The Food is Medicine Initiative, announced in September 2022 by the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation, with inaugural supporter Kroger, at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, seeks to provide the large-scale clinical evidence required to ensure patients receive medical prescriptions for healthy food to help prevent and manage chronic disease.
Our vision is to accelerate a future in which millions of patients receive the benefit of a more holistic approach to diet and health, healthcare professionals and practitioners know how food is medicine programs can help prevent and manage disease, and payors have sufficient, objective cost and effectiveness evidence for reimbursing food is medicine programs.
This national initiative will help identify, support, and implement the most viable “food is medicine strategies”
Initial Request for Proposals – Open September 19, 2023
The initiative’s first FIM Request for Proposals focuses on feasibility and 
implementation science: achieving high rates of enrollment and engagement, using input from the lived experiences of patient participants or practitioners to guide program design, and testing ways to achieve significant short-term changes in healthy eating behavior.
Funded studies will be short term rapid cycle studies (18 months or less) that address challenges in feasibility and implementation or test approaches to achieve short-term behavior change.
https://www.heart.org/en/professional/food-is-medicine-initiative
More information here
Full RFP (PDF)
New research by UB Food Lab member Carol E Ramos-Gerena in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2023.122.008
INTRODUCTION
Food policies shoWhat do people need to know before they can transform municipal food policies?uld be informed by those who they intend to serve, but policy-making processes remain exclusive to privileged voices, knowledge, and experiences. This article bridges food and policy scholarship with the critical literacy work of Paulo Freire to answer the question: how do we understand literacies tied to food policy? What does (or what could) it mean to be food policy literate? In a new JAFSCD article, Carol E. Ramos-Gerena proposes five principles for conceptualizing critical food policy literacy that support food system transformations.
KEY FINDINGS
The paper suggests that efforts to promote critical food policy literacy must facilitate communities to (a) “read the world,” (b) “read the word,” (c) be critically aware of food policy processes and systems, (d) learn contextually and through authentic practice, and (e) enable people to negotiate and transform the world (their context) collectively.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY, PRACTICE, AND RESEARCH
Possessing knowledge on engaging with food policy processes is not commensurate with actual engagement. Thus, structural barriers to community participation must also be addressed. Food system planners and educators, particularly at the municipal level, should support locally-based citizen food organizations to engage in food policy. This support must go beyond assessing communities’ food policy literacy. Instead, it must intend to bridge the gap to ensure critical readiness for food policy engagement.
For questions and suggestions, contact us at [email protected].
Do you know of a local jurisdiction that has adopted or updated policies related to urban agriculture or land access in the past ten years? The UB Food Lab is updating the municipal policy database Growing Food Connections. The update focuses on urban agriculture, particularly policies impacting land access. If you are aware of any such recently adopted policies, consider sharing them with Growing Food Connections. It will be added to the publicly available database. Please send any relevant information to the UB Food Lab at [email protected].
