According to The Greater Boston Food Bank, 1 in 8 individuals are food insecure in Eastern Massachusetts. Lacking access to nutritious food significantly impacts both mental and physical health. There is a vast need for food, with many waiting in long lines to have enough to eat. But imagine how much more difficult it is to attain nutritious food if you, or a family member, have a dietary restriction or food allergy.
The communities we serve are diverse. Food insecure individuals and families in Massachusetts are not homogenous. At Food For Free, our mission to is to make healthy, fresh, delicious food accessible to all regardless of age, income or ability. We also want to ensure that access to food is culturally appropriate and do our best to address dietary restrictions, such as a nut or gluten allergy.
It was with this mission in mind, that Emma Stellman, Program Manager, recently instituted changes to our Home Delivery boxes. Home Delivery brings food to low-income Cambridge residents who are unable to access traditional food pantries due to illness, disability, or COVID-19 risk. Currently, this program delivers groceries to 410 residents. When Emma started managing the Home Delivery Program, which has more than doubled in size over the last year, she noticed that some clients had listed dietary preferences, such as, vegetarian. At that time, due to the size of the program, there wasn’t a formal process in place to identify special diet preferences and address these in our deliveries. She realized that boxes might be going out to vegetarians with a meat protein included in the delivery. “We get food to people but we also focus on reducing food waste as an organization, this felt like a solvable issue,” Emma said.
Emma started to touch base with clients about special diet preferences and soon added questions to our new Home Delivery enrollment form to address preferences such as, vegan, vegetarian, gluten free or nut free. Now, each client is surveyed and special diet preferences are identified upon entry. As a result, we are able to offer special diet Home Delivery boxes to meet a variety of requests. If a client has a dietary health concern we cannot address, we refer them to organizations such as Community Servings, who can provide food customized for these more nuanced, medical-diet needs.
Just last week, our special diet boxes included the following: 2 gluten free, 3 gluten free vegetarian, 5 no pork, 2 nut allergy, 1 vegan and 17 vegetarian boxes. We hope that providing these special diet boxes helps us better serve our diverse community, reduce food waste and improve access to healthy food for all people.
