About Fresh, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food is Medicine Research Initiative, is partnering with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to create a large-scale demonstration project aimed at using healthy food to improve veterans' health.
About Fresh, a startup focused on integrating healthy food into the healthcare system, began bringing fresh produce to Boston food deserts in converted school buses. Today, the Boston-based startup nonprofit is mapping out the nearly million-dollar demonstration project with the VHA to prove that the "food is medicine" movement has a future in healthcare.
Founder Josh Trautwein stated: “This project is almost more important than expanding our program because we want to contribute to the system's change in healthcare. That's going to create the context for healthcare investment in 'food as medicine'.”
The move to embrace ‘food as medicine’ shifted from a widely dismissed corner of healthcare to a topic of conversation at the highest levels when, in September 2022, the White House held its conference on hunger, nutrition and health. In the U.S., 34 million people are food insecure, with 100% of U.S. counties exhibiting food insecurity. Diet-related illnesses like heart disease and diabetes are some of the leading causes of death, disproportionately affecting under-resourced communities.
