Access to healthy food isn’t as universal as running down to corner Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s for 23.5 million Americans. The 23.5 millions Americans who live in food deserts are prone to unhealthy diets out of necessity not choice. Being trapped in a food desert is a bad enough predicament on its own. It is compounded by the fact that 46.5 million of our fellow Americans rely on food stamps to help feed their families. Too many Americans on food stamps have no access to healthy food besides online purchase and delivery, which they are barred from utilizing. Thrive Market wants that changed and they’ve teamed up with some big names to make that change a reality.
Russell Simmons is leading the charge to get you to sign Thrive Market’s Thrive Action petition to lobby the USDA to allow access to online shopping for at risk families. According to Thrive Market “76 percent of households that receive food stamp (SNAP) benefits include a child, or an elderly or disabled person—people who aren’t even eligible for employment.” Providing access to healthy food is crucial to these people’s well-being and it is a pretty easy logic that that food should be good for them.
Overall, the food stamp program is a supplementary course to help people fill in the gaps in their budgets, rarely does it provide enough for everything a family will need for a full cart of groceries as Thrive Action notes on their website: “The average monthly benefit is $133.85 per person, or less than $1.50 per meal, per person.” That is a small amount to build a diet upon. That makes access to healthy food a crucial element.
Thrive Market is going before the US Congress and the White House in July to plead their case and ask that food stamps be allowed for online shopping as soon as possible. The USDA has tried several options to allow food stamp recipients access to healthier food, even trying to regulate convenience stores to stock healthy snacks with little success. Recently they launched a pilot program to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets (pending the vendor’s application). The USDA is trending hard towards finding solutions to the USA’s continued obesity epidemic amongst the poorest of us. An epidemic that costs $698 billion a year in diabetes and heart disease treatment alone. The USDA has announced that it will start looking into the possibility of implementing a pilot program in 2017.
If helping a family eat a better, healthier meal is something you’d like to support, sign Thrive Market’s petition at ThriveAction.com.
(via Quartz)
