The Farm Stand is Becoming the New Apothecary
This is a great article from the New York Times on a new approach to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables. What do you think? Would you be more likely to eat your veggies if your doctor wrote you a prescription?
The farm stand is becoming the new apothecary, dispensing apples — not to mention artichokes, asparagus and arugula — to fill a novel kind of prescription.
Doctors at three health centers in Massachusetts have begun advising patients to eat “prescription produce” from local farmers’ markets, in an effort to fight obesity in children of low-income families. Now they will give coupons amounting to $1 a day for each member of a patient’s family to promote healthy meals.
“A lot of these kids have a very limited range of fruits and vegetables that are acceptable and familiar to them. Potentially, they will try more,” said Dr. Suki Tepperberg, a family physician at Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, one of the program sites. “The goal is to get them to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables by one serving a day.”
Related posts:
Comments RSS You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “The Farm Stand is Becoming the New Apothecary”
Leave a Reply
Categories
Copyright Urban Farm Hub 2010 | Designed by Woonerfs
I’m all for encouraging a more healthful diet and for promoting farmers’ markets. But if the doctors’ objective is solely to address health problems, why is the coupon only good for farmers’ markets? It seems that if their patients can get more carrots for their dollar at the supermarket, they should do that to supplement their diet with more nutritious foods. This seems like a major oversight, particularly since they are working with low-income families.