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<\/p>\nQuick Read<\/p>\n
Rural Minnesotans sometimes have a hard time finding healthier food items, and fresh produce, lean proteins and whole grains can often be more expensive. So a Red Wing Clinic is filling prescriptions for healthy foods right in it’s lobby, allowing patients to take fresh fruits and vegetables home with them.<\/p>\n
Like many of us, Jose Luis Garcia knows he should be eating better and healthier. And he wants to provide healthier food options to his wife and two children, too. <\/p>\n
But that’s easier said than done for the 50-year old, who works long hours on a dairy farm in rural Goodhue County, about an hour southeast of the Twin Cities.<\/p>\n
Grocery stores are few and far between, and the early morning and evening milkings make it difficult to travel to distant big box grocers and supermarkets. On top of that, fresh produce, whole grains and lean proteins often cost more than junk food and fast food.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is very easy for a doctor to say you gotta eat more fruits and vegetables, but can the people afford it, especially if they have kids?\u201d said Fernanda Jimenez, a community health worker at the CARE Clinic, which serves low income residents in and around Red Wing. <\/p>\n
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Jose Luis Garcia, a dairy farm worker in Goodhue County, visits the Fresh Food Farmacy after his CARE Clinic appointment on Tuesday, Sept. 29. Community health worker Fernanda Jimenez helps him pick out a bag of fresh fruits and veggies to take home.<\/p>\n
Molly Castle Work | MPR News<\/p>\n
Near the entrance of the small medical clinic sits an industrial-sized fridge, chock full of fruits and vegetables.<\/p>\n
Jimenez helps Luis Garcia fill a bag with fresh lettuce, cucumbers, apples and oranges to take home to his family.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt helps a lot,\u201d Luis Garcia said.<\/p>\n
The healthcare providers at CARE Clinic, which serves uninsured and underinsured patients in Red Wing and surrounding rural areas, provide bags of fresh produce from this fridge to their patients each week, free of charge. <\/p>\n
CARE Clinic\u2019s VeggieRx program, known as the Fresh Food Farmacy, takes that extra step of not just prescribing healthier foods, but providing it to patients who need them. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of several similar programs that have cropped up across the state and nation to respond to growing food insecurity, which is expected to worsen amid the Trump administration\u2019s sweeping changes to the federal SNAP food aid program<\/a>. VeggieRx programs can be especially impactful in rural areas where residents are at a higher risk for developing chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, and can have a harder time finding and affording healthy food.<\/p>\n CARE Clinic\u2019s program is yielding promising results \u2014 reminding health providers and legislators that healthy food can be an important tool to improve rural health outcomes, if it\u2019s made available. <\/p>\n People participating in the Food Farmacy program declare get to take home a certain amount of fruits and veggies each week based on their household family size.<\/p>\n Molly Castle Work | MPR News<\/p>\n Food as medicine<\/p>\n Julie Malyon, director of CARE Clinic, said she started the Fresh Food Farmacy partly to conduct research and determine if her patients could stave off diabetes if they got free produce once a week. <\/p>\n \u201cJust as you take medicine to help your chronic disease, you make your food choices,\u201d Malyon said, \u201cand that can affect your chronic disease management as well.\u201d <\/p>\n For years, the clinic surveyed people about their diabetes status and tested blood levels routinely of those that participated in the Fresh Food Farmacy. Then, CARE Clinic intern Aliena Grainger and Mayo Clinic Health System physicians Randy Foss and Ryan Burroughs collaborated to crunch the numbers. <\/p>\n They found that people with diabetes who regularly accessed the fresh produce reduced their A1C levels and achieved clinically meaningful improvements in glycemic control. <\/p>\n Inside CARE Clinic, a small medical clinic in Red Wing, Minn., on Tuesday, Sept. 29.<\/p>\n Molly Castle Work | MPR News<\/p>\n Malyon said she was excited by the results, especially since it\u2019s not just the patients who pick up the fruits and veggies that benefit. <\/p>\n \u201cWe give them enough to bring home for their whole family, so then the kids in the household [who] might be prone to [diabetes], they’re having healthier options in the home as well,\u201d Malyon said. \u201c[So it helps] that next generation too.\u201d<\/p>\n Why is it harder to get healthy food in rural areas? <\/p>\n While food insecurity isn’t just a rural problem, there are some factors that make it more difficult to get fresh produce far away from a big city. <\/p>\n Abby Gold, a health and nutrition specialist at the University of Minnesota Extension, said that rural grocery stores often struggle to maintain and provide a wide range of fresh produce since they see fewer customers. <\/p>\n “They’ll stock onions and potatoes and, you know, green peppers \u2014 things that have a longer shelf life,\u201d Gold said. \u201cThings like leafy greens or bananas, if people don’t buy them quickly, they don’t look so good after a few days. And then the grocery stores don’t really want to stock them because they’re not being purchased.”<\/p>\n The produce also tends to be more expensive for rural consumers because the food has to travel a longer distance, and the smaller grocer likely pays higher prices because they can\u2019t buy in bulk at cheaper rates like a bigger supermarket chain, such as Trader Joe\u2019s, Wal-Mart, or Costco would. <\/p>\n CARE Clinic in Red Wing, Minn., pictured here on Tuesday, Sept. 29, serves uninsured and underinsured people who live in town and surrounding rural areas. <\/p>\n Molly Castle Work | MPR News<\/p>\n Gold explained that programs like Fresh Food Farmacy can\u2019t be the only answer to food insecurity, primarily because they rely on grant funding and private donations which aren\u2019t always sustainable long term. But they do help. And she said their growing popularity is a big step forward.<\/p>\n “Providers are starting to recognize the importance of food as a part of health,\u201d Gold said. \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to just say to your patients, \u2018Hey, you need to lose weight,\u2019 and send them off. They\u2019re actually trying to think of ways to help their patients access healthy foods, so they can follow their doctor’s advice.\u201d <\/p>\n How is H.R. 1 impacting SNAP food benefits?<\/p>\n But healthcare providers, food banks and food shelves still have a long way to go to make healthy food more accessible to rural residents, and the number of Minnesotans who are food insecure is rising sharply. <\/p>\n H.R. 1, which Republicans in Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in 2025, included much stricter eligibility requirements for people to receive food aid benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, or SNAP. The law cuts off benefits for some legal, non-U.S. citizens, including refugees and those seeking asylum. It also expanded work requirements for people aged 55-64 and parents whose children are 14 or older, and the law shifts SNAP administrative and benefit costs onto states and local governments. <\/p>\n The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families reported that since the law Trump calls his One Big Beautiful Bill Act was enacted in July 2025, 26,000 fewer Minnesotans are receiving SNAP or Minnesota Family Investment Program assistance<\/a>, a 6 percent decline \u2014 pushing more people towards already overrun and financially-strained food shelves. In fact, the food bank Second Harvest Heartland reports record demand<\/a> for food aid over the last year. <\/p>\n Special thanks to Danger Boat Productions and the Minnesota Humanities Center for their Sketches of Minnesota events around the state that helped inform this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quick Read Rural Minnesotans sometimes have a hard time finding healthier food items, and fresh produce, lean proteins…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[102,6636,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-health","tag-nutrition","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Cucumbers](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/a38442-20261023-cucumbers-in-a-container-600.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"CARE](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/4afee7-20261023-care-clinic-in-red-wing-exterior-600.jpg\")
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