Food is medicine, plants are medicine, nature is medicine. It has always been. This approach isn’t just some radical, mainstream trend that recently became popular. Throughout history, we used plants in the place of medicine, that’s how we somehow learned to make our precious chemical drugs. However, maybe some place between industrialization and the modern era, we forgot what natural plants meant to us.

A recent trip in one of my classes taught me about a new initiative that has been established around the US and is also present really close to our school located in Fishersville. This is a new initiative that focuses on delivering freshly produced organic food to food insecure families. The AMI Farm at Augusta Health also focuses on patients from the hospital and leads workshops where they teach to cook for certain types of illnesses.

However, I did have a reservation about this initiative regarding its affordability. You see, AMI is supported by the hospital itself, but on a bigger scale insurance companies would need to step in. Seeing that they are hesitant about covering mental health services, I thought that insurance companies wouldn’t even take a step toward helping a program like this. Nevertheless, I learned from the manager at AMI that there would be a likely scenario in which doctors and insurance people, and many more would need to collaborate in order to defend the initiative and assure the companies that it would help people beyond their understanding. Of course, this wouldn’t be doable in the very near future, but I feel as if knowing it is possible is a first good step.

Maybe this initiative could even be universalised if the right steps were to be taken. Possibly teaching workshops in order to inform about better and healthier ways of cooking, especially for patients, would lead to measurable outcomes. Of course, there is also the whole “delivering fresh produce that hasn’t been processed or dipped in some chemicals to your doorstep” thing. Even though there may be huge challenges in the way of universalising this, it would be an amazing thing to see. Even though I feel like countries should focus on trying to solve the problem of food insecurity, providing people with better and healthier food may be the next step that should be taken.