By Stephanie Tyler Smith with contributions by Jessica Cantin

Before joining Food For Free, I spent several years managing the Beverly Bootstraps food pantry on Boston’s North Shore. At the time, I was overseeing all pantry operations and food acquisition processes and it was a continual challenge to bring in more fresh produce. 

While donors regularly organized food drives – donating items like mac n’ cheese, canned beans, and shelf-stable products – what our pantry needed most was fresh food. During every single distribution, we were constantly restocking our produce case. Across cultures, ages, and backgrounds, people gravitated toward fresh fruits and vegetables.

We built partnerships with local growers and grocery stores to increase our fresh food offerings, but watching that produce case empty so quickly raised a lot of questions for me about how our food access system actually worked. 

Why had we normalized a hunger relief model so heavily centered on shelf-stable, ultra-processed foods when people were clearly telling us what they wanted and needed: fresh, nutritious and minimally processed foods to feed themselves and their families?

Food Insecurity vs. Nutrition Insecurity 

In hunger relief work, we often focus on food insecurity, which is defined as the lack of consistent access to enough food. Today, I want to talk about nutrition insecurity, a term increasingly used in public health and policy circles that goes a step further. Nutrition insecurity means not having reliable access to the kinds of foods that support long-term health: fresh produce, whole grains, and nutritious meals that help people thrive. 

In other words: Food insecurity is about calories. Nutrition insecurity is about what is actually good for your health. 

You can technically have enough food and still lack consistent access to the fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins that support long-term physical and cognitive health. This distinction makes a huge difference over the course of a person’s lifespan.

According to the 2026 Statewide Food Access Report from the Greater Boston Food Bank, a record 40% of Massachusetts households are food insecure – that’s more than double what it was in 2019. While these numbers highlight challenges created by the increased cost of food, they also point to something deeper: uneven access to nutritious food.

Why Nutrition Matters Across the Lifespan 

Limited access to nutritious food has lasting effects that build over time. 

• In early childhood, inadequate access to nutritious food is associated with developmental delays and behavioral challenges.
• Among school-aged children and adolescents, food insecurity is linked to worse academic performance and negative cognitive impacts.
• In adults, both nutrition and food insecurity contribute to higher risks of diet-related diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular conditions.
• Among older adults, limited access to high-quality food is associated with lower overall diet quality and increased health vulnerability.

This is not just about hunger. It is about health equity. 

If we accept that nutrition insecurity drives lifelong health disparities, then hunger relief organizations, and we, as a community, have a responsibility to evolve to meet the needs of those we serve.

We should aim to provide nutrition justice, which means ensuring equitable access to healthy, culturally responsive food –  not just as an act of charity, but as foundational infrastructure for community well-being. This shift is already happening in meaningful ways across many hunger relief organizations, but there is still so much more to do.

What Nutrition Justice Looks Like in Practice 

At Food For Free, we practice nutrition justice every day. Our Just Eats program, and its distribution at Fresh Pond Apartments in Cambridge, is just one example. This program developed organically through our partnership with Community Charter School of Cambridge, as many of their students and families live at Fresh Pond in an area with limited food access options. 

Ted Hirsch, the student family liaison who is engrained in the school culture, worked with us several years ago to begin food distributions, full of produce and pantry staples, to this community. To this day, we work closely with Ted to distribute 120 Just Eats boxes twice a month to Fresh Pond. On distribution days, neighbors from all walks of life gather to pick up boxes full of produce, exchange recipes, share food, and build community.

Another program that contributes meaningfully to nutrition justice is School Markets. These free, monthly pop-up markets bring farmers market-style food directly to schools in Cambridge and Somerville, reducing barriers to food access like transportation, time constraints, and stigma. 

School Markets are run in partnership with student family liaisons at each school, providing the community with a trusted, in-person resource who knows each student and family by name, and who can often connect families with other resources they may need through interactions at the markets. At each School Market, Food For Free tailors its food choices to be culturally responsive to the specific needs of the populations served. 

Somerville student family liaison, Lee-Anne King, says it best: “Families can choose the foods that work best for them, including fresh produce, pantry staples, and culturally diverse foods that reflect the many communities we serve. One of my favorite parts of the market is seeing the connections that happen there. This week, we had pineapples, and students walking by were excited to see them. At another market, families shared recipes and cooking tips for chayote, encouraging others to try something new.” 

Produce is consistently in high demand at our markets, resulting in little leftover inventory, whereas shelf-stable items are regularly passed over by attendees. Fresh produce is the cornerstone of School Markets, bringing community connection and a focus on health to the forefront of our efforts. 

Looking Beyond Hunger 

Unfortunately, nutrition insecurity doesn’t reset at the start of each life stage. Its impacts stay with us throughout one’s lifespan. In response, we, as a community, must tailor our approaches to meet an individual’s food needs at all of life’s stages. But in an under-resourced “emergency food system”, achieving this can be challenging. The cumulative effect of these impacts is not just individual hardship – it is systemic inequity. 

Hunger relief organizations cannot solve structural inequity all at once, especially at this moment in time in our country. What we can do is:

• prioritize nutritious and culturally relevant foods
• design programs that put health and nutrition first 
• align food access work with public health and policy strategy
• center lived experience in program design

Last November, when SNAP cuts were winding their way through our communities, there were so many social media posts and calls-to-action to collect food, just to fill bellies. But we know that nutrition security is about so much more than just meeting basic needs. When we center the compounding health impacts of food and nutrition insecurity in the conversation, we can change a well-intended narrative from helping our communities survive, to giving neighbors the food they need to thrive. At Food For Free, we believe access to nutritious food is essential to community health and dignity. Through partnerships and community-centered programs, we will continue working toward a future where everyone has access not just to enough food, but to the fresh, nourishing food they deserve.

You can join us in this partnership in many different ways: volunteer with us, donate, follow us on social media, and come to our events. The heart of food is nourishment and connection; let’s change the narrative for our neighbors and do this work together.