At a time when prepared foods are attractively packaged and well advertised, young people in particular may not have opportunities to build the cooking skills for heart-healthy recipes. Cookbook Margaret Harnum is a single parent on low income who decided to teach herself about nutrition and food budgeting to allow healthy eating for her family and other families. She realized that they had the same problem. As she read everything she could get about nutrition and food budgeting, Margaret learned that it actually costs less to eat healthy. She had always thought that it was more expensive to eat healthy, and explains the difficulty in changing this attitude.
Culture shapes people's expectations of food.
By cooking new recipes like stir fry, people can have low-cost healthy food. Margaret decided to share this knowledge by putting together a cookbook. The Eat to Your Heart's Content cookbook explains how to make these into butterscotch crisps. Margaret's first-hand experience with food banks provided her with the knowledge to make the cookbook into a useful tool for other people living on low income. The Department of Health, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, became involved with SPAN when a Department of Health nutritionist received a request from SPAN to review and approve the cookbook.