Food banks have long emphasized better nutrition in the food they distribute. Now, serious structural changes are making elevated nutritional quality a lasting characteristic of food banking. The most important of these may be the development of nutrition guidelines specifically for use in the charitable food system. Introduced two years…
Posts published in “Food is Medicine”
The charitable food system may be a risky incubator for diabetes intervention, but hunger relief organizations are experimenting anyway. And they are seeing encouraging results. Despite challenges, hunger-relief organizations are continuing to find novel and creative ways to address diabetes, a diet-related disease that afflicts about 10% of the U.S.…
Not many food banks actively promote nutrition incentive programs that make fresh produce more accessible to low-income families. But the ones that do are seeing results that go well beyond increased produce consumption in their communities. These “Double Up Food Bucks” programs, which originated at farmers markets over 15 years…
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…
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,…