Oklahoma Food Facts

I know what you are thinking, another post about food.  But, it is important to continue discussing the food crisis in Oklahoma.  Since I am a numbers person, I thought I would share some statistics about hunger in Oklahoma. According to Oklahoma Food Bank Network: According to the USDA, Oklahoma ranks 8th in the nation in the [...]

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Summer Food Programs

Ah…summer…the time of year when kids get to be kids, playing all day without the stress of getting up early and homework.  But, some kids have even more stress during this time of year.  More than 30 million children in the US benefit from the national school lunch program during the regular school year, but [...]

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SNAP Tools

To continue with last week’s theme of providing tools to assist low-income families, this week’s post will focus on the SNAP Pre-Screening Tool and the SNAP Retail Locator.  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the new name for the program that is commonly referred to as food stamps.  The eligibility standards for SNAP can be somewhat confusing, but the [...]

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Can School Lunches Be Appetizing and Nutritious?

The movement to revolutionize school lunches is not a new one.  Some say it started with Alice Waters, whose focus on local grown food led to the Edible School Yard program.  More recently chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and the television show associated with it have brought school lunch reform into the mainstream.  In Tulsa, OK, we are lucky enough [...]

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Can’t Find the Broccoli? Try the Circulation Desk

NPR reports on an innovative project in Baltimore to bring groceries to neighborhoods without access to a full-service store with fresh fruits and vegetables (called “food deserts”). Residents order online and pick up at the library: Under a new city program, patrons can order groceries online and pay with cash, credit or food stamps. The [...]

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What Does Hunger Look Like?

Yesterday the Tulsa World, our local paper, published a front-page story describing the huge increase in the amount of food the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma distributed to local food pantries in recent months.  Food pantries are the entities that get the food into the hands of people – so the article included a [...]

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Moveable Oases for the Food Desert

Some of the innovation gang headed over to a local taco stand for lunch to enjoy the weather and much talked about experience by the local media of late. When we came back, I had an a-ha moment of why doesn’t Tulsa introduce some sort of traveling fruit and vegetable truck in our food deserts? Since [...]

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Food Deserts or Food Swamps?

Ezra Klein, a health policy blogger for the Washington Post, links to a new report from the Food and Drug Administration examining the problem of food deserts – places that lack access to full-service grocery stores and the fresh produce they sell. This isn’t really a food equity blog, but since I recently posted on [...]

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New Oases in the Food Desert

The New York Times reports on that city’s efforts to bring fresh produce to so-called “food desert” neighborhoods. The city launched an initiative called Green Carts, which created licenses for 1,000 new food vendors (carts) provided that they sell only fresh fruits and vegetables and that they locate in the designated food deserts, such as [...]

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Westside Harvest Market Opens (Grandly) Saturday

The Westside Harvest Market (2232 S. Nogales Ave) is having its grand opening celebration this Saturday from noon to 3pm. They’ve actually been open for a while now, but now that the Eugene Field neighborhood’s first grocer can accept food stamps and WIC, they’re having a big to-do. The event will feature free food (hot [...]

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