Food cupboards: Improving access to nutritious foods

Americans struggle to eat the recommended servings of fruits and vegetables and for residents with lower-incomes, inadequate access to affordable fresh produce presents an even greater challenge. Food cupboards work hard to “fill bellies” but many realize that in order to meet the needs of their clients a greater emphasis on providing healthy foods is necessary. Establishing and maintaining sources for the year round procurement of fresh produce is a challenge for food cupboards whose resources are stretched to the limit as they try to meet the growing demand for services. Results from a 15 month intervention demonstrate that enhanced collaboration among emergency food providers, achieved through the development of a coalition, produced several creative approaches to securing fresh and healthy food for those who needed it most. Community education, fresh food drives, and partnerships with food retailers, farmers and community gardeners generated more than a half ton of fresh food for emergency food providers and established replicable methods for procuring fresh foods. Measures of collaboration, food inventory, caloric consumption and relative cost are discussed.