Giving Compass' Take:

• Food Tank highlights the nonprofit, Community Servings, which delivers medically tailored meals to critically-ill patients with limited resources living in 21 communities in Massachusetts, while trying to address different social and food-related issues in the communities.

• Should we reframe healthy eating as a public health solution? 

• Here's an article on "meals as medicine."

Community Servings is a non-profit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts that delivers made-from-scratch meals to critically ill and poor patients and their families. “Most of these people are very isolated and often forgotten,” David Waters, CEO of Community Servings tells Food Tank. Patients tend to lack the energy to shop and cook for themselves, leading them to skip meals or eat highly processed foods. According to Waters, home-delivered, medically tailored meals (MTMs) can help patients meet the dietary requirements and prevent their disease from deteriorating further.

The organization began by feeding 30 people living with HIV/AIDS in two neighborhoods in Boston in the 1980s. “Food became the only medicine or the only intervention. To care for people was to give them calories, while their body was fighting off the infection,” says Waters to Food Tank. Waters was a manager at a four-star restaurant in Boston when he joined Community Servings as a volunteer. And it did not take him long to “really fall in love with” feeding people in need.

In 2004, Community Servings expanded their services both to include more communities in Massachusetts and they are now covering other types of diseases. Today, Community Servings’ chefs, registered dietitians, and volunteers prepare about 2,500 meals a day and 650,000 meals a year for patients living in 21 communities across the state.

Read the full article on Community Servings by Min Hyun Maeng at Food Tank.