with food banks to match whats typically donated with recipe ingredient lists.
WIC is a federal-state partnership program, and the specific requirements are set by each state WIC program within federal guidelines. So, sure, it would be nice to have cookbooks that were coordinated with each state's WIC program, but its really not reasonable to expect someone to do that in a free cookbook offered as part of a degree project. Donations to food banks vary even more than state-level WIC requirements, and so present an even more dramatic version of the same problem.
"it would be nice to have cookbooks that were coordinated with each state's ..."
That sounds like a computationally difficult, yet possible, "hard" problem. Sounds very "start-uppy" to me.
We already have book-on-demand, more or less, we need content-on-demand, and it sounds like an interesting startup.
I want a "upper-midwest" "cost is not much of a concern" "paleo-ish" hypercustomized cookbook. So given my tags a hundred or so recipes his the B-O-D printer and its under my christmas tree. My sister in law on the other hand is Kale Krazy so her tags would be similar region of the country, and every recipe must contain Kale, and like my son she's medically allergic to soy so cross all of those out, and she likes Dancing with the Stars (well, there's no accounting for taste) so thats where the background art in the cookbook will come from. And a hypercustomized B-O-D printer squirts out a cookbook for her under the christmas tree.
If its a success, I could see major publishers getting "interested" in turning it into a division of their own as an exit strategy.
Sounds easy to screw up and difficult to get right. Got startup written all over it.
However, some (most?) of the recipes in the first veg cookbook are both healthier and probably cheaper than some of the recipes in the poverty cookbook. (some are the same, at first glance)
And re categorizing the other way, aside from offending vegetarians, in a first cookbook, it wouldn't hurt to transplant the roast chicken from the poverty book into the first cookbook. Other than cross contamination its pretty hard to screw up a roasted chicken, so its a good place for kitchen noobs to start.
On a small scale, all appears awesome, only on a larger scale is it debatable exactly which recipe belongs in which book and how much of each kind of dish belongs in each book. An editor-class of problem more than an author-class of problem. I can find no author-class problems to complain about, so far, which is impressive.
