An Athens collaboration to improve the lifestyle and well being of local food pantry patrons through education and accessibility champions the importance of eating and distributing fresh produce.
In March 2012, Live Healthy Appalachia, the Athens County Health Department, Community Food Initiatives and Rural Action teamed up to train food pantry coordinators on how and where to get fresh produce, how to store it and promote it to patrons, said Louise DiLullo, executive director of Live Healthy Appalachia.
A key component of the Food Pantry Project is education.
“You can give people some food that they are not familiar with, and even if they are hungry, they won’t eat it,” DiLullo said. “It’s new to them, and they don’t know what to do with it, so they won’t even try it.”
The Farm to Table program was born in order to familiarize patrons with the healthier options.
Using a grant from the Athens Foundation, the collaboration devised an education program to reach food pantries in Nelsonville, Bishopville and Chauncey, said Laura Ford, an Ohio University medical student and Farm to Table coordinator and educator.
The Food Pantry Project and its Farm to Tables classes promote a plant-based, whole foods diet, making it a modified version of Live Healthy Appalachia’s Complete Healthy Improvement Program, Ford said. The difference is that while CHIP costs $599, Farm to Table demanded only that participants commit to three-hour education sessions on four consecutive Saturdays.
Participants received a box of food every Saturday for a month, as well as a kitchen appliance of their choice, Ford said. They also went through a basic preliminary health screening.
The Farm to Table Healthy Eating and Cooking Workshop included topics such as how food affects health, how to stretch your food dollar, cooking with beans and kitchen equipment. A cooking demo preceded lunch, when the group would eat what they made.
“Our message was never ‘don’t eat meat or dairy,’ ” Ford said. “It was ‘eat more of this or this.’ ”
For example, she would introduce patrons to soy or almond milk to replace dairy milk or show them how to make pasta from a spaghetti squash rather than traditional noodles.
Jenny Cantor attended a series of Farm to Table workshops in Bishopville. She learned, among other things, that a smoothie made with spinach could taste good.
“It’s hard, once you set a routine of eating, to knock out the sweets and stuff,” Cantor said. “It’s very hard, because you have to process your whole way of thinking, and then to get your body not to want to eat the regular food.”
Once an avid consumer of processed foods, Cantor said she is now cognizant of sodium content and cooks with a lot of whole grains.
af116210@ohiou.edu
