Back in 2007, there were only two farmers’ markets in the country that offered a special deal for poor families: one in New York City and another in Columbia Heights, Md. That’s before Michel Nischan, a James Beard Award-winning chef long associated with the sustainable food movement, got involved. His grassroots organization, the nonprofit Wholesome Wave, helped persuade Congress to provide low-income families with extra bucks if they bought healthy, local fare. NationSwell spoke to Nischan by phone about his efforts to end food insecurity.
Wholesome Wave aspires to make healthy, local food more affordable to low-income shoppers. How have you accomplished that goal?
The target of our activity is federal dollars. The average person’s benefit through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) is about $4.20 a day — and that’s to spend on breakfast, lunch and dinner. When that’s all you have to spend on food, you’re really forced to make choices that you might not want to make.
The 2014 Farm Bill included the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program, with $100 million dollars in federal funding that has to be matched in full from the private sector to double SNAP dollars spent on fruits and vegetables. We wanted to level the playing field between healthy food and artificially inexpensive foods, like instant rice and noodles or snack chips, which are cheaper because of agriculture policies, tax breaks for large manufacturing facilities and transportation subsidies that scaled system enjoys. We raised private money to double SNAP and started with fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets. The message to the consumer was “Spend your SNAP on anything you want, but if you come over here [to the farmers’ market], you double your money.”
Why do fruits and vegetables often cost more than less healthy foods?
The major reason some foods are so incredibly inexpensive is the public support for soy, corn, rice and wheat. Cereal companies often pay a price that is below the cost of production. After world wars I and II, these crops were favored as the future, and we produced a lot of them, because whichever country or ally bloc had the most food for its marching armies would be the one to win a war. When we learned how to process food to make it last 10 years, how to make it lighter so it’s cheaper to transport, how to put nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium in the ground so things would miraculously grow, we felt secure. And we also thought we could end starvation and feed the world. In that compelling moment, it was really easy to get the American public and Congress on board. It wasn’t to give one sector an unfair advantage, but those systems are still in place. It’s kind of a false economy; it’s not a true free market. [The question now is], how do we create a case to shift all of that public money that goes to funding these artificially inexpensive foods, which we now know are not good for us and the environment, to the types of foods that are good?
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What has building this grassroots organization taught you about leadership?
We need people to understand what they can align on. What I’ve learned over the years — and I think this is endemic in our society — is that we only want to work with people who think just like we do. Whether it’s in business or nonprofits, you’d much prefer working with someone who shares your core values. People ask us, “Is Wholesome Wave anti-GMO?” Why are you asking us that question? We’re about affordable access. Let’s align on that. If the thing you deeply, personally believe in is migrant farm-worker rights, equitable access to land or a ban on GMOs, work on those things. But there are other ways, while we’re doing our work, to come together on food justice.
What can the rest of us do to help further this movement?
I think food is one of the most powerful lenses to evaluate the quality of a lawmaker when we’re going to the polls. What’s their stance on abortion or marriage equality? All of those are important things and informed by deeply held religious beliefs. But if you’re going to take a meal a day off the table of a child by eliminating nutrition in schools, or you say that you don’t see the point of paying for healthcare in schools, you’re probably a jerk. How they vote on food and hunger is a great lens into their soul. Personally, I want an honorable, good person in office making decisions on my behalf. When you show up to vote, make sure you know what these folks do with food votes. You can go on Food Policy Action, put in your zip code and get a score for your representatives based on how they vote on food issues.
What books would you recommend to read up on the current system?
I’d recommend Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire,” Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America,” Mas Masumoto’s “Wisdom of the Last Farmer,” and “Fair Food” by Oran B. Hesterman. Still, none of those really touches on the potential power of changing the decision you make at the grocery store. Food has the amazing potential to fix human health, the environment, our economy and our society, and people need to be inspired.
What other innovations are you excited about right now?
With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, we see an opportunity in the way Medicare and Medicaid dollars are spent, now that we’re shifting to more of a prevention culture rather than a fee-for-service model. We could potentially see billions of dollars put toward creating a fruit-and-vegetable prescription program. [In 2011, Wholesome Wave launched the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program to encourage healthcare providers to prescribe fresh produce to patients.] Doctors, nutritionists and nurse practitioners can work together to diagnose an at-risk patient, work to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables, and then measure that for health outcomes.
It’s actually less expensive to feed a family of four fruits and vegetables for 20 years than it is to have one person go on dialysis for four years. Dialysis from diabetes and kidney failure is the most expensive line-item in Medicare and Medicaid. And if we could get certain healthy food item SKUs coded as reimbursable for prevention, that would unlock billions of dollars and affordability for the country’s 66 million food-insecure people who are having difficulty making the lifestyle changes to prevent diseases that cost us over half a trillion dollars a year.
Tag: Food Stamps
Meet the Harlem Native Who Is on a Mission to End Poverty in America
“Government is not ‘a system’,” says Elisabeth Mason, co-founder of Single Stop, USA. “It’s lots of systems. And what we care about are the people.”
The East Harlem headquarters of Single Stop, the nonprofit that Mason helped establish seven years ago, invites at-risk Americans from all walks of life to pay a visit. There, representatives demystify the labyrinthine process of accessing aid — quickly determining which public benefits and safety-net programs (from local to federal) their low-income clients may qualify for. And depending upon eligibility and needs, they may be connected to private charitable organizations, too. Through coordination of disparate programs, the organization aims to stabilize individuals and families, eventually lifting them out of poverty and into the middle class.
Mason has spent practically her entire life in East Harlem. Her father, a teacher and playwright and her mother, a social worker, were theater lovers of limited means and wanted to find an affordable way to live in Manhattan. Shortly after the 1968 riots, when Mason was a baby, the family moved into a dilapidated row house that they purchased for $6,000.
Mason’s parents were educated, giving her opportunities unavailable to most of her neighbors. Winning a scholarship to a top-notch Manhattan prep school, Mason’s childhood was divided between playing with her Harlem friends and attending school with, as she puts it, “millionaires’ and billionaires’ children.”
“This is a great blessing,” says Mason, speaking of her divergent childhood experiences, “when you want to do something around economic inequality because it means that you can understand all sides of the puzzle and you know how to talk to different people about that puzzle. But as a child, certainly, you feel at one time like you fit in everywhere and you fit in nowhere.”
While finding her way in the world after high school, Mason continued to rub shoulders with the elite and underprivileged alike, studying at Columbia and Harvard and working for six years in Central America, assisting street children. Her deep connection to East Harlem remained, however, and she returned, settling with a family of her own in a house two doors down from her childhood home.
Co-founding Single Stop is her way of addressing poverty in America — something she has witnessed her entire life. Annually, the U.S. allocates about $750 billion on a variety of safety-net programs, but many low–income Americans are unaware of what they are eligible for or don’t have the time or resources to jump through the hoops to apply for different programs.
Single Stop has expanded rapidly, existing at more than 113 locations (many at community colleges, since they already serve large low-income populations) in eight states. According to its website, Single Stop’s efforts have helped 1 million households access about $3 billion worth of existing benefits.
But Mason wants to do more, faster. Single Stop is currently developing software that will allow clients to screen themselves for benefits they might qualify for. This won’t eliminate the need for the human interaction that will still be available at every Single Stop location, but it should vastly expand the service’s reach.
“We never solve anything in society by talking about how hard it is to do or that it’s impossible,” says Mason. “Do I think alone we can end poverty in America?” she continues. “Probably not. Do I think with what we are doing we could actually significantly reduce it? Yeah.”
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This Nonprofit Is Creating a One-Stop Shop for Social Services
Too many of America’s underserved are missing out on social programs thanks to long lines, exhaustive processes to register and the time and effort it takes before actual benefits ever kick in.
But like many other sectors, technology is increasingly playing a bigger role in turning a daunting procedure into a more accessible one. Nonprofit Single Stop USA is playing its part by launching a platform that enables clients to do online self-screenings to determine federal aid and resources, whether that’s food stamps or Medicaid, and transforming it into a one-stop shop.
Single Stop USA, which first launched in 2007 after spinning off from the New York-based nonprofit Robin Hood Foundation, is an anti-poverty national organization that coordinates social service resources for families and students.
“There are many resources are out there, but one of the biggest problems is a lack of coordination, information, and access,” said Elisabeth Mason, chief executive of Single Stop.
Staffers typically meet with clients in-person, but the nonprofit is aiming to make the process as seamless as an online consultation followed by a virtual check-out with a shopping cart. Mason likens the forthcoming platform to Amazon, which will ask clients a series of questions—including what type of benefits they may be interested in—and then give an estimate of which services a client is eligible for and how much they would receive each year.
Once a client is ready to move forward with the services they’d like to pursue, they can check out using a virtual shopping cart and receive contact information for local recommended providers. The site will also enable users to contact those providers directly through the site.
Akin to Amazon, Mason said, the platform will offer recommendations for other services which similar clients were interested in and will also use digital advertising strategies to determine what people will want when they visit the site.
Single Stop, which operates locations in eight states, will continue to offer in-person visits, much like “the doctor versus the WebMD,” says Mason.
The pilot project will target those in need of college aid along with other social services, but the New York branch may focus on other demographics such as veterans or those looking for early childhood benefits.
The nonprofit is also planning to add video chats for clients who may need assistance to walk through the online process as well as providing analytics for case managers.
While the platform is not expected to launch until later this year, Single Stop is already entertaining the idea of partnering with federal agencies and other organizations to use the platform.
Disrupting social services may be Single Stop’s first step, but it’s a critical one in supporting America’s underserved.
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10 Chefs Who Are Bringing a Food Revolution to America
1. Mario Batali
Home base: New York, N.Y.
Noted for: Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, Del Posto, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria
Cause: Hunger relief
How he’s changing America: With a slew of Manhattan restaurants, regular television appearances and famous friends like Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali is hands down one of America’s most visible chefs. But behind the scenes, the man in the orange Crocs is equally hard at work at the Mario Batali Foundation, which has taught low-income families about nutrition and healthy food preparation since 2008. Batali has also raised nearly $8 million in the last decade for the Food Bank for New York City, a nonprofit hunger-relief organization where he serves on the board of directors. In 2013, the Mario Batali Foundation partnered with the Food Bank for New York City to create the Community CookShop, a program that has taught more than 1,400 people at 24 food pantries and soup kitchens how to maximize their food budgets and cook nutritious meals.
2. José Andrés
Home base: Washington, D.C.
Noted for: Jaleo, Zaytinya, Minibar by José Andrés
Causes: Hunger relief, culinary training
How he’s changing America: When José Andrés moved to Washington, D.C., one of the first people he met was Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing poverty and hunger in the nation’s capital. Humbled by the group’s efforts, Andrés began helping on a number of their initiatives, including a culinary training program that teaches homeless vets and former prisoners food preparation and cooking skills so they can find jobs in the restaurant industry. In 2010, Andrés formed World Central Kitchen, which aims to replicate the success of DC Central Kitchen on an international scale by teaching vulnerable citizens how they can grow, cook and preserve their own food and become self-sustaining communities. “As chefs, we are in a position to influence how people eat and how they think about food,” Andrés says. “Yes, we cook for the few in our restaurants, but we have the power and knowledge to cook for and feed the many.”
3. Cat Cora
Home base: Santa Barbara, Calif.
Noted for: Kouzzina by Cat Cora, Cat Cora’s Kitchen
Cause: Hunger relief
How she’s changing America: In 2005, Cat Cora made history by becoming the Food Network’s first and only female Iron Chef. And yet the Mississippi-bred chef may be best known for her work as president and founder of Chefs for Humanity, an organization that aims to provide nutrition education and hunger relief around the world by rallying culinary experts to raise money for disaster-affected populations and to teach low-income communities about healthy eating habits. In 2005, Cora and fellow chefs worked with the American Red Cross to help feed victims and volunteers of Hurricane Katrina, which left a trail of destruction in her home state of Mississippi. More recently, Cora has partnered with Michelle Obama on the first lady’s Chefs Move to Schools program, which invites chefs to help eradicate the childhood obesity epidemic by creating healthy meals and menus.
4. Bill Yosses
Home base: Washington, D.C.
Noted for: White House executive pastry chef
Cause: Food literacy
How he’s changing America: Many chefs would consider a tenure in the White House to be the gig of a lifetime. Bill Yosses can claim that honor twice, as he has whipped up delicious desserts for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama as the White House executive pastry chef. This summer, Yosses will depart 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for New York City, where he plans to form a foundation to promote healthy eating habits for adults and kids alike. “There’s much talk about STEM in schools — science, technology, engineering and math,” Yosses told The New York Times. “Food knowledge should be part of a complete curriculum.” And while the White House kitchen will no longer be his domain, its hallowed halls won’t be far from his mind. Yosses’ plans are reportedly inspired in part by Michelle Obama and her White House garden, which provided ingredients for healthier desserts during his stint.
5. Michel Nischan
Home base: Fairfield, Conn.
Noted for: Wholesome Wave
Cause: Sustainable farming
How he’s changing America: Though he grew up in the Chicago suburbs, Michel Nischan spent the summers of his formative years on his grandfather’s farm in Missouri. There, he learned how to raise animals, can veggies and drive tractors. “It’s where my passion for food comes from,” Nischan says. “It’s also where I learned about the role and importance of people who produce that food.”
In 2007, Nischan co-founded Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that partners with farmers across the country to provide underserved communities with better access to locally grown foods. Wholesome Wave is perhaps most famous for its double- value coupon program: Food stamp recipients get double the value of their government-issued food dollars if they shop at participating farmers’ markets rather than traditional grocery stores. In 2011, in an effort to lower obesity and boost health, Wholesome Wave launched its fruit and vegetable prescription program, in which doctors write patients “prescriptions” for fruits and vegetables that can be cashed in at farmers’ markets. The program was introduced in Massachusetts, Maine, California and Rhode Island (New York City adopted it in 2013).
6. Ann Cooper
Home base: Boston, Mass.
Noted for: The Lunch Box
Cause: Healthy school lunches
How she’s changing America: Ann Cooper realized there was a problem with our food culture when her own niece informed her that strawberries were grown on trees, not bushes. Since then, Cooper has become an advocate for childhood nutrition, a fight she’s led for more than 20 years. “So many of our kids don’t know where real food comes from — that it doesn’t come in plastic wrap in a box,” Cooper says. The Boston-based chef has been dubbed the “Renegade Lunch Lady” for her efforts to bring healthier foods to the public school system, having launched several nonprofits and websites in support of these initiatives, including The Lunch Box, an open-source community that provides free recipes, video cooking tutorials and other tools to families who want to eat better. In 2010, Cooper also teamed up with Michelle Obama to start Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, an effort to bring 6,000 salad bars to school cafeterias across the country.
7. Christina Tosi
Home base: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Noted for: Momofuku Milk Bar
Cause: Immigrants
How she’s changing America: One of Christina Tosi’s earliest dreams was to own a bakery. In 2011, she checked that item off the bucket list when she became chef, owner and founder of Momofuku Milk Bar, the dessert branch of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant group. It’s only fitting, then, that her philanthropic efforts are with an organization that also loves baking: Tosi serves on the board of Hot Bread Kitchen, a Spanish Harlem-based nonprofit that trains low-income, immigrant women in artisanal baking skills, which can help them secure management jobs within bakeries, where minority women are particularly underrepresented. (In New York City alone, just 500 of the area’s 6,000 bakers are minority women.) Founded in 2007, Hot Bread Kitchen has already helped 12 of its 39 trainees find full-time work as bakery shift managers, with plans to train 30 new participants this year.
8. David James Robinson
Home base: Columbia County, N.Y.
Noted for: “Learn How to Cook (and Eat Your Mistakes)!” DVD program
Cause: Job training for veterans
How he’s changing America: Having cooked for more than 35,000 guests in his career, including presidents, Academy Award winners and professional athletes, chef David James Robinson has a wealth of culinary knowledge to share. His DVD program “Learn How to Cook (and Eat Your Mistakes)!” offers beginner chefs lessons from food prep to chopping. A spin-off, called Culinary Command Training, is a 45-day program for vets and select active-duty soldiers eager to learn skills that would prepare them for a culinary career. The program, which takes place twice a year in Chatham, N.Y., is free for military participants and funded by donations.
9. Hugh Acheson
Home base: Athens, Ga.
Noted for: Five & Ten, The National
Cause: Food security
How he’s changing America: Hugh Acheson lives in Athens, Ga., about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where more than half a million people live in food “deserts” —communities where citizens, the great majority of whom receive benefits from the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), live more than a mile from the nearest grocery store.
Acheson has been one of the loudest advocates for those living on SNAP, donating money to organizations that help underserved communities access nutritious foods and running cooking demos for low-income citizens who want to learn how to make the most of their food stamps. “People forget that SNAP is supposed to supplement — not serve as 100 percent of anyone’s food budget,” says Acheson, whose demos focus on how to make sustainable meals from vegetables and grains, which are considerably cheaper than meat. “I don’t want to raise a bunch of chefs in America,” he says. “I just want to raise a bunch of people with basic cooking skills so they can feed themselves.”
10. Rick Bayless
Home base: Chicago, Ill.
Noted for: Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, Xoco
Cause: Local farmers
How he’s changing America: With multiple restaurants, cookbooks and even his own PBS show dedicated to Mexican cuisine, it’s no wonder that Rick Bayless was invited by the Obamas to be the guest chef at an official state dinner in 2010 for Felipe Calderon, then president of Mexico. But he’s not letting that national attention get to his head. For decades, Bayless has helped out small farmers who supplied food to his restaurants, and in 2003 he founded the Frontera Farmer Foundation to support local Chicago farmers through grants for capital improvements; to date, the foundation has given $1.2 million to 71 farms. “They’d tell us they needed a little help with this project, with that project, and we wanted to see them thrive — not the least bit because we wanted to continue getting product from them — so we’d help them out whenever we could,” Bayless says. “And eventually we thought, ‘Hey, this is part of our mission, it’s part of what we
do, we should just make it official.’” But for Bayless, the decision to support farmers goes beyond his three Chicago restaurants. “I just didn’t want to see our food systems go completely corporate and globalized,” he says. “I wanted to eat food that was grown in the Midwest, the same way people in Mexico eat food that was grown just a few miles away…the same way we all used to do that. It’s about health, it’s about the planet’s health, it’s about flavor, it’s about stories and it’s very much about people, the farmers who make their living growing food for us to eat.”
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Michel Nischan, CEO of Wholsome Wave, has become a NationSwell Council member.
What Happened When This Mom Came Up Short on Her Grocery Bill Will Give You Hope
Andrea Gardner, a mom with five kids, was struggling to make ends meet after her husband was laid off. Like many Americans, she relies on food stamps to help put meals on the table.
Out grocery shopping one day, Andrea found herself unable to pay her $17.38 bill because the store’s EBT machine (which is used to deduct money out of a person’s welfare benefits account) wasn’t working, and she didn’t have any other form of cash on her. That’s when a perfect stranger standing behind her stepped in and paid off the entire tab.
Andrea wrote about this experience in a touching blog post titled “To the Woman Behind Me in Line at the Grocery Store” published by the Huffington Post.
“You didn’t judge me. You didn’t snarl ‘Maybe you should have less kids.’ You didn’t say ‘Well, get a job and learn to support yourself.’ You didn’t look away in embarrassment or shame for me. You didn’t make any assumptions at all.”
MORE: North Carolina’s Food Stamp Crisis Is Nearly Resolved, But It’s Not Too Late to Help
“What you did was you paid that $17.38 grocery bill for us. You gave my kids bananas, yogurt, apple juice, cheese sticks, and a peach ice tea for me; a rare treat and splurge. You let me hug you and promise through my tears that I WILL pay this forward. I WILL pay someone’s grocery bill for them. That $17.38 may not have been a lot for you, but it was priceless to us. In the car my kids couldn’t stop gushing about you; our ‘angel in disguise.’ They prayed for you. They prayed you would be blessed. You restored some of our lost faith. One simple and small action changed our lives. You probably have forgotten about us by now, but we haven’t forgotten about you. You will forever be a part of us even though we don’t even know your name.”
Andrea’s story is a sobering reminder that this could be happening in your own neighborhood grocery store. In a recent article, Slate reported that 1 in 7 of Americans are on food stamps. And it’s not just people who are chronically unemployed who need a little help. Slate also reports that the fastest-growing group of people who need assistance are actually people with jobs and work all year round.
Times are tough for millions of people across the country. But it’s stories like these that show how ordinary people can play a big part in making sure families like Andrea’s don’t go hungry.
The Cost of Walmart Paying Its Employees a Living Wage
Take a guess how much the price of a 68-cent box of mac-and-cheese would increase if Walmart paid its employees a living wage. Twenty-five cents? A dollar?
Try a single penny.
In this fascinating video from Slate and Marketplace, you can see that if Walmart passed the cost of increasing their workers’ salaries along to consumers, prices would only increase by 1.4 percent.
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It’s no secret that Walmart pays wages so low to their employees that many rely on (yep, taxpayer-funded) food stamps. Many of these workers return to their place of employment, spending their food stamps on Walmart’s low-priced goods — funneling even more money to the big-box retailer in a vicious cycle. As the videos points out, the United States distributed $76 billion in food stamps last year, and Walmart took in 18 percent of food stamp dollars, or about $13 billion.
Of course, why make the consumer pay extra for Walmart to increase its payroll costs when the retail giant could easily absorb this expense? Slate and Marketplace crunched the numbers and found that by simply raising the average cashier’s wage from $8.81 to $13.63 (a point where they would be ineligible for food stamps), would only cost Walmart $4.6 billion — an amount that the company could simply absorb from the $17 billion they made last year.
Kind of puts the Walmart slogan “Save Money, Live Better” into perspective, doesn’t it?
Could a National Sales Tax Ease American Inequality?
The U.S. has one of the highest levels of income inequality among the world’s industrialized nations. The imbalance between rich and the poor is a popular political topic — President Barack Obama even focused his State of the Union address on the issue. Michigan State University law professor Reuven S. Avi-Yonah has an idea that he can help: he wants to implement a national sales tax.
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Sure, this idea is probably at the very top of the list for politically unpopular topics, but don’t write Avi-Yonah off just yet. By using the Gini Coefficient, a measure of statistical dispersion that represents income distribution, Avi-Yonah discovered that income inequality in the U.S. is on the rise while social mobility is on the decline, making it one of the most unequal developed economies, while countries like Germany and Japan are more balanced. By comparing the U.S. to these countries, he found a clear difference: the presence of a national sales tax — or, more specifically, a value added tax (VAT). While states levy a sales tax on consumers who purchase goods and services, funds from a national sales tax could go even further. “One key to reducing inequality in the U.S. is to bolster the social safety net,” Avi-Yonah writes in his report.
But why a national sales tax over other forms of funding? For one, these types of taxes are used in more than 150 countries and have a demonstrated ability to raise revenues. VATs are not income taxes, which are easy for some Americans to avoid and can discourage work. Sales taxes are also paid by all members of society — the old and young, rich and poor. Plus, a sales tax is cheaper to administer than income taxes. Sound like a no-brainer? Well, try getting any new tax past congress.
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North Carolina’s Food Stamp Crisis Is Nearly Resolved, But It’s Not Too Late to Help
Needy families in North Carolina will finally get the help they’ve been waiting for. Officials at the state’s Department Health and Human Services have made significant progress in clearing the backlog of food stamp applications that topped out at nearly 35,000 unresolved cases in mid-January. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the state until February 10 to process the applications and renewals that were pending for more than 90 days or categorized as “emergencies.” Federal guidelines demand that officials process food stamp applications within 30 days. On Monday, data showed that only 3,600 backlogged applications remained — less than half of the 7,700 applications that were reportedly unresolved on January 30. Case managers must complete the remaining applications before February 10 or risk losing about $88 million in funding.
MORE: How to Double the Value of Food Stamps and Get the Best Fresh Food
Problems with North Carolina’s food stamp system began in July, when the state rolled out NC FAST, a new system that was, ironically, supposed to streamline the process of applying for and receiving social services. But that isn’t the only issue. Liz Scott, assistant human services director in Wake County, one of the areas most affected by the backlog, said that staff in her county can’t keep up with the increasing demand for benefits. “This isn’t an NC FAST issue alone,” Scott told WRAL. “That is one factor in a number of factors that have caused us to be this far behind.” Considering that almost 1.6 million people in the state participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in October 2013, according to the most recent data, hopefully the issues will be resolved so families can continue to get the help they need. In the mean time, ordinary citizens may have to step up to help feed their communities. You can find a list of North Carolina food banks here.
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What If You Could Do More Than Feed the Needy? This Food Bank Is Giving the Gift of Health
Every family deserves a healthy meal. Feeding America, which supplies nearly 23 million lbs. of food each year to hungry San Diegans, is trying to make sure they get one. Four years ago, the organization stopped accepting donations of sugary drinks and candy. Now, it’s preparing to go a step further by guaranteeing that its food bags will be 100% healthy in 2014 — less Honey Nut Cheerios, more fresh fruits and vegetables.
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The move, which is funded in part by the Dennis and Pamela Mudd Charitable Foundation, is in direct response to families’ needs: for many, food donations aren’t just a stopgap anymore; they’re a long-term fix. It doesn’t help that temporary stimulus increases to food stamps and welfare assistance programs have expired in recent months. The good news is that food-bank recipients have embraced Feeding America’s initiative, consistently reporting that they’re satisfied with the healthier options. The idea that poor people only want junk food? It’s a myth.
How to Double the Value of Food Stamps and Get the Best Fresh Food
San Diego put a smart spin on food stamp programs. For individuals families receiving government assistance, the Farmers’ Market Fresh Fund Initiative provides incentives for making healthy choices. Participants in the program can purchase Fresh Fund tokens (using cash or benefits cards), and the incentive basically doubles the tokens, giving them double the purchasing power, as long as they’re spending them on the healthy options at that market. Participants also complete surveys and share data, giving organizers a chance to analyze how active people are and share the statistics behind the success.