Why a Rio Grande Valley hospital is helping to feed its patients

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ALTON — Evangelina Yzaguirre had worked as a clerk for the bilingual department at a local school district for nearly 14 years when last summer the school board slashed her modest pay from $29,000 a year to $23,000.

With all four of her children fully grown, the 68-year-old Alton resident only has herself to support. Even so, her income is stretched thin to cover her health expenses stemming from a lymphoma diagnosis.

“I am struggling,” Yzaguirre said.

She is one of the 146,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley who experience food insecurity, according to the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley, which reports feeding 88,410 people a week.

To help cover some of her expenses, Yzaguirre has turned to a food pantry launched by DHR Health, a local hospital system, that serves Hidalgo County.

At the food pantry, staff supplied Yzaguirre with beans, rice, macaroni, and tuna.

“It’s a good help,” she said.

The food pantry at DHR is one example of how community institutions, such as churches, schools, and nonprofits, feed hungry Texans. At best, this loose network of support helps the most dire, but many more Texans live with limited access to healthy food due to a variety of factors, including an inability to afford food. Texas lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to take action and have collectively filed nearly a dozen bills to take on the state’s food scarcity crisis.

More than half of the neighborhoods are considered food deserts in the Rio Grande Valley, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For some, reliable food proved so hard to come by that they check themselves into the hospital just to eat, said Lauren Boeta-Lopez, a mental health clinician at DHR Health.

"I would have patients that would say, 'Well, I came here because I knew that I would get at least three hot meals,'" she said.

She wanted the hospital to help these people get food and avoid a night at the hospital.

Through a partnership with the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley, she spearheaded the launch of the food pantry at the hospital in November.

The pantry has two walls of shelves stocked with canned goods, cereal, peanut butter and other non-perishable food items. It had served about a thousand people by the end of January. Boeta-Lopez, now the health equity officer at DHR Health, plans to grow the pantry to include refrigerated items as well.

The need for greater access to food extends beyond South Texas. At 16.9%, Texas has the second-highest prevalence of food insecurity in the U.S., according to the USDA.

State Rep. Christina Morales, a Democrat from Houston, filed a bill to investigate the causes of food deserts and their effects across various demographic groups.

"Everyone deserves to have healthy food,” Morales said.

Morales has first-hand experience with food deserts, growing up in the Second Ward neighborhood of Houston, one of the first Hispanic neighborhoods in the city. Over the years, she’s seen one grocery store after another close. Constituents there often express disappointment in the lack of grocery stores, she said.

The term “desert” may give the impression that an area is empty, but cities and neighborhoods experiencing food insecurity are anything but that.

“Texans are living, working, playing, in food deserts all the time,” said Amber O’Connor, food policy analyst for Every Texan, a nonprofit organization that advocates for equitable access to health care, food security, education and financial security.

A more accurate description of what Texans are experiencing is a form of grocery store segregation, she said.

“People were relegated to certain parts of the city, and the grocery stores didn't go in them because they weren't making enough money or they were afraid,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor hopes to prevent this regression of resources that has been occurring in low-income neighborhoods.

“So much of what we're fighting right now in the Legislature isn't about even expanding access, it's trying to maintain what little access we do have,” O’Connor said.

For Morales, it seemed evident that food deserts led to a reliance on junk food for many in her community. And that was making them unhealthy.

During a school supply drive she hosted with the Morales Memorial Foundation, Morales noticed many of the kids were overweight. That prompted her and the organizers to partner with a local H-E-B grocery store to hand out healthy snacks along with school supplies.

"This is about having equity and better health outcomes for our communities and making sure no family struggles to find fresh food in their own neighborhood,” Morales said.

Another bill hopes to address health issues with changes to eating habits.

Filed by state Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican, the bill would allow health care organizations to provide access to healthy food programs instead of prescribing medication when appropriate. These programs could include nutrition counseling, providing meals tailored to a person’s medical needs, and food prescription programs that prescribe a certain amount of fruits and vegetables to a patient.

Just as some lawmakers are trying to create more access to food, others are trying to limit what low-income Texans using government assistance can buy.

More than 3.3 million Texans receive benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, but state lawmakers are proposing four bills that would impose restrictions on the program. One bill would ban the purchase of candy and soft drinks under SNAP.

While the ultimate goal is to provide nutritious food, O’Connor argued that it’s important to maintain access to less healthy food through

O’Connor and Every Texan oppose restrictions under SNAP, pointing out that it is often a temporary benefit for some that helps them get through the day.

“You need enough calories to get through the day and then we can start talking about what those calories should look like,” she said. “That's what it's intended for. It's an emergency type of situation with SNAP.”

Like with Yzaguirre, one of the biggest issues with accessing healthy food is the strain on people’s budgets.

In Hidalgo County, the biggest county in the Valley, 27% of people live in poverty, which is double the rate statewide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

As part of the food pantry services, Boeta-Lopez delivers food to hospital patients who are about to be discharged and who are identified as food insecure. Countless times, she said she’s encountered patients who struggled to afford food.

She recalled a couple who were especially grateful for the emergency bag of food because the husband’s hospitalization had meant they could not rely on his income.

“When I brought the food, the wife just broke down in tears,” Botea-Lopez said.

The couple said they didn’t know where their next meal would come from.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

Disclosure: DHR Health, Every Texan and H-E-B have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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