On Feb. 7, students from the culinary class were assigned a challenge, one like none other: to create a dish for $10. Limited to only purchasing from the local Safeway, the assignment required students to coordinate and plan efficiently to stay within the budget.
“I wanted to give my students a taste of what it might be like when they’re off in college when they have a fixed budget. They [would have] a whole apartment or dorm full of students who are hungry and only a limited amount of money to feed everybody. So that’s why I had the budget as $10,” said culinary teacher Steven Dady.
Fortunately, most students were just a few cents short of $1o and made a wide variety of dishes.
“[We made] fried rice. We bought onions, eggs, peas, bacon, garlic, and some carrots and were very prepared. Our total was $9.45,” said Gavin Colombo (‘25).
While some people made meals without any issues, others had to modify their meals and omit some items.
“We’re making alfredo [and] the total was about $9.83. We were going to include bacon but we couldn’t afford it. One strip costed a $1.40,” said Shien Benoit (27’).
Students who made meals without a meat group were more likely to get their meal under the budget without any modifications. Comparing the prices of all the food groups, “the meat group had the highest mean prices per 100 g ($0.80/100 g), which was significantly higher than that for every other food group,” according to the National Library of Medicine talks of the cost of US foods to their nutritive value.
“It’s not graded by their participation. [I grade on] their effort and their closeness to the ten dollar limit. A couple of groups got docked a few points because they went over a few cents or a few dollars. But, generally it was graded by creativity, effort and nutritional value,” said Dady.
Luckily, meals such as pasta were easy to make under ten dollars.
“We’re making tomato pasta. We got two roma tomatoes, one clove of garlic, one onion, mushrooms, and pasta. The total was nine twenty five. Everything [went] perfect,” said Colin Suen (26’).
Most of the students in the culinary class chose to make pasta, but some students had to make modifications to take out meat from their recipe.
