After decades of relying on donated food, food banks are starting to place more emphasis on purchasing food. The trend appears to be an outgrowth of Covid, which forced food banks to purchase food by the truckload as constricted supply chains put the squeeze on donated food. The purchases, along…
Posts published in “Food is Medicine”
Earlier this year, Food Outreach, a St. Louis-based provider of medically tailored food and meals, reached out to a local bakery with the idea of creating a special artisan bread loaf that would enhance the health of its immune-compromised clients. Weeks of building and perfecting a recipe resulted in a…
The healthcare system may be vast and complicated, but finding a way to work within it can supercharge a food bank’s ability to ease food insecurity. Second Harvest Heartland, the country’s seventh-largest food bank (by revenue) and the largest in Minnesota, has succeeded in integrating itself into the state’s healthcare…
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…
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…