27 | Child Food Insecurity and Home Delivered Food Boxes
b'The federal government funds a variety of national nutrition programs to combat hunger among children and families, and yet roughly 37 million Americans were food insecure in 2018, and 6 million of them were children, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). \\n\\nIn some parts of the country, food insecurity is made worse by a lack of accessible and affordable options. That is, if you live in a rural area with limited public transportation and no major supermarkets nearby, you may rely on smaller retailers with limited produce, higher prices, and lower quality food compared with a larger store that is farther away. \\n\\nOn this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about a demonstration supported by a federal grant that used home-delivered boxes packed with fruit, vegetables, and other shelf-stable foods selected by registered dieticians to address food insecurity among children in Chickasaw Nation territory in rural Oklahoma.\\n\\nOur guest is Phil Gleason, a senior fellow at Mathematica, who helped evaluate the demonstration for the Food and Nutrition Service at the USDA. Phil and I spoke in Denver shortly before he presented findings from the evaluation at a 2019 fall research conference hosted by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, better known by the acronym, APPAM. \\n\\nThe full report that Phil and his Mathematica colleagues submitted to the USDA is available here: https://www.mathematica.org/our-publications-and-findings/publications/evaluation-of-demonstration-projects-to-end-childhood-hunger-edech-the-chickasaw-nation\\n\\nRead an abridged and edited Q&A blog based on our conversation here: mathematica-mpr.com/commentary/home-delivered-food-boxes-reduced-food-insecurity-among-adults-but-not-children'