The newly named head of the USDA, Tom Vilsack, has introduced a new way of framing the issue of hunger relief in America: it’s about nutrition security, not just food security. Inadequate nutrition is leading to high rates of chronic disease including obesity, presenting nothing less than a potential national…
Posts published in “Food is Medicine”
Fifteen food banks across the country are helping people navigate the ongoing trade-off between food and medicine, while also benefiting from a new donation stream, thanks to a discount-prescription program from BuzzRx. BuzzRx, formerly known as Watertree Health, seeks out food banks and other partners to help it distribute discount…
A food bank in Missouri has shown in a pilot that it can improve health outcomes by giving people nutritious food. Now it wants to conduct a more formal test that would prove it to insurers. Operation Food Search of St. Louis is about to embark on a three-year randomized,…
Food banks might agree that they need to distribute healthy foods, but they haven’t always agreed on exactly which foods are healthy. Now a set of nutrition guidelines created specifically for the charitable food system is aiming to solve that problem. Just over half of food banks already use some…
Foodlink’s Curbside Market looks like a typical mobile pantry, but it’s actually so much more. Besides improving access to fruits and vegetables in low-income neighborhoods, Curbside Market is prepping to become the nation’s first mobile provider of WIC staples. Plus, it’s advancing a new model for fruit and vegetable prescriptions,…
As more food banks make progress in identifying the nutritional quality of the food they distribute, they are running into the same problem that Foodshare of Conn. did: big piles of mixed, donated foods that are not easily ranked. Sometimes known as salvage, these miscellaneous items usually come from retail…
It seems pretty obvious that one way to reduce healthcare costs in a community is to get area hospitals and doctors to lower their prices for drugs and services. Actually, a better way would be to reduce food insecurity. Food insecurity accounted for nearly $53 billion of extra healthcare expenditures…
Like other food banks, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank is striving to distribute more produce by making it at least 50% of the total amount of food it delivers. It’s getting closer to this goal, thanks in part to a novel way of pushing produce out to its pantries. Its…
When Houston Food Bank set out to address root causes of hunger, ranging from poor health to unemployment, it knew it needed to partner with hospitals, schools and clinics. It didn’t realize that getting these community organizations on board would require it to develop a nutrition policy. Now two years…