Baltimore City is working with programs to provide healthy food options beyond brick-and-mortar stores to ensure everyone has access.Going to a neighborhood grocery store is something many take for granted, but 16% of Baltimore City residents don’t have a grocery store in their community.Angela Coleman said choosing healthier foods has been one of the best medicines for her diabetes.”It helped me a lot. It got me down with my weight because my weight was 240. Now, I’m down to 180 because I learned how to control my eating,” Coleman told 11 News.During the COVID-19 pandemic, the city’s Food Policy and Planning Office used federal funding to expand access to healthy food from more than just brick-and-mortar stores.Coleman is part of MedStar Health’s Food Rx program, also known as “Food is Medicine.” It’s a six-month patient referral program for people struggling to manage diabetes, heart disease, chronic kidney disease and other illnesses.Angela Roberson, the program’s regional clinical manager, and her team started Food Rx in 2021 at MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital with the help of American Rescue Plan funds from the city. The program has since relocated to MedStar Harbor Hospital and MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center to teach patients how to eat healthy and give them healthy foods.”A lot of patients, when they come and we start talking about what it is we recommend, oftentimes they say, ‘Well, I would love to, but I can’t afford it,’” Roberson told 11 News. “We take that issue off the table by saying, ‘We are going to send you fresh fruit and vegetables, whole-grain bread, eggs. We are going to take care of that part of it for you.’””I had groceries coming to my home with fresh vegetables of all kinds straight from the farm, wherever it came from, but it was very fresh,” Coleman told 11 News. The Food Rx program is one of several programs that the city helps fund to ensure people have access to healthy and fresh food, even if they don’t have a grocery store in their neighborhood.”We know today, there’s not a grocery store in nearly as many of the neighborhood in the city that we would like there to be. So, we, as a food policy and planning team, have really shifted at our focus, particularly since the pandemic, to focus on what are other ways that we can improve food access,” said Taylor LaFave, the city’s chief of food policy and planning.The efforts include a produce box distribution program in which 32 community organizations in healthy food priority areas are involved.The Farmers’ Market Nutrition Incentive program match people’s SNAP dollars or other federal nutrition benefits with incentives to buy fresh food at farmers’ markets across the city.The city-funded Black Butterfly Teaching Farm trains the next generation of farmers who are Black, indigenous and people of color, and produces fresh produce.The city also offers an online SNAP Nutrition Incentive program.”These incentives are specifically for fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, where folks can receive $30 a month to purchase those through online SNAP,” LaFave told 11 News.People can use the links on the city’s website to shop for produce online from Amazon or Safeway.”Even if a resident in the city doesn’t live within an easy access of a brick-and-mortar grocery store, it doesn’t matter. They can still have that food delivered to their door,” LaFave told 11 News.