When medically tailored meals got real for me
When my friend asked if I wanted to join her volunteer group working in a New York City charity kitchen (with promise of brunch afterwards!), I jumped at the chance for a new adventure.
Little did I realize I dropped myself right in the middle of the cover story I wrote for the January-February issue of PMG magazine.
The “Let’s Get Medical: Prescribing Produce” feature detailed what medically tailored meals are and how these programs, plus insurer-paid produce prescriptions, are an opportunity for retailers, wholesalers and suppliers to find a new market for their products. It’s an update on the food as medicine movement, and even a focus of one of the education sessions at International Fresh Produce Association’s June 7-8 Retail Conference in the Chicago area.
A couple weeks after I signed up for the Manhattan volunteer session, I found myself sitting in the God’s Love We Deliver orientation room, my hair wrapped in a hairnet, white apron strapped on, watching a video that brought tears to my eyes. The clients were sick — really sick. And these meals, delivered to their door, meant they would eat more than once a day. And on their birthday, they receive a personalized cake, a heart-warming touch many hadn’t enjoyed in years.
Related: How retailers are responding to the growing medical market
This multilevel operation was in New York’s fashionable SoHo neighborhood, around the corner from the famed Dominique Ansel Bakery (the Cronut inventor) and Ladurée cake shop (with trés chic macarons).
The mission of God’s Love We Deliver is to improve the health and well-being of adults and children living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other serious illnesses by alleviating hunger and malnutrition.
More than 17,000 volunteers a year, like me, prepare and deliver more than 13,000 nutritious, high-quality meals each weekday to people who, because of their illness, are unable to provide or prepare meals for themselves. Powered by 10 registered dietitian nutritionists who create the recipes, the nonsectarian organization also provides illness-specific nutrition education and counseling to clients, families, care providers and other service organizations. All the services are provided free to clients without regard to income.
People who are very sick don’t just need food, but individually tailored meals that consider the many challenges facing someone with a serious illness.
Research nationwide has proven that this act of tailoring each meal to meet a client’s specific medical diagnosis works. The approach not only improves a client’s health outcomes, but also improves medication adherence, and it keeps clients out of the hospital and in their homes.
Project Open Hand, a similar medically tailored meal agency in San Francisco, conducted a study with University of California San Francisco that showed clear results. For clients with Type 2 diabetes and HIV, there was a 63% reduction in hospitalizations, 50% increase in medication adherence and 58% decrease in client emergency room visits.
While I scooped upstate New York-grown apple slices into aluminum pans for French toast in an assembly line, I thought of these people. I thought of a couple of my own family members with chronic, serious illness that could be in tough situations in the future.
Related: How retailers can implement Food as Medicine in 2023
I thought of how beggars can, indeed, be choosers, and there’s dignity in that.
Scooping for the 89th time from my third huge plastic bin, I thought of how these apples have the power to help improve the quality of real people’s lives.
We all want quality in our food, and in our lives. And our fresh produce industry is integral to making these medically tailored meals that help our country’s most vulnerable people — whose treatment is a marker of what makes us civilized.
