Recession-era recipes flourish on TikTok

At a time when a majority of adults say that they are concerned about the cost of food, a new generation of home cooks is teaching audiences on social media how to cook cheap, easy and filling recipes.

"Every day in August," Matthew Bounds announces on TikTok, "we're cookin' an easy, shortcut recipe for back-to-school season. The name of the game is just get s*** on the table."

Using the social media handle Your Barefoot Neighbor, Bounds has amassed 4 million followers across his platforms, including TikTok and Instagram. He has also become a bestselling cookbook author; his most recent is Keep It Simple, Y'all.

Bounds' ingredients are nothing fancy — this particular chicken casserole includes cream of celery soup and dehydrated gravy mix. It's the kind of recipe you might have found in a 1980s women's magazine. Like all his creations, it's easy, accessible and affordable. He delivers the whole recipe in less than 90 seconds, which is perfect for TikTok.

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Bounds' online followers don't just share tips on cooking. This summer, he and his followers, in collaboration with creator V Spehar and their platform Under the Desk News, raised about $80,000 for Toups' Family Meal in New Orleans, a nonprofit that feeds food-insecure families in that city. "They were specifically feeding kids during the summer while they were out of school," Bounds said.

He also did a food drive for the Knox Pride Food Pantry System. Knox Pride told NPR that Bounds' followers sent about 15,000 packages of food for its pantry.

"So they were able to not only stock up their food pantry, but four neighboring food pantries, with those donations. And they did all that in the span of 48 hours," Bounds said.

Bounds said that these campaigns have been effective because people are "dying to find positivity."

"There are so many people that tell me that they want to help and they want to give. But the internet's such a big place, they don't really know where to put that intention. So when I come up to them and I say, 'Hey, here's this need,' they really love to jump on it," he said.

Getting tips from those who've done it before

Another influencer focusing on easy, inexpensive cooking is Kiki Ruff, known online as the Recession Recipes Lady.

"I was looking specifically at cookbooks that were published during depression, recession and wartime, because I figured I would just learn from the pros," she explained. "For example, what were they doing in World War II during rationing? I could take that and adapt it to our modern economy."

Ruff offers endless riffs on her recipes. Don't like beef, or it's out of your budget? Spin her homemade hamburger helper a bunch of different ways with chickpeas, mushrooms or tofu. Don't have tomato sauce in the pantry? That's OK.

"We gotta get tomato in there somehow," she says in one TikTok video. "I am going to use tomato paste, because that's what I prefer to use, but if you have pasta sauce, salsa or even ketchup, you can use that for this next step."

"Recession Recipes" influencer Kiki Ruff.

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Kiki Ruff

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Ruff has decided not to monetize her content. "I don't want to capitalize on this audience, who's looking to me for help in extreme financial duress, to fuel my own lifestyle," she said.

Ruff said she often hears thanks from people in precarious financial positions: single parents, young adults just moving out of the foster care system, folks who have lost their jobs. She ends every video with a certain tagline — something her friend Beck once wrote on a note to her during a rough time.

"'Please remember to eat, and also I love you,'" she says.

"Every time I walked into my home, I saw that," Ruff recalled, "a reminder from the person who really stepped up for me and made sure I took care of myself. So I tried it as a sign-off because it was something so impactful for me. And I'm realizing how powerful that is for people who may not even hear that otherwise."

Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and digital.
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