Equitable Food Distribution Needs to Address Food Allergies

The charitable food sector rarely accommodates people with dietary restrictions, an issue that affects communities of color at a higher rate.

Food equity often has to do with eliminating racial differences in how people access food. For Emily Brown, food equity also means addressing food allergies.

About 32 million people in the United States have food allergies. Two of those are Brown’s daughters, who were diagnosed with multiple food allergies as toddlers. Brown’s experience of trying to provide her family with specific foods on a limited budget led her to create the Food Equality Initiative, which supplies free food to people with dietary conditions like allergies and celiac disease.

“Special dietary needs should not be considered an afterthought” in hunger relief, Brown said.

Brown surely felt as if her family’s needs were an afterthought when she went to a Kansas City-area food pantry about seven years ago, seeking food her daughters could eat, and came away with only two potatoes and a jar of salsa.

Driven to start the Food Equality Initiative in response as her “own supplemental nutrition program,” Brown is facing down the many severe conditions that food-insecure, food-allergic people face.

For starters, the food available to them is often much more expensive, with markups ranging from 100% to 1,000%. “SNAP dollars don’t go nearly as far if you need food that costs two to four times as much,” Brown noted.

Federal programs like WIC provide only limited ability to substitute in allergy-proof foods, and school districts can be uneven in their approach to modifying school meals, with many having abandoned the effort all together during the pandemic, Brown said.

Also, the charitable food sector is not really geared up to accommodate people who need to avoid gluten (in the case of celiac) or other allergens. Brown has identified only a handful of pantries that accommodate dietary restrictions, including Garden of Health Food Bank and The Rachel Way, both in Pennsylvania, and SAFE Food Pantry, based in Maryland. Porchlight Community Services of San Diego is another.

Finally, food allergies have emerged as a matter of racial justice, with those in the Black community shown to be 7% more likely to have dietary limitations, Brown said. “The most burdened are patients of color and those who lack resources,” she said.