Food security is an issue for all year. Health care community must play a role in solving it.

By Heidi Chan
Market President, AmeriHealth Caritas North Carolina

This time of year includes holiday food giveaways, meals at shelters, and spikes in donations to food pantries.

These generous and meaningful acts of kindness highlight our community’s compassion. At the same time, hunger and the broader matter of food insecurity don’t follow the holiday calendar. They are serious issues year-round, not only in December.

According to Feeding America’s most recent data, reported before Hurricane Helene, 15% of Buncombe County residents struggle to provide healthy meals for themselves or their household, and around 18% of western North Carolina children experience food insecurity, well above the national rate of 13%.

When people can’t reliably access nutritious food, rates of diabetes and obesity rise. Food insecurity also affects mental health. For parents and caregivers, uncertainty around where the next meal will come from creates stress and anxiety. Children in food-insecure households may feel that same stress and anxiety, have trouble in school, or even show signs of depression.

Clearly, food insecurity is a physical and mental health issue. This means the region’s health care community, including hospitals, clinicians, and health insurers, must play a role in addressing it.

At AmeriHealth Caritas North Carolina, we are doing this in several ways.

Evidence shows that screening for food needs and connecting patients to resources leads to better health outcomes. When someone joins our health plan, we conduct a health risk assessment, part of which includes questions about their access to healthy food and other social factors that influence health. If that assessment tells us the member faces food insecurity, our care management team will reach out to the member and connect them to community resources.

Our family of companies has also made investments in North Carolina, and elsewhere, in local food banks, mobile food pantries, and similar programs aimed at helping families access healthy food. That includes a $5 million multi-year community investment to support MANNA FoodBank in Mills River. Like so many organizations in the region, MANNA FoodBank did admirable work during and immediately after Hurricane Helene despite losing two warehouses full of food, along with most of its technological infrastructure and storage and moving supplies. MANNA FoodBank is still recovering from the storm while trying to meet an ever-increasing need for its services.

This community investment is helping MANNA FoodBank expand its Essential Foods Program, which buys nutritious produce, meat, cheese, and eggs from local farms to provide to local families in need. In addition to helping address food insecurity in MANNA FoodBank’s 16-county region, this program has the added benefit of supporting western North Carolina farmers, many of whom are also still recovering and rebuilding from last year’s storm.

Monetary donations are a critical starting point for delivering impact. But you will also find our associates volunteering at food pantries by unloading food pallets, packing boxes and grocery bags, or distributing food to the families. Following Hurricane Helene, we delivered food and water, along with other essentials, to Asheville residents. These opportunities to meet individuals that are struggling, even temporarily, connect us to our mission in a tangible way. 

Let’s recognize food security as critical to a community no matter what month it is. Food security sustains health and hope. With access to healthy meals, students can thrive in school, adults can succeed at work, and communities can bounce back faster from tragedies. Without reliable access to nutritious food, long-term well-being suffers.

By placing food security at the heart of western North Carolina’s health strategies, health care organizations, government agencies, businesses, and community organizations can make sure the region stays healthy throughout the year.

Heidi Chan is market president of AmeriHealth Caritas North Carolina, a health plan which offers a standard benefit plan to North Carolina Medicaid enrollees.