Appetites: Food truck helps keep Minnesota kids fed when school is out

A no-cost meal program allows high-poverty schools to offer all enrolled students free lunch, which consequently addresses child nutrition problems and meal debt. The program, however, has pivoted and expanded during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure that schools can still act as a food distribution hub.

Individuals, churches, and nonprofits are joining together in North Carolina's food deserts to help address childhood hunger throughout the state. In one particularly food-insecure county, an alliance between three community churches as well as pop-up markets has helped to more equitably distribute produce to neighborhoods and communities where resources are scarce.

Mobile delivery increases the accessibility of summer meal programs for children who rely on food assistance during the school year. Across the country, multiple initiatives by local governments, schools, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations are working to extend participation in summer meal programs. Many of these programs receive support from the USDA, but additional grants have allowed organizations to extend their range of delivery, as have partnerships with food trucks and transportation services.

Funded by a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation, several nonprofits are working to fill the summer food security gap for children who rely on school meals. Several groups, including Pine River Shares and Friends with Food, have partnered with the Education Literacy Health and Inspiration Community Center to provide free lunches to needy schoolchildren. When the school district ceased operating the meal program, ELHI took over the operations, serving the children of families who already come to the center for other activities.

People living in food deserts have very limited access to healthy food, prompting 'Green Carts' (street vendors with vegetables and fruits) and other mobile markets to pop up. Critically important to the success of these markets is their provision of Electronic Benefits Transfer machines to allow customers to pay with their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamps.

To combat food insecurity, the nonprofit Little Tokyo Senior Nutrition Services delivers free, nutritious meals to Japanese seniors in local residential communities, Boyle Heights, and East Los Angeles.

Bakers in Nigeria make bread with orange-fleshed sweet potatoes to help offset the growing cost of producing bread with just wheat flour.

The Women’s Collective is a nonprofit that works with more than 10,000 subsistence farmers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to promote food security using millets, a crop resilient to drought and climate change. For Pavitra, one of those farmers, she began cultivating the ancient grains in 2015 and now has more than enough food to feed her family year-round. However, there’s a lack of public investment in millet production and machinery. And there’s no unified effort to create demand for millets: Some state governments lead the charge and in other states, it’s led by grassroots organizations.

A nongovernmental organization, Sanku, invented a new technology that allows a machine to mix in the right amount of basic nutrients into flour that children and others need. By working directly with the millers and creating a sustainable business model, nearly 100 schools were provided fortified flour to keep its students healthy.

Pennsylvania’s WIC program, offering people experiencing economic hardship food stipends, is switching from paper checks to plastic cards. The seemingly small change will have a huge effect on how the benefits are used, allowing participants to be more flexible in where and how they spend the money. Such flexibility means more of an opportunity to buy healthier food and to use the entire stipend across a month, rather than having to spend it all in one place at one time.