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Food Bank Asks: On a Scale of 1-to-3, How Nutritious is that Donation?

Second Harvest Food Bank is the largest in Louisiana, serving over 200,000 people each year. Three quarters of clients at the pantries Second Harvest supplies say they regularly rely on the food they get there to make ends meet. In the same survey, over a third of pantry clients say they have a family member with diabetes. So Second Harvest is starting to pay closer attention to the nutrition of the food they distribute.

 

Gail Murphy runs the food pantry at Love in Action Outreach in New Orleans East, supplied by Second Harvest.

"We get a lot of canned vegetables. I can tell my clients 'you know it’s really healthy if you would drain and maybe rinse the salt off of the peas on the green beans,'" Murphy said.

Kate McDonald at Second Harvest Food Bank says they’re stuck with whatever local grocery stores and distributors give them.

 

"It’s things like leftover Halloween candy. You know, it’s tricky because as a food bank we can’t say and we will never say no to things that people want to give us," McDonald said.

Food banks might not be able to turn donations away. But to encourage distributors to donate healthier foods, come January, Second Harvest will start taking stock of  the nutritional value of the food they give out. Foods will be rated 1-3. So, a one food would be a protein, a low-fat dairy, or fresh produce.

"A two food is something maybe like Jiff peanut butter. Because peanut butter has a lot of protein but it also has a high fat content and can have a lot of added sugars," McDonald said.

The three foods are chips, junk food and that Halloween candy.

Even if you can get healthy foods in the bank, shoppers may not choose them. But Second Harvest and its pantries are already on it. They offer cooking classes, and lead clients on nutrition tours of grocery stores.  Their educators advise clients on a tour to eat half their diet in whole grains.

"It took me a while to get into brown rice, but it’s better for you.  And you get somebody that don’t want it, you can slip it on em;  just put some red beans on they’ll never know," said food pantry client Comazell Bickman.

 

Copyright 2014 WRKF

Nina Feldman