Tag Archives: food insecurity

Lessons from the Food Pantry

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Shortly before winter break, our daughter came home from elementary school with materials she received during an educational event regarding a local food pantry. While I look through everything she brings home, I was particularly curious about these materials because issues of community nutrition have long been important to me. On one hand, I was glad she learned that food insecurity exists and that society has resources in place to assist people who are struggling, but on the other hand, I had some concerns about specific messages contained in the materials. 

By way of background, I have taken an interest in community nutrition ever since I was given an eye-opening homework assignment a couple of decades ago. My professor tasked me with going to the grocery store to research prices and to use the information to design a diet that would nutritionally satisfy the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet while also financially satisfying the Thrifty Food Plan’s allowance of $4.37 per day. Unfortunately, I failed, as the closest I could come was $4.77 per day, still $0.40 over budget. If I could not do it despite my nutrition knowledge and mathematics degree, then how is someone with less education in such matters supposed to figure it out?

The assignment helped me to appreciate the impacts that financial limitations and food availability can have on health. The simple truth that people can only buy what they can afford and is accessible to them sounds so obvious now, but it took studying community nutrition for me to really get it. When I rode my bicycle from Seattle to Boston that summer, I made a point to visit the grocery stores on the Native American reservations that I passed through because I wanted to understand the options available to the residents of these relatively isolated communities.

During my dietetic internship in Boston, I spent time working on a roving healthcare van that stopped in some of the more impoverished areas of the city. We gave out condoms, took blood pressure readings, performed blood sugar checks, and answered nutrition questions for anybody who visited. During our breaks, my preceptor took me around the neighborhoods to visit restaurants, food pantries, and grocery stores. We talked with some of the regulars who relied on the pantries, and I was struck by the realization that food insecurity is not some abstract notion in textbooks or a relic of a bygone era, but rather a present challenge for many people in our own city. Many years later, I remain conscious of this reality, and I was glad to hear that our daughter’s class learned about what I believe is an important topic.

Unfortunately, some of the materials she received reinforce a dichotomous view of food that is damaging, oversimplified, and – quite honestly – unnecessary. For example, one exercise in a workbook invited her to take stickers of various foods and to sort them into “healthy food” and “junk food” bins. Another exercise asked her to draw a picture of a “healthy” meal. 

The food pantry’s materials reflect how our society generally views and talks about food, but while this kind of language is common, it is also problematic. These kinds of dichotomies warp how kids see food and set them up for potential issues as evidenced by the large number of patients who can trace their disorders back to something like this. 

How “healthy” a given food is depends on context. Bananas are commonly known as being a significant source of potassium, which might make them helpful for somebody with hypertension, but perhaps less helpful for someone with renal disease, so onto which bin should my daughter affix a banana sticker? Because a myriad of factors – medical, cultural, personal, social, financial, etc. – influence our eating, absolute claims about any particular food are going to apply to some individuals while completely missing the boat for others.

Besides, while food pantries are essential, teaching nutrition to school children seems like an unnecessary and sabotaging step towards fulfilling their mission. Imagine the sad irony of being a kid in class whose family struggles to make ends meet and being told by a food pantry – maybe even the very food pantry that you and your family rely on – that a food you and your family utilize to survive belongs in the “junk food” bin. How is that child going to feel, and what are they going to do, next time their family serves a meal or snack featuring that food?

So I reached out to the food pantry in question and communicated my concerns. As a preliminary step, I emailed our daughter’s teacher. She shared my concerns and strongly encouraged me to directly contact the food pantry in question, which I did. In my message to them, I explained that I was neither angry nor was I judging them, but rather I was reaching out in the spirit of constructive criticism and a willingness to help. To their credit, they responded quickly and with an open mind. They requested that we schedule a time to talk so they can learn more. Similarly, I hope our conversation will help me to better understand what they are trying to achieve by their inclusion of nutrition talk in their student materials. Perhaps we can devise a plan together to reach those same goals in a way that mitigates the risk of inadvertent harm.

The Privilege of Intuitive Eating

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While my time working in food service was mostly limited to academic teaching restaurants and hospital cafeterias, I learned that some businesses monitor the food that customers leave on their plates and interpret the observations as feedback for what the patrons thought of their orders. The less food remaining, the more the customers enjoyed it, is the general theory. This summer, I thought about that each afternoon as we opened our daughter’s backpack to see what portions of her snacks and lunches returned home from camp unconsumed.

We packed her an array of snack options each day without any expectation that she would eat them all, but we wanted her to have choices so she could select something that sounded good to her. Sure enough, each day she ate at least one of the snacks, but lunches were a different story. Providing multiple snack options was easy because they were all shelf-stable items that required no preparation; if she did not feel like eating a particular snack one day, it could stay in her bag until a different day when she did. However, the lunch options she said she wanted were perishable and took time to prepare, so sending her off to camp each day with multiple lunch choices was impractical. Thus, when a lunch returned largely uneaten, that got our attention because it meant she did not have much of a meal. 

If she just was not hungry at lunchtime, that would be fine, but our concern was the possibility that she was hungry but did not want the packed food. So we tried a bunch of lunch options, all of which she said she wanted, only to see them return home virtually or literally untouched. Eventually, I realized and accepted that she simply was not very hungry come lunchtime, and it became sort of humorous that she would request a specific lunch option only to not eat it.

As I chuckled at her uneaten food, I reminded myself of our luck and good fortune, and how being able to practice intuitive eating is a privilege. We did not mind if food came back uneaten and went down the garbage disposal, but what if that was the extent of the food that we could afford, and the choice was either to eat it or go hungry? Over the years, I have met people in our community who experience food insecurity, kids who either eat their free school-supplied breakfasts and lunches or have nothing all day, and families who accept what the food pantries have to offer or deal with barren kitchens.

Intuitive eating is embedded with privilege. Going through the matching process to choose one food over others requires having options available. Choosing when to eat necessitates having enough autonomy to be able to make such a decision. Ceasing to eat when comfortably full demands confidence that another opportunity to eat will arise again soon. Any of these privileges go out the window, and so does intuitive eating, at least to an extent.

However, subtle opportunities might still exist to utilize our intuition even in times when privilege is sparse. Buying dried legumes in bulk can be a thrifty way of obtaining protein, and with the prices of each bean being so similar to each other, we could choose the one that we most enjoy. A small array of cheap spices can impart somewhat different flavors on the same food for more variety in tastes. Free school meals include choices, such as chocolate or unflavored milk, and possibly different entree options. Foods that are shelf stable or at least function well as leftovers can be finished later, thus reducing the pressure to eat past the point of comfortable fullness.

The extent to which each of us practices intuitive eating is based at least in part on our circumstances. The laugh I got out of seeing our daughter’s uneaten lunches come home each day was a privileged reaction, and someone in different shoes might understandably have a very different reaction.