Healthy Food
Offering our customers healthy foods is a touchstone of our success.
We recognize it is essential for all people to have a wide range of foods in their diets so they can access all the nutrients necessary for healthy living. Eating a diet rich in fresh produce, whole grains and protein helps people maintain good energy levels and combat disease, as well as helps children stay focused at school. Altogether this creates a healthy community.
To address these values, we have a Five A Day Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Policy, we fund raise specifically to purchase diverse whole grain products, and we encourage donations of healthy foods, specifically nutritious school snacks for children.
The Five A Day Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Policy states that we will aim to offer each customer five fresh produce items on every visit to the Food Cupboard. To meet this goal, we encourage community members to grow one row of produce in their gardens to donate to the Food Cupboard, we glean excess produce from nearby farms and gardens through our Harvest Rescue program, and we buy directly from local farmers. We are proud of the fact that for 10 months of the year our produce section is well stocked with 95% locally grown produce that ranges from traditional staples such as carrots and onions, to less common vegetables like kohlrabi and tomatillos.
Our annual Whole Grains for Health Campaign encourages community members to donate whole grains, whole grain products or money for us to purchase such products. It is important for us to be able to offer customers a diverse range of grain products, because many people have food intolerances or allergies, and some suffer from diseases such as diabetes that require strict diets. As well, it is beneficial for all people to eat a wide variety of grains to access the different nutrients they each provide. Our fund raising allows us to have quinoa, millet, rice or kamut pasta, and multi grain cereals in stock.
Approximately one quarter of our customers are children. Their parents rely on the Nelson Food Cupboard to be able to send them to school with healthy lunches. To help them, we ask people to donate healthy school snacks such as fruit or granola bars and juice boxes which we then give specifically to families.
Beyond simply giving our customers food, we empower them to stay healthy by offering them recipe sheets to learn to cook the diverse fresh produce and grains we provide, we give out seeds in the spring for customers to garden, and we offer food preservation workshops in season. All of our recipes are straightforward to cook yet delicious to eat, and take into consideration many of our customers have limited kitchen facilities.