Giving Compass' Take:

• VeggieBook is an app that helps individuals cook more meals with vegetables by offering recipes and in-person training on how to utilize the app. 

• As social impact technology becomes popular, will peer-to-peer learning/training grow alongside tech advances?

• Read about how access to nutritious food could be the key to student academic success.

Paula, a 59-year-old mother of two in Southern California, is getting out of a cooking rut with VeggieBook, a free mobile app we created that users can view in English or Spanish. It gives her customized recipes and food tips.

Thanks to this new approach to cooking, her family is beginning to eat meals that include vegetables. Also, Paula’s teenage daughter is helping out more in the kitchen and the family is eating together a few days a week. We were also pleased to hear that, for a change, they aren’t watching TV or using their smartphones at the table.

Food banks began to distribute fresh produce in the mid 1990s marking a change from years of just giving shelf-stable items. They now offer hundreds of millions of pounds of produce through tens of thousands of food pantries every year. But it often goes to waste because low-income people, like many Americans across the economic spectrum, are not eating a nutritious diet. When they don’t know what to do with free vegetables, they throw them out.

The food pantry staff, middle-aged women like Paula, taught her how to use the app and took the time to walk her through many of its features. They also gave her some fresh vegetables to experiment with that evening, in addition to the usual allotment of foods like pasta and cereal she normally would take home.

We see a cautionary lesson here: The way digital health tools are promoted may be just as important as how good those tools are.

Based on experiments that we have conducted in five states, we have determined that food pantries and other community organizations that encourage the app’s use need guidance and additional staff time for this personalized, mobile tech to help people start eating better food.

Read the full article about VeggieBook by Peter Clarke and Susan H Evans at The Conversation