Defining food as medicine, Duke Health, community partners address food insecurity in Durham, Wake counties

More than 18 million Americans live in low-income communities that don’t have easy access to grocery markets, data shows. Food insecurity continues affecting people all over, including residents of the Triangle.

About one out of every ten people living in Wake and Durham counties is food insecure, according to a report from Duke Health. To combat the issue, they're partnering with organizations in both counties to address those concerns, looking at food as medicine.

"Food is universal for what everyone needs," said Peter Skillern, the CEO of Reinvestment Partners. "There is the immediacy of now when one is hungry."

Skillern walked WRAL News around the Farmer Foodshare and Inter-faith Food Shuttle's Geer Street Learning Garden. Those are two places in Durham that are trying to provide nutritious food to residents by providing fresh produce, grown in North Carolina, to those who lack access to it.

The area where these food ecosystem nonprofits are located is a food desert, USDA data reveals. One out of every five people in this census tract live below the federal poverty level, and the closest major super market is over half a mile away.

"Being food insecure is often related to housing insecurity which is really related to being economically insecure," said Skillern.

Many of health outcomes in life are linked to where we live. More than 150,000 people in both counties reside in areas that are low-income with low access to supermarkets, according to USDA data. The lack of access to nutritious food has impacts on health outcomes, research shows. That’s why Duke Health is getting involved. In 2019 they began screening patients for unmet health related social needs. Food insecurity sits at the top of the list, Debra Clark Jones told WRAL News.

The organizers say there is an urgency of getting this done right now because the food we’re feeding our residents affects the futures of our cities.

"We can't separate these unmet social needs from healthy living and academic performance, employment performance," said Clark Jones, the associate vice president for community health with Duke Health. "It's all interrelated. We have to focus on the systemic causes of the issues, the symptoms that we're seeing in our community, in order to see improvement."