Yazil Rodriguez remembers “the carrot girl.”
The toddler stood out among the participants of Northern Roots, a food program Rodriguez helps administer at Presbyterian Santa Fe Medical Center, offering fresh fruits, vegetables and pantry items for families with referrals from healthcare providers. The girl ignored sweeter options — apples, kiwis, bananas.
“It was always the carrots, and she’d scream until she’d get one,” recalled Rodriguez, a community health worker at Presbyterian. “It’s always very healing to see kids excited about veggies.”
Northern Roots is one of a handful of New Mexico programs that offer what’s called a “produce prescription.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: Participants who could benefit from easier access to fruits and veggies — often as a result of diet-related conditions like diabetes, heart disease or obesity — get a steady supply of healthy food and nutrition education resources to complement their medical care.
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During New Mexico’s growing season, the largely federally funded programs benefit not just participants in need of healthy food but local farmers, said Kirsten Hansen, director of community health and engagement at the New Mexico Farmers’ Marketing Association. The association runs FreshRx, a statewide produce prescription program that connects patients with diet-related conditions at local clinics — like La Familia Health in Santa Fe — to fresh fruits and vegetables during the growing season, usually from July to November.
While participating in FreshRx won’t make or break a farmer’s season, Hansen said it adds some certainty to the volatile agricultural industry.
“They’ll know that they will be growing for this program,” she said. “They know what can go in those bags, and they know when the program will kick in each season. Anything that farmers can do to plan their growing and their season is helpful.”
The central idea behind the local produce prescription programs: Food isn’t just sustenance. It’s medicine.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists poor nutrition and inadequate physical activity as “significant risk factors” for chronic diseases like obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Only about 1 in 10 teens and adults eat the recommended amount of fruits and veggies daily, CDC data shows.
And yet, for many New Mexicans, healthy food can be both hard to find and hard to afford. Much of New Mexico — from entire rural counties in the western and northeastern part of the state to Santa Fe’s Airport Road corridor — is categorized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as “low income and low access,” indicating census tracts where a significant share of residents are more than a mile from the nearest supermarket.
“It’s really expensive right now to go out and get food, especially if you have a large family,” said Rodriguez, the community health worker. “And as someone who works in the healthcare field, we see how much it affects people in terms of their health.”
Produce prescription programs are intended to address those challenges. Such programs administered by Presbyterian Healthcare Services — including the Northern Roots program, based in hospitals in Northern New Mexico, and the newly established Southern Roots program, based at Lincoln County Medical Center in Ruidoso — are aimed at addressing and preventing diet-related chronic diseases, said Carrie Thielen, Presbyterian Healthcare Services’ director of regional community health.
“Health care has really prioritized looking at the whole person, looking outside of medical care and really bridging into the community to make sure that people have the support to follow your doctor’s advice,” Thielen said.
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
Northern Roots launched about five years ago, serving pregnant and postpartum parents and children ages 3 to 11. The program now serves hundreds of families at Presbyterian hospitals in Española and Santa Fe, as well as a partner site in Las Vegas, N.M., in 16-week intervals — though participants can “refill” their produce prescriptions for another 16 weeks as recommended by their healthcare providers, Thielen said.
Both Northern Roots and Southern Roots are free for participants, with no insurance or other prerequisites required. The programs also provide cooking demonstrations and nutrition classes to help families put the produce to use.
Through FreshRx, clinics — many of which are federally qualified health centers serving large proportions of un- and underinsured patients — connect patients who have diet-related conditions to regularly distributed bags of 100% New Mexico-grown produce.
Largely supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the program is free for participants and clinics, Hansen said. It also typically operates over the course of about 16 weeks in summer and fall.
The two programs work together, too. For the new Southern Roots program in Ruidoso, FreshRx will kick in for the summer and fall, helping Presbyterian “stretch their funding,” Hansen explained.
Throughout the produce prescription programs, participants get to connect not only with healthy food but with community health workers like Rodriguez, Thielen said.
“I think that’s where the magic happens,” she said. “There’s so much trust that’s built between our participants and the community health workers for a duration of time. … There’s 16 weeks to really get to know the families.”