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White House Convenes Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, & Health
Dear Friend,
Yesterday, the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health was held in Washington, DC. For months now, I’ve participated in bi-weekly stakeholder calls organized by the Office of Public Engagement, where people with hunger- and health-related lived experiences and leaders of dozens – if not hundreds – of nonprofits gathered to communicate their perspectives on how to best solve current food disparities that have contributed to our nation’s health crisis.
While we weren’t asked to join the conference in person, we were happy to participate online. Regardless of politics (this was at least partially bi-partisan), we applaud the Biden-Harris Administration for taking on this important issue. You can learn more about these plans by reading the just-released National Strategy, which includes actions the federal government will take to drive solutions to these challenges in order to meet a courageous goal:
“End hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.”
It’s been more than 50 years since our nation’s leadership has broadly acknowledged that we have a health crisis (COVID-19 pandemic aside). In 1969, the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health led to life-affirming programs, like school lunches and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). It also sparked important changes to food labeling.
The 2022 conference held great promise for a discussion about causes and solutions to widespread and preventable diet-related diseases. Instead, and nevertheless important, the focus, by and large, was about health disparities related to food access. The Biden-Harris Administration has released a fact sheet outlining more than $8 billion in new commitments to address food access and meet the 2030 goal. Read the fact sheet to learn more.
Panel Session A included a title that held great promise: Food is Medicine: Bringing nutrition out of the health care shadows. A bright spark on the panel was Dr. Kofi Essel, a pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital and Director of the George Washington University (GWU) Culinary Medicine Program. He lamented the lack of nutrition training and the role of food as a contributor to health at medical schools and presented the remarkable food and nutrition approach at GWU. Doctors like Dr. Essel and programs like the one at GWU give me hope that we can improve training to create positive change in today’s mainstream healthcare system. While registered dieticians were mentioned repeatedly in this panel discussion, the lack of recognition of the value of nutritional therapy practitioners, naturopathic doctors, and others who are deeply immersed in food as medicine was a conference miss.
The conference wasn’t without logistics issues, including a late start. This was quickly overcome by the sincerity of President Biden and other speakers committed to ending hunger and food inequities. More discussion and focus on diet-related diseases and the role of food and diet to address these issues would have benefited all in attendance.
I’m convinced that much good will come from this conference that, after more than 50 years, has once again brought national visibility to food as the center of a public health agenda. At Price-Pottenger, we will continue our 70-year history of sharing ancestral health wisdom, advancing knowledge from our pioneer archive collection, and publishing contemporary reporting on nutrition, health, and healing. Please join us in this journey by sharing this information with your community and click on Donate Now to support our work today.
Wishing you good health,
Steven J. Schindler,
Executive Director