When Octavia Hammond of Southeast D.C. goes to the grocery store, she uses two cards to pay for what she is buying. One card is for all the fresh produce, and the other pays for everything else.
The one that buys the produce, a Fresh Connect card, is distributed by the nonprofit DC Greens and its Produce RX program. It’s literally a prescription she got from a doctor, but instead of medication, the prescription is for healthy foods for her and her family.
“Because of food prices, everything is super expensive these days,” said Hammond. “Just having that little extra bump, knowing that you have picky eaters and children that want to try stuff but they might not want to finish it, it’s just a good way to introduce new foods to the household and not really put a dent in your income.”
Programs like this one are helping her and her family eat better, which in turn is helping the whole health care system.
A study out this week in the American Heart Association’s Journal Circulation found that programs such as Produce RX led to increased consumption of fruits and vegetables in low-income homes where affordability is often a barrier. Participants also saw improvements in blood pressure, obesity and blood sugar.
“It’s like the old wives tale of what our grandmothers did, but it’s very much so,” said Luisa Furstenberg, the Produce RX program manager with DC Greens. “Food is medicine. Food is health. Food is preventative. To be able to take care of ourselves in that way is the return on investment for all of us in ourselves.”
Produce RX participants are Medicaid-eligible or enrolled in the DC Health Alliance. They have to go to one of 18 clinics that DC Greens partners with and have some sort of diet-related chronic illness, such as high blood pressure or diabetes, for instance. If they meet the criteria, they’ll get a Fresh Connect card, which works as a prepaid debit card at stores like Giant, Safeway and Walmart.
“Doctors were saying, ‘I will prescribe Metformin or I will prescribe something to lower blood pressure and my patients won’t take it. They don’t want to take it.’ They don’t want to take medication,” said Furstenberg. “But if I say, ‘hey, I can prescribe you fresh food,’ they’re excited.”
The money it frees up for families struggling to meet all their needs is an additional benefit.
“If for nothing else, the participants in our program are just less stressed and less anxious,” said Fursternberg. “Food insecurity. We know people have depression, anxiety and stress all combined with it. So for nothing else, they have 100 extra dollars a month to spend on rent, on health care on day care, and they’re able to have that money just to spend for fresh food. Even that has health outcomes.”
Program participants can get between $80 and $100 per month on their cards to spend on produce.
“When they get to the checkout, they can scan all of their things that they want, and then they scan their fresh connect card, and anything that qualifies gets taken off,” said Furstenberg. “Any fresh produce gets taken off. Anything else they have, if they have their meat or their dairy, they can just use their own money or like other benefits as well. So it’s really seamless, and then again, at the first of every month, this money gets loaded.”
Produce RX has been operating in D.C. since 2012, though the first several years, the money was limited to use at farmers markets. DC Greens began working with grocery stores around the region in 2019 to offer more options to residents.
While the national study looked at programs in several states, Furstenberg said Produce RX has its own data showing similar results locally.
Acknowledging that it can be hard to account for outside factors in a study like this one, including how improving food security alone can improve someone’s health, Furstenberg said “about 35% of our participants had lower A1C, lower blood pressure, lower BMI.”
And, as the national study found, they ate more fruits and vegetables every day, too.
