food and nutrition

Growing up in central New Jersey, I loved to eat the fresh fruit from the two pear trees my family grew in our backyard. I found it special that we had the chance to grow these healthy treats at home. Though I didn’t know it at the time, pears grow commercially in almost all 50 U.S. states, and are even the state fruit of Oregon. Even so, anyone who’s ever eaten a fresh, juicy pear knows they’re rather delicate and don’t always travel well.

It takes a village to get those red ripe watermelon or sweet ears of corn to the neighborhood grocery store at the right time for consumers. Producers must decide when to plant and pick crops, package produce, find buyers and select the right shipper to transport products to market. Hundreds of people and thousands of decisions are needed to get the fruits and vegetables people love to stores at peak freshness. And to make sure everything gets done right, many producers and handlers rely on trusted resources from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS).

My mother has a jar in her kitchen with the phrase, “Cooking is love made visible.” I can say for a fact that her food spreads a lot of love, and I think the same could be said about school food service professionals.

Summer is a great time for kids to get outside and be physically active. But for those days that are spent indoors, Nutrition.gov’s Children section has solutions to keep children busy and encourage healthy lifestyle habits.

The face of poverty has often been associated with the starving child in the slums of New Delhi, India or streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. While this is the reality for many children across the developing world, rural and urban poverty is often overlooked in developed countries, such as the United States.

Summer is in full swing with warm, long days to enjoy with friends and family. The season offers a perfect time to stock your freezer with vegetables to have on-hand. Frozen vegetables are simple to store and an easy way to make half your plate fruits and vegetables year round. One popular freezer favorite for every season is frozen broccoli.

As the school year ends across the country and summer approaches, summer meals are critical in the lives of millions of our nation’s youth, whose risk for food insecurity increases during the summer months when they no longer have access to the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs (NSLP).

Did you know the southern states of Georgia and South Carolina both name the peach as their state fruit? Whether they’re fresh, canned, dried or frozen, peaches can easily be included in a healthy eating pattern. Canned peaches are not only delicious and nutritious, but are easy to use because they’re pre-cut and washed. When selecting canned peaches, choose ones that are unsweetened or canned in water or 100 percent fruit juice.

At USDA our mission is a vital one: to reduce hunger and increase food security by providing children and low-income people access to food, a nutritious diet and nutrition education. And that mission was put to the test in 2017, in the aftermath of a trio of devastating hurricanes that slammed into Texas, Florida, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

As Americans, we care about our neighbors in need, and we also expect that the nutrition assistance benefits we pay for with hard-earned tax dollars are used as intended – to put food on the table. Public trust is a central part of USDA’s mission. To help meet that mission, the Department recently released the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Fraud Framework (PDF, 216 KB) to provide states with new and innovative resources to help combat recipient fraud and benefit trafficking.