Shauna Petchel
PAH 660
Presentation #1
How I landed here…
I started out as in the clinical nutrition world but I’ve worked for the last nine years for a nonprofit organization that advocates against domestic child food insecurity (hunger). They do this by conducting outreach and providing technical assistance to increase the number of schools and community-based organizations who are participating in the “Federal Nutrition Programs” (FNP). Some FNP’s you may know about include the School Breakfast Program, School Lunch Program and WIC. Some you may not have heard of are the Summer Food Service Program and Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). The last two in particular are not widely available and could be serving more food-insecure kids. (read pages 1-4, 7, and 14 of this CRS report for an overview of FNP, CACFP and how the US defines food insecurity).
I also volunteer with a domestic violence organization that operates a shelter and a community resource center, both of which are eligible to participate in CACFP to get reimbursed for providing meals to the kids served through those facilities. The USDA has even waived most of the paperwork requirements in order to remove barriers to participation (read memo CACFP 11-2007 found here). Despite this, the organization doesn’t participate and instead “shops” for food at the food bank on a weekly basis to stock a first-come, first-serve pantry for families at both locations. Over the summer, I was asked to do the “food bank run” to do a weekly re-stock of the pantries. I spent hours that morning at the OFB warehouse picking over expired cans, moldy vegetables and huge bins of chips and candy, hunting for decent stuff to take back. When I got back to the shelter, completely frustrated and demoralized by the whole experience and was unloading the food, the kids went wild over the raspberries - literally grabbing them out of my hands and opening the containers to eat them on the spot. It was probably one of the most formative and memorable experiences of my entire time working in the nutrition/hunger world. I had all this information on how we could be doing a better job, and yet I knew that past conversations with the staff about offering CACFP have fallen flat. I’m aware of other organizations serving this population that are also eligible and also not participating.
Around the same time this summer, a couple things were happening in the public health world. I attended a Nutrition Symposium at the Moore Institute for Nutrition at OHSU looking at how poor nutrition in pregnancy and early childhood can epigenetically “lock in” biological factors that give rise to chronic disease later in life (skim Godfrey at al, especially intro and conclusion). It’s a strong connection that can also pass to that generation’s children. The Adverse Childhood Experiences work (skim Felitti, et al) also started to receive widespread media attention. It has found strong links between trauma experienced in-utero and early childhood with development of chronic and mental illnesses in adulthood. These two separate but related bodies of research, which fall under the umbrella of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DoHaD), started to put a frame around the problem I was seeing.
Knowing that this population is in a critical period with respect to their risk of chronic disease development and that the USDA has taken steps to make it as easy as possible for shelters to offer CACFP, why does the shelter network appear to be opting-out of a program that could dramatically improve the nutritional status of these kids?