The statistics of food insecurity tell a story. One part of the story is about financial distress - when a family cannot afford to purchase food or purchase enough food. Or it's when someone has to make a choice between buying medications or food, or putting off the gas bill for another month so that a grocery purchase can be made.
There are more financial implications. It is a fact that healthier food comes at a higher cost. Yes there are exceptions to this, yes there are measures that can reduce the cost of healthier items (CSA farm shares, visiting local stands, budgeting/clipping coupons, buying certain things like protein in bulk etc.). Yes there are other ways to look at this (high medical costs resulting from diet related illnesses, etc.) but to keep it simple, just know that on average, the healthier your items the more expensive your bill.
Another part of the story is about geography - certain regions have higher incidences of food insecurity based on the median household income and also based on other factors, such as access (public transportation) and availability (local grocery stores). A "food desert" is a town where there are no regional grocery stores with a wide variety of food items. These towns generally have bodegas or convenience stores but the only produce available tends to be red delicious apples, navel oranges and/or bananas.
These factors modify the story of food insecurity slightly. In America - a place where "hunger" does not necessarily mean "starvation" - those suffering from "food insecurity" are also suffering from "nutrition insecurity". More families suffer from nutrition insecurity even if they don't fit into the financial statistic of "facing a food crisis". This is due to a general lack of financial security, a lack of nutrition education or culinary education, and an overwhelming presence of high calorie, low nutrient, highly addictive items in the Standard American Diet - also known as the SAD Diet. A good friend of mine who has since passed on used to run workshops on the drug-like effect of processed foods. She used to say "we are sitting DUCKS for the processed food industry!!!" She was very colorful in her candor and had a brilliant, beautiful mind. And she was right.
That's why it's important for organizations like The Franklin Food Bank to first be aware of this problem in trying to serve our community's food needs in an atmosphere of dignity and respect. That last part of our mission is really really important to us - it gave rise to our program Client Choice and it guides us along our way as we think about the future.
To walk the walk, we have implemented some techniques in our program and plan to add to them. All produce on our shelves (and thanks to our farm partners, that's a LOT) is zero points. That means that any client can, while following the limits on specific items we don't have lots of, gather as much produce as they want in their shopping cart and it will have no effect on their monthly point allocation. In general, we try to use the opposite calculation as supermarkets - in the Client Choice market, the healthier the cart the "less expensive" it is for the families we serve.
We know that's not enough and so in our future we plan to partner with SNAP-ED and other organizations with great thinkers to implement wrap-around services and make the Franklin Food Bank a place where food insecurity is addressed in a Whole-istic way. Where clients can gather food items they need AND some education on nutrition. We're in the beginning stages of this but it's exciting to imagine how much more dignified our program can become when we're not just trying to put out a fire and instead we're removing the fire hazards.
