Help is on the Way for Senior Food Insecurity
Money has just arrived to help Michigan seniors/older adults, facing food insecurity, and it couldn t come at a better time.
The Food Bank Council of Michigan – in partnership with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services – recently received a Feeding America Boundless Collaborations grant to support a statewide grocery delivery program for older adults facing food insecurity.
Fox17 reported that senior food insecurity became more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, as older adults were particularly vulnerable to the virus, unable to leave their homes and were also left without support services like the ability to get meals.
Partnership aims to tackle food insecurity among seniors through grocery deliveries
Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
David Zalubowski/AP
A shopper surveys the overflowing selection of packaged meat in a grocery early Monday, April 27, 2020, in southeast Denver. With closures in meat processing plants across the country because of the spread of the new coronavirus among workers, food analysts are forecasting shortages of beef, pork and poultry on the shelves of the country s supermarkets in the days ahead. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
and last updated 2021-06-09 10:29:50-04
LANSING, Mich. â The Food Bank Council of Michigan â in partnership with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services â recently received a Feeding America Boundless Collaborations grant to support a statewide grocery delivery program for older adults facing food insecurity.
The Farmers to Families program was designed and implemented as a temporary effort to respond to severe market disruption caused by a global pandemic, including the collapse of food service, largescale food loss and waste, and curtailed export markets in the early stages of the pandemic, Matt Herrick, USDA spokesman told the Free Press in an email.
But according to Herrick, program challenges included that distributing the food boxes wasn t based on need and prices ranged greatly, from $28 to $105 per box.
Other challenges the USDA listed that the program faced:
Data on which counties received food boxes wasn t captured and as many as 900 counties didn t receive food from the program.
USDA’s temporary Farmers to Families Food Box program will end after its expiration at the end of May when the funding will sunset for the food response program crafted immediately following the pandemic’s onset in the spring of 2020.
Through the program, USDA contractors delivered 157,152,030 of fresh produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats through the food boxes. The agency spent $4 billion on the food box program in 2020.
“The food box program was designed and implemented as a temporary effort to respond to market disruption caused by a global pandemic. While it did help respond to severe market disruption caused by the collapse of food service in the early stages of the pandemic, it had a number of significant challenges along the way,” according to a USDA spokesperson.
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