How can employers provide access to healthy foods in the workplace?
In most communities in America, at least part of the year, community-supported agriculture deliveries are available.
Here’s how CSA works: a single farmer, or a group of three or four small farmers, packages their freshest fruits and vegetables into parcels each week. Boxes are usually ordered by subscription online and typically run between $20 and $30 apiece. The usual model is to have it delivered to a neighborhood backyard, where it’s picked up on delivery day.
An innovative employer could say, ‘We believe that healthy food is so important that we’re going to set up the delivery of these community supported agriculture food boxes directly to interested employees at work.’
So you come to work on a Tuesday, and at 11 a.m. a farmer stops by with boxes of fresh fruits and vegetables for the employees who signed up.
The money goes right to the farmer and your employees get fresher food that tastes better and lasts longer. Most CSA boxes come with recipes for how to use the products in the box. It’s a fun event. It’s like a holiday present every week.
Of course, that’s in addition to working with your cafeteria vendor. Many companies of various sizes have vending machines or cafeterias. There are a variety of programs now that label the foods at cafeterias and call out which are healthy for you and which ones aren’t.
What if CSA delivery is unavailable in your area or just isn’t practical?
CSA is one way to get healthy food to employees; the second way is working with the cafeteria vendors to get healthier choices. A third way is farmers markets.
If you have a large business where thousands of people gather on a daily basis for work, or a smaller business that is surrounded by two or three other buildings, and if the community has more farmers looking for a farmers market than there are markets, then you have the right mix. You can work with the local farmers market association and bring a farmers market directly to the people.
When there is a fresh peach in front of your business in the middle of July, it’s awfully hard to walk by. The farmers are looking for a market; you have thousands of people who could eat the food — it’s a win-win.
Dr. Preston Maring is the associate physician-in-chief at Kaiser Permanente’s East Bay Medical Center. Reach him at (510) 752-7506 or [email protected], or visit his blog at kp.org/farmersmarketrecipes.
