Sophia Lenarz-Coy
Appearances
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And I think some people might say, like, I don't understand what linkage there is between a child income tax credit and hunger or food insecurity. We saw at the federal level when that was instituted, the number one biggest household expense was food. So for folks with kids, you spend a lot of money on food. And so if you can get additional resources, you're gonna spend that on food.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So to have that at the state level, we think is gonna really help. But things like this take time to kind of build up, to start seeing those effects on the numbers. The other thing that happened last legislative session is universal school meals in Minnesota. So all kids in Minnesota now can have breakfast and lunch at school, no questions asked. that's going to help.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
That's going to take some of the pressure off of families. It's also going to take some of the pressure off of food shelves. But these things take time. So I think we see that we're headed in a better direction. But the X factor is truly what are grocery prices going to continue to do? Because as those go up at a higher rate than wages do, this pressure on food insecurity gets bigger.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, I think, you know, generally Minnesota, it would have lower food insecurity rates than certainly some places where, again, it's so tied to, you know, income. And then also just to kind of the attitude of the state government in terms of safety net support. So I would say Minnesota has a... You know, a couple different things going for it.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
There's a real culture of volunteerism in Minnesota and a kind of sense of state pride. So I do think Minnesotans like the idea of taking care of each other, coming together. So that certainly helps. But the place Minnesota has an abysmal track record is on how our food insecurity breaks down according to race. And so our racial disparities in terms of food access continue to be
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
really, really high. And that's one thing we think a lot about at the food group of we have to talk about race head on and really think about, to your point, access. But access looks different in different cultural communities, in different geographic communities.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So how we might address that in maybe a rural community is going to be really different than maybe a neighborhood that has a lot of historic disinvestment. So I would say Minnesota on the whole, you could say it's doing well.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But then when you start disaggregating some of that data, it's really clear that there are kind of really prevalent, almost generational food access challenges for certain of our communities, many of them being black and brown communities.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah. So I think, you know, that is such an important connection. And it's one that when I started kind of doing some of this work, it used to be that it was one we had to kind of justify or talk about a lot, right? Like we'd cite studies that, you know, if people have access to fruits and vegetables, they'll eat more of them or, right? We'd cite studies that people
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
People know often what is healthy, but they just can't get those things. And so if folks do, we, you know, we think that rates of diabetes would go down or heart disease would go down and obesity related, right? Any kind of chronic diet related diseases are very much tied to food access because all sorts of studies show that when you don't have access to
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
you have to really think about how to buy the most dense calorie foods that are available. So it often is really, really unhealthy things. So one thing that is talked about sometimes is the hunger obesity paradox. that many folks struggling with food insecurity have struggles with obesity as well.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so what's been really interesting kind of as things have evolved in the past decade is we no longer really have to make that case to funders or to healthcare partners. There's a real understanding that if you can get people really consistent, reliable access to nutritious foods, health outcomes improve.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So there's, there's not even a sense of, oh my gosh, we need to study it or we need to look at the dietary outcomes. It really is kind of almost now commonly accepted that access will lead to better health results.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, certainly there are demographic differences in food insecurity. So one of the groups with the highest rates of food insecurity are Native American folks, Indigenous. There's a really long, super complicated history of how the US government has used food as a tool to really kind of oppress Native communities.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
and really tore away many of their natural kind of food sovereignty ways of producing foods that were good for their community and replaced that all with commodity foods. So rates of diet-related disease, rates of food insecurity, they are off the charts for many indigenous communities. There's, you know, different kind of pockets of places to, again, certain
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Urban areas without reliable access to grocery stores are going to have higher rates of food insecurity. And then plenty of families with children. That is a group that has high rates. But then the growing group is seniors as well. So there are many, many seniors who are not always sure where their next meal is coming from.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And when you couple that with the fact that many of them are probably taking medication regularly, if you don't have the proper food to have that medication, do what it's supposed to do, you're going to have even worse health outcomes.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, so I'm really glad that you brought that up. So it's really interesting. So generally, when people refer to a food desert, they're speaking about a neighborhood that does not have access to affordable, healthy groceries. So it might have corner stores. It might have fast food restaurants, right?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
There might be places you can get food, but not a quality, nutritious grocery store that's affordable to residents, right? But one thing that's really interesting is there's been some talk around maybe food desert isn't the best way to describe that. So the Sioux chef, Sean Sherman, who is a local indigenous chef, he talks a lot about actually deserts are naturally occurring ecosystems.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
That they're beautiful. And if you know where to look for food or water, you can find them in a desert where actually the situation we find ourselves in is really one of political investment decisions. And so when we think about kind of how grocery stores are located, sometimes we talk about a little bit more as supermarket redlining.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So if you're familiar with like redlining and housing where certain neighborhoods are got less access or only white folks were allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. When you look at grocery store access, if you look at communities with equal per capita income, black neighborhoods are less likely to have a grocery store than white neighborhoods.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So there's a real kind of complicated context to all of this that we need to keep talking about so that we can change those outcomes. But there's nothing natural about it, right? It's really just built into kind of our built environment and our food ecosystem.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, well, I mean, so one kind of exciting way that there can be partnership between farmers market and folks experiencing food insecurity is there's a program called Market Box. And so what that does is for a participant, if you bring your SNAP card to a farmers market, you can get your money match.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So we have a state program that matches money, and then there's actually a federal program that is another even match on top of that. So you could spend $10 of your SNAP card at a farmer's market and end up getting $30 worth of produce.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so, again, it's really trying to incentivize folks to think about farmer's markets as a good option, to understand that they are in lots of neighborhoods, and that, again, that produce, that local, often organic produce, can have such good health outcomes for folks using the program. So that's all super exciting.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
I think the piece, though, that we always have to remember is in Minnesota, we have quite a short growing season. And so while farmers markets are great at expanding access, and there certainly are some that are open in the winter, finding other year round grocery options is important as well.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Well, so this is a really important kind of piece of the whole conversation around kind of like. food waste and food rescue. So again, in the same way that there's this paradox maybe between food insecurity and obesity and people not thinking those are linked, the other paradox we're working with kind of in our country is that we have people who don't have access to the food they need.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
At the same time, we have huge problem with food waste. So all sorts of people are trying to kind of
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
think through better ways to find prevent that food waste and get that to folks who need it so a few things on that uh one of the programs we run at the food group that i i love and i think is really exciting is called gleaning where we bring volunteers out to farmers fields because one of the most expensive parts of farming is to have the labor to pick the vegetables
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So there are local farmers who sometimes will, you know, maybe have a bumper crop of something, but they don't have a market for it. So they're not going to pick it. Generally, it just gets tilled back under as compost for the next year. But what we do is we bring volunteers. So we might be picking apples. We might be picking squash.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
We might be picking, you know, green beans or peppers, things that they can't harvest. But would otherwise go to waste. So that is that's outstanding. And then what we can do is get that to our food shelf partners. And that's top quality foods. So that's a really, really exciting thing.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But the other thing, Clarence, that you mentioned was kind of like, what about ugly foods or what about foods toward the end of its life? So historically, there's been a ton of food rescue that has come into our food shelf system. So whether it's the bagged lettuce that you see at your local supermarket, when that hits the date, right?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
You know, you still have a couple of days to eat it, but they're not going to sell it. So a lot of that tends to go to local food shelves. And that's really good. It's obviously free. It's a lot of variety. But the thing we try to talk a lot about at the food group and really think through is we want to make sure that there's always dignity in the experience.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so it's really important that while we're going to do our best to rescue food, we're going to go through that food and make it beautiful and make sure that nothing happens. that I wouldn't eat or that you wouldn't eat is on the shelf at a food shelf too, right?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So it's this kind of complicated dance between, and I think actually some of the movement around like imperfect foods or ugly fruits or whatever, I think that has better potential for consumers almost at a higher income level because people are willing to make that trade-off knowing my carrot could be ugly or my carrot could be pretty. It's the same carrot. I should take it.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Sometimes, though, folks who are really experiencing food insecurity, the last thing we want them to do is think, why am I the one getting a weird carrot? You know what I mean? So it's kind of like figuring out how to how to think through the levels of food waste prevention, but also dignity.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, I mean, that's something that we've worked on really intentionally with a lot of our partners is thinking about how we can have culturally appropriate foods, culturally relevant foods available to folks. Because the truth is, especially when we're thinking about health outcomes, right, you have to be able to access foods that you're going to know what to do with.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so, you know, if you're from a specific cultural community and you get handed some, you know, ravioli in a can that you might just not even eat it because you've never seen it or it means nothing to your family or right even to your palate. And so we've done a lot around finding some key culturally relevant foods that we can help our partner source.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But then there's also some kind of more culturally universal foods that that actually are the most nutritious foods anyway. So focusing a lot on fresh fruits and vegetables. Some things like canned tomatoes, vegetable oils, some really basic staples that are going to cross cultural traditions.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so some partners are in a position where maybe they're seeing folks from so many different cultural communities. They're not able to carry everything. But then we really encourage them, well, just focus on those things that you can add different spices to, right? And create a completely different meal with some lean protein and produce. Thinking a lot about that.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And I think actually those are the kind of staples, those whole foods that lend themselves to meal preparation. Those are the things that are going to lead to better health outcomes too.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
No, we don't do anything specifically on that topic. I know plenty of our partners do. We have partners like North Point Health and Wellness, for example, in the north side of Minneapolis. They're both a clinic and a food shelf, right? So they can see some of those linkages really well.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But we do participate, along with several other partners, every year in something called the Minnesota Food Shelf Survey. And so that is online. And I know that that asks some people about questions around the prevalence of certain diet-related diseases and just kind of what people are experiencing.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But, yes, many, many folks who are using food shelves have either themselves or someone in their household who is experiencing a diet-related disease. Right. you know, ideally, again, there's a wide variety of things at that food show that are going to work for what they need. Um, and then there's other groups like, uh, open arms is a nonprofit that does medically tailored home delivered meals.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So if somebody maybe isn't in a position where they can cook for themselves, but they need to have that meal be medically tailored. Right. Um, I know there's, there's, there's work in that space too.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Sure. Yeah. Well, thanks again for having me. It's great to connect. And, you know, there are so many important connections between food insecurity or some people call it hunger. Right. And health. And so this idea of the linkages are just so important. So really appreciate the chance to talk about it. And I would say food insecurity. tends to be defined by the USDA.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, so I would say there are, you know, food banks and food pantries. So it's interesting. Minnesota likes to be unique. We call them food shelves. That's the place where you can go in your local community to get free food. Many, many other states call them food pantries. But they are in every state, right? So food pantries are in every state. SNAP, which is the Federal Food Support Program,
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, yeah. So the federal food support program is absolutely the best response that we have to food insecurity and really is keeping many, many households able to afford some foods at the grocery store. So that program is in every state. There's local programs in every state. And then there's food banks, right, which are more at the level we are where
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
we're aggregating food and supporting lots of different food, food pantries. And those exist in every state as well.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
That would be where I would say that. I think that there's all sorts of research that shows the efficacy of these programs And the way that investing in these programs leads to less cost down the road. Now, that doesn't mean that all of our political debate is based on rational data.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So I think that there are plenty of people who can, you know, think about the worst aspects of these programs or try to kind of find fault with them or also try to, I think, sometimes frame that the only people utilizing these programs would be people who are not working hard. And the piece that I would just say is the myth around that is that
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
people are working incredibly hard, sometimes more than one job at a time. But we've just set up certain contexts in our economy that means that food is just still not accessible. And so, you know, we do a lot to keep telling that story of how important those programs are.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And I think that's something that everyone can do, whether you're super familiar with the issue of food insecurity or not, just acknowledging that it is a real thing and that we have an obligation as a I think, as a country to just make sure folks have that basic need supported and covered.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So those are the big ones. And, you know, there's always an opportunity to expand SNAP, especially make it, you know, increase the minimum benefits. Right. All of those things. Hard to do politically. SNAP is part of the farm bill and the farm bill tends to be the piece of congressional legislation that never gets done on time. So that seems to be on track to also be true to this coming farm bill.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And it tends to be defined by someone who is not sure where their next meal is coming from at least a couple times a week. So you're just not sure you might find it. You might be able to cut back or go to somebody else's house. Everyone's kind of trying to make ends meet in different ways. But it's that sense of unsureness, that insecurity where you're
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, so the Minnesota Food Helpline has a great find help map. And you can enter your zip code and it will give you lots of different resources from farmers markets to food shelves to the county office to get assistance with a SNAP application. So that's a really great resource if people are looking for somewhere in their local community they can go.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And then the other thing I would say is people, all those groups, including the food group, are also always looking for volunteers. So there might be times you need to know how to get help for either yourself or for someone or that you want to engage in volunteering.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Because the truth is, this whole kind of system really operates off of volunteers pitching in and helping make the services all be available.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, I think food help is an option. I think, you know, in Minnesota, we've got the Minnesota Food Helpline. So that's both online. But then if you call, someone will walk you through all these resources. I think many county offices, right, will walk you through services, sometimes United Way. in different communities has a hotline.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So it really is kind of finding that social service kind of navigator connector because it is overwhelming. And, you know, I think the other thing to remember is for some people, it's just a really brief moment in time that they're needing help, right? So then you might be going to go to a couple of food shelves or, you know, a hot meal program.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
For other people, it's really a change in their life that's going to probably get them into a
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
qualifying for for a lot of different social programs and then again you want someone to help you walk walk through that whole process and and both things are totally fine and there's help uh kind of for any different situation people find themselves in that's great i thank you so much you're um you know when you when you listen to you can you can tell the um the passions
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
not sure if you're going to get the nutrition that you or your family needs. And it's quite prevalent. In Minnesota, it's about one in 10 or one in 11. Again, the numbers are always changing. At the height of kind of some of the pandemic, it was one in eight folks was experiencing food insecurity. So it really is significant. But to the point you raised earlier, it's not always visible.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And I think that is the thing that sometimes people don't realize is Nobody, a lot of people aren't going to publicize the fact that they're maybe one of the parents is skipping meals so the kids have enough to eat or, you know, all sorts of things people are doing. It's not always talked about. There can still be a lot of stigma around it.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But with the price of groceries, having done what it's done for the past couple of years, there's just a lot of folks who are not able to get all the food they need for the month.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, I mean, great, great question. I'm not an expert on that. I know USDA has different ways that they do it. I do know that a lot of healthcare institutions now ask food insecurity screening questions. So there are two questions that have kind of been validated that if you ask these two questions, you'll get a real sense of of folks who are experiencing food insecurity.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so as that kind of becomes known as one of the social drivers of health, more and more health care providers are asking those questions for patients, knowing that if they're going to prescribe a patient medicine but that person doesn't have access to food, it's not even going to solve the problem.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So I would say there's a lot more research happening on the health care side of things than there has been in the past. Um, but then there's also other ways to look at it, whether it be snap enrollment rates or, you know, kind of income levels at a census, uh, you know, census track level, those kinds of things too.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yes, so like a lot of things I think in that kind of social drivers of health field there's a lot that's kind of still emergent so there's a wide variety of things that happen, but yeah The goal is to do a warm handoff referral right and so that could either happen at the really local community level so.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
You know, if you're going to a clinic in South Minneapolis, they might refer you to the nearest food shelf that serves that neighborhood. Or they may refer you to a group like ours. We coordinate the Minnesota Food Helpline. And so we have a statewide kind of access to resources where we can do closed loop referrals with health care providers and feed that data back.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So there's all sorts of different groups kind of trying to solve that problem. And, you know, the thing that's challenging is we've seen visits to food shelves in Minnesota really skyrocket these past couple of years. So in 2023, we had seven and a half million visits to food shelves in the state.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
That was up two million visits from 2022. So this idea of while we want to get everyone connected to resources, there's also this question of how do we sustain the resources at the local level, too?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah, well, I am a passionate consumer of food. So Clarence, as you described your favorite food being seafood, I can relate. I really like to eat food and cook food. And food in my family was always a way that people kind of celebrated together, right? Getting to choose what was for dinner meant something. It was special. It was the way we came together.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
It's also a way that I grew up showing we cared for people, right? Whether someone was struggling, you had them over for dinner, right? That food has this kind of magic power to connect us, to create community, to create that feeling of belonging. And so I've always had that.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And then after I graduated from college, I was pretty clear I wanted to get into the nonprofit sector and address some kind of social issue that was just not as, it wasn't right, right? So I was at that time in my life, I could get fired up about a lot of things, right? Whether it was educational inequity or housing policy or all sorts of things, right?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
But it just so ended up that my very first job out of college was at the food group. And so I worked in a variety of different roles there in our programming. And I think the piece that has kept me in this work is food feels quite solvable. There's a lot of things in the injustice in our society that feel really kind of intractable or complicated. Food to me feels quite solvable.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
We have enough resources. And if we can get the right people at the table, we really can make progress. And so that sense of possibility keeps me in the work.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yeah. Well, the first group of the most right people are folks who are experiencing food insecurity, folks for whom food is not accessible in the way that, at least at the food group, we believe it should be. We believe that food is a human right. Everyone should have access to it. And that is just not the reality for many, many folks.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And so for us, really understanding how can we engage those folks and listen carefully to the experiences that they're having and not make assumptions about it. I think it's so easy to make assumptions. I also think that kind of the charitable food system, how it was designed kind of as it rose up in the 80s to address food insecurity.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
It really has a kind of that old school charity mindset, right? Where people who have more are doing good to those who have less. And while there's some things about that that are okay, I think it's really trying to get more to the heart of the issue about how do people want to receive food? Where should it be accessed?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Where are the trusted places in the community that people can feel empowered and have dignity accessing that food? And so- For me, that is a huge group that historically has been left out of some of the problem solving in this space. That's really, really critical. And then building on that, it's a lot of partnerships.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
It's partnerships with nonprofits, partnerships with government organizations, right? Thinking about the federal programs, the state programs, but then it's also, you know, corporate partners, right? whether they're funding the work or even thinking about grocery stores and grocery store access. Right. You have a neighborhood where there is no grocery store.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
You're going to have higher rates of food insecurity. And so there's just a lot of different sectors that need to solve it together.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
It's been really interesting because the COVID pandemic put a spotlight on food insecurity in a really interesting way. And so while needs certainly went up, the other thing that happened in kind of 2020, 2021 is there were a lot of emergency relief programs that were established.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So whether it were things like the child income tax credit, or there was a pandemic emergency SNAP, where the minimum SNAP, benefit SNAP, which used to be called food support, right, food stamps, that really increased. And so while things were tough in 2020 and 2021, there were tremendous federal support programs that really buffered a lot of low-income households.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
And many of those expired in the end of 2022. And so what we saw was almost kind of, some people even called it a hunger cliff, right? Where all these programs started to expire kind of one after the other. And the thing that is often, I think, a little bit of a misconception about food insecurity is sometimes people think it's for folks who don't have jobs, right? right?
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
So that if you're experiencing food insecurity, you must not be working. And what's actually very, very common is for households to have two working people, right? But not having enough because of the pressures of rent, of transportation, of healthcare costs, right? And so... This idea that, oh, there's low unemployment, it must be that there is not food insecurity as an issue.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
That's a common linkage people make. But the wage growth just has not been there for folks who are working minimum wage jobs to be able to afford the foods that they need to get through.
Health Chatter
Food Insecurity
Yes, that is the question. And so I think one thing that's really positive, especially if we zoom into kind of the Minnesota situation, is in the last legislative session, there were some really big policy wins that have good impacts on these issues. So things like we do now have a statewide child income tax credit.