In the United States, federal funding cuts to major food assistance programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and food banks, are projected to increase hunger and malnutrition. And soon, it will become harder to track how many Americans are impacted: The Trump Administration recently announced that it would end a longstanding annual food insecurity survey.
At the “Food is Medicine and Eating for Health” summit during Climate Week NYC 2025, which Food Tank hosted in partnership with the Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation, leaders in food, health, policy, and culture spoke about how food can strengthen communities and support a healthier future despite these challenges.
“It is baffling to me, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, that we would force people to choose whether they are going to eat or get healthcare, have dinner or pay their rent, and that’s really what [these SNAP cuts are] going to do,” says U.S. Congressman Daniel S. Goldman. “But this actually provides us with a unique opportunity to reimagine how we want to provide healthcare and food assistance.”
Goldman adds that “the impact of all of this on our small businesses is exacerbating significant problems.” But according to Grace Young, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and food historian, a food-is-medicine approach can also help sustain those small food businesses that need support now more than ever, as inflation and tariffs create economic uncertainty.
“One of the great hidden secrets is to shop in Chinatown, where the quality is so high and the prices are so low, because Chinese customers are very frugal,” says Young. “You can find everything in Chinatown, and the fruits and vegetables are generally local. This is an opportunity to eat local and support mom and pop restaurants.”
Panelists agreed that food insecurity is a multidimensional issue, one that requires a multidimensional approach to solutions.
“It’s no one discipline’s job to solve food insecurity,” says Dr. Christine Going, Senior Advisor at the Food Security Program Office within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “It’s rare for food insecurity to exist in isolation; if you’re food insecure, there’s probably something else happening.”
For example, issues like “poverty [are] inextricable from this food as medicine conversation,” says Brandon Lombardi, Chief Sustainability Officer at Sprouts Farmers Market.
A‑dae Romero‑Briones, Vice President of Policy and Research at the First Nations Development Institute, also emphasized the systemic factors at play when it comes to health and food security. America is a highly individualized society, but health is a collective issue to solve.
“Health is not only dependent on what one person does, it’s dependent on what the community around you does and how healthy the environment is,” says Romero-Briones. “In America, when everything becomes an individual action or an individual fault, we really lose sight of all these other impacts that create a healthy person in a healthy community and a healthy environment.”
And any conversation about health in the U.S. must include gender and race, says Tanya Fields, Executive Director at The Black Feminist Project.
“The medical system is invested in keeping Black women and children sick…we sterilize these conversations and make it seem like these discrepancies and disparities don’t exist,” says Fields. “This is happening because people are profiting from it.”
Fields sees food as a form of radical resistance. She works to uplift stories of successfully using food as medicine within her own community: “I’m so sick of people coming to the Bronx and only talking about us through the lens of pathology. There are good things happening in the Bronx,” says Fields, who urges the audience to fund organizations like The Black Feminist Projects and others led by women, immigrants, people of color, and members of the queer community.
Finally, Lyndsey Waugh, Executive Director of the Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation, challenged the audience to engage with the next generation about the interconnected issues discussed at the summit—and empower them to take action.
“What would it look like to pick out one thing from this panel that inspires you and talk to a young person about it?” says Waugh. “People are becoming more connected with how food makes them feel…Future voters, the kids who are out there seeing this swirl around them, they care, and I think it’s our responsibility to play a role in helping them see themselves as part of that work.”
Watch the full livestreamed event on Food Tank’s YouTube channel.
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Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.
