March '23: Lettuce Talk about Food

Mar 14

Written By Social Medicine Fellows Advocacy

By Naomi Shin (MS1), Christina White (MS1), Brianna Brooks (MS1), & Vivian Wang (MS1)

Food insecurity is a national and local crisis. In 2020 a FeedPGH report from the City of Pittsburgh shared that 63,000 Pittsburgh residents were food insecure. This means that 1 in 5 community members struggle to access healthy, culturally appropriate, affordable, and adequate food. This problem disproportionately impacts historically excluded neighborhoods and people of color in Pittsburgh. The FeedPGH report identified Healthy Food Priority Areas (HPFAs), defined as priority regions of the city for action on food insecurity based on scores of low availability, access, and utilization of healthy food. The report found that 1 in 3 Black Pittsburgh residents live in HPFAs, but less than 5 percent of white Pittsburgh residents live in these areas. Pittsburgh neighborhoods containing HPFAs specifically include the greater Hill District, Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar, Larimer, East Hills, and Homewood. More information about HPFAs and relevant underlying data can be explored on the HPFA Dashboard. These stark disparities are a result of decades of marginalization by our institutions and have real impacts on health and well-being. Living with food insecurity contributes to a range of chronic health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, and food insecurity is also associated with asthma, anemia, and depression in children., As the SNAP COVID-19 emergency allotments end this month, food insecurity is more pertinent than ever.

How can you be a well-equipped advocate for a healthier, more equitable, and more resilient food system? It is our responsibility to help shape a more resilient food system in our community to achieve “Zero Hunger” and we all have roles to play. Here are a few ideas for how we can ignite conversation and action to combat food insecurity and increase access to healthy food in our communities:

1. Ask questions of your neighbors

Speaking with the patient, friend, or colleague that has a personal experience with food insecurity is a vital preliminary step towards understanding one’s experience. Choose a safe environment and respectfully ask questions with the clear intent of being a listener. Is healthy, fresh food available in your community? Can you tell me about the average diet of a resident in your community? What do people in the community think could be changed to have healthier diets? Use what you learn to form your approach to your advocacy.

2. Support local resources

There are many nonprofit organizations that are doing the work of ensuring food security in Pittsburgh. Great places to start are 412 Food Rescue, Hunger-Free Pittsburgh, and Community Kitchen Pittsburgh. If you have a few hours to volunteer, or simply speak with a representative of the organization, you’ll gain a deeper and vivid appreciation of food-related issues and ongoing efforts to address them. Walk through neighborhoods and investigate where the nearest grocery stores are. What kinds of healthy options exist and how much do they cost? Consider volunteering a small amount of time to 412 Food Rescue to pick up leftovers and deliver them to community distributors. With time, you’ll begin to grow connections with problem-solvers and advocates. These local leaders are ideal sources of knowledge and can serve as guides for future involvement.

3. Be a connector

As a result of continued efforts to know a community and its fight against food insecurity, you can serve as a link for others to access resources and knowledge. If you are a medical provider, you might have a list of organizations that provide hunger relief in your office. Perhaps your clinic can partner with a local organization, offering a mini food pantry in the waiting room (like the one at Birmingham Free Clinic). Make sure every patient knows where to go for food assistance and benefits, starting with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. Below, we have outlined a number of consumer facing federal and state programs providing assistance:

Food Access Programs and their target population

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): Low income households
Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC): Low income pregnant and postpartum women, and eligible children up to age 5
Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP): Low income seniors
Summer Food Service Program (SFSP): Children
Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (FMNP): WIC recipients and low income seniors
Congregate and Home Delivered Meals (Find sites via PA211): Seniors
Food Bucks: SNAP recipients

4. Incorporate community insight into related research

If you perform research, you can prioritize community-based participatory research methods. What does this mean? It means intentionally including community members and community-based organizations not only as study participants, but as consultants, ideators, and co-authors. If you are conducting research on food insecurity or federal programs like WIC/SNAP, consider thinking about ways in which you can incorporate community members into the ideation and dissemination of your work.

5. Stay up to date on the conversation about long term solutions

Learn about federal and local initiatives.

Federal

Food insecurity and healthy eating are built into the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Healthy People 2030 initiative, a set of objectives to improve health and well-being by 2030. Specifically, Healthy People 2030 tracks objectives such as increasing consumption of vegetables, fruit, calcium, potassium, and vitamin D, increasing the proportion of schools that do not sell less healthy foods and drinks, and reducing household food insecurity and hunger. In line with these objectives, the Biden-Harris administration released their National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in September 2022. The Strategy included action items including expanding SNAP eligibility; piloting coverage of medically tailored meals in Medicare and testing Medicaid coverage of nutrition support; and enhancing funding for nutrition research. Several organizations responded to the National Strategy urging the administration to address root causes of food insecurity such as housing and homelessness.

At the legislative level, Congress is currently considering reauthorizing child nutrition programs, a process called Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR). Although many child nutrition programs are permanent, meaning they are funded automatically, the intent of CNR is that Congress will reevaluate and consider improvements on these programs every five years. The last CNR was in 2010 with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. The current iteration of a CNR bill, the Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act, includes provisions that would increase the amount of schools in high-poverty areas eligible to provide free school meals to all students. Similarly, the Farm Bill, which includes SNAP and CSFP, must be reauthorized every five years. However, unlike CNR, most programs under the Farm Bill are not permanent and will end with the expiration of the current Farm Bill in September 2023 unless Congress reauthorizes the bill.

Local

To follow the FeedPGH report, the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council (PFPC) introduced the Greater Pittsburgh Food Action Plan to outline recommendations to improve Allegheny County’s food system. The PFPC outlined the following goals and strategies: