Farmers’ Market “prescriptions” to keep the doctor away
By hola | Published | No Comments
A novel program helps families improve their health at the dinner table
Every Saturday morning from late spring through December, Ruth Romero makes a trip to the Columbia Heights Marketplace farmers’ market in Tivoli Square to take advantage of an usual DC health initiative that involves what could be called nature’s medicine: fresh, locally-grown fruit and vegetables that she purchases with a “prescription” from her son’s pediatrician.
The boy is enrolled in an obesity prevention program at the Upper Cardozo Health Center that seek to improve the lives of low-income patients by helping their entire families develop healthier eating habits as a form of preventative medicine.
Government assistance programs for the poor, food pantries, and other public and private programs have long been criticized for fobbing off too many canned and otherwise unhealthy foods on some of society’s most vulnerable people. The Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program that benefits the Romero family is one of a growing number of efforts in the District and nationwide to provide healthier food to the poor, who are disproportionately children. Nationwide, about 20 percent of all U.S. children (nearly 15 million people) live in poverty. And an even greater number, 15.8 million kids live in households with “food insecurity,” meaning they don’t always known when they will get their next meal, according to the nonprofit group, Feeding America.
At the Upper Cardozo clinic operated by Unity Health Care Inc., the Romeros are among about 130 patients and family members taking part in the prescriptions program run by DC Greens, a nonprofit organization begun in 2009. They receive wooden tokens good for purchasing $1 a day for each member of the patient’s family. For a family of four, that’s $28 a week, which can get you a fair amount of locally grown produce at Columbia Heights Marketplace.
The prescriptions program, based on one pioneered in Connecticut by an organization called Wholesome Wave, began in Washington three years ago as a partnership among DC Greens, the Upper Cardozo clinic and the Columbia Heights Marketplace. It has since expanded it to three other D.C. clinics and several other farmers’ markets, with partial funding from the D.C. Department of Health, according to Lillie Rosen, DC Greens’ Food Access Director.
In addition to farmers’ market produce, the young patients and their families get together for weekly meetings at the 14th Street NW health clinic, which allows their doctors to keep closer tabs on the patients. The gatherings also build community among the kids, who make friends and play while their parents receive cooking and budgeting tips.
Families in the DC Greens program say that access to healthier food plus the recipes, budgeting and cooking tips, and peer supports have helped them adopt healthier eating habits and make better shopping choices at the supermarket, as well, Rosen says.
“One of the wonderful things that happens is that families in the program help each other. If one family can’t make it to the farmers’ market one day, another will take their tokens and do the shopping for them,” Rosen says.
And more than half the children enrolled in the Columbia Heights obesity prevention program have seen a reduction in a their Body Mass Index (BMI) Percentile, a standard measure used by doctors to monitor children’s weight by assessing them relative to others of the same age and height.
For Romero, the tokens she picks up at the market’s DC Greens table each week allow her to purchase vegetables such as spinach and purple cabbage that she’d never seen before.
Before, she says, “I did not know what it meant to eat correctly.” But nowadays she has learned so much she can quote from memory the nutritional value of foods such as carrots, though it can still be a struggle to get them to eat them. “Despite it all,” she says, “sometimes the kids don’t want to eat them [vegetables]–but they do,” she adds.
More programs helping all DC residents eat healthy, locally-grown food
DC Greens’ RX program just one of several local and federal government programs aimed at making the country’s blossoming farmers’ market movement more accessible to low income people who may never otherwise venture into the markets, where product grown by local small farmers is sometimes more expensive grocery store produce. In the District this year, for instance, the Produce Plus program earmarked $200,000 in city funds to be distributed $10 per week to households receiving Medicaid, WIC, Senior, and Food Stamp and for use exclusively for purchasing fresh fruit and vegetables at city farmers’ markets.
The Columbia Heights Marketplace also offers supermarket tours to help educate residents on reading product labels and how to stretch their budgets to maximize the nutritious food they purchase for their families.
Here are a few more links where you can find farmers’ markets near you:
https://search.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/Default.aspx
https://www.dcfoodfinder.org/edit.html
—by the HC staff, additional reporting + graphic by Magdiel Antonio Ramos
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