VeggieRx: A Red Wing clinic prescribes and gives healthy food to patients, for free
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
Quick Read
Like many of us, Jose Luis Garcia knows he should be eating better and healthier. And he wants to provide healthier food options to his wife and two children, too.
But that's easier said than done for the 50-year old, who works long hours on a dairy farm in rural Goodhue County, about an hour southeast of the Twin Cities.
Grocery stores are few and far between, and the early morning and evening milkings make it difficult to travel to distant big box grocers and supermarkets. On top of that, fresh produce, whole grains and lean proteins often cost more than junk food and fast food.
“It is very easy for a doctor to say you gotta eat more fruits and vegetables, but can the people afford it, especially if they have kids?” said Fernanda Jimenez, a community health worker at the CARE Clinic, which serves low income residents in and around Red Wing.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
Near the entrance of the small medical clinic sits an industrial-sized fridge, chock full of fruits and vegetables.
Jimenez helps Luis Garcia fill a bag with fresh lettuce, cucumbers, apples and oranges to take home to his family.
“It helps a lot,” Luis Garcia said.
The healthcare providers at CARE Clinic, which serves uninsured and underinsured patients in Red Wing and surrounding rural areas, provide bags of fresh produce from this fridge to their patients each week, free of charge.
CARE Clinic’s VeggieRx program, known as the Fresh Food Farmacy, takes that extra step of not just prescribing healthier foods, but providing it to patients who need them.
It’s one of several similar programs that have cropped up across the state and nation to respond to growing food insecurity, which is expected to worsen amid the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to the federal SNAP food aid program. VeggieRx programs can be especially impactful in rural areas where residents are at a higher risk for developing chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, and can have a harder time finding and affording healthy food.
CARE Clinic’s program is yielding promising results — reminding health providers and legislators that healthy food can be an important tool to improve rural health outcomes, if it’s made available.
Food as medicine
Julie Malyon, director of CARE Clinic, said she started the Fresh Food Farmacy partly to conduct research and determine if her patients could stave off diabetes if they got free produce once a week.
“Just as you take medicine to help your chronic disease, you make your food choices,” Malyon said, “and that can affect your chronic disease management as well.”
For years, the clinic surveyed people about their diabetes status and tested blood levels routinely of those that participated in the Fresh Food Farmacy. Then, CARE Clinic intern Aliena Grainger and Mayo Clinic Health System physicians Randy Foss and Ryan Burroughs collaborated to crunch the numbers.
They found that people with diabetes who regularly accessed the fresh produce reduced their A1C levels and achieved clinically meaningful improvements in glycemic control.
Malyon said she was excited by the results, especially since it’s not just the patients who pick up the fruits and veggies that benefit.
“We give them enough to bring home for their whole family, so then the kids in the household [who] might be prone to [diabetes], they're having healthier options in the home as well,” Malyon said. “[So it helps] that next generation too.”
Why is it harder to get healthy food in rural areas?
While food insecurity isn't just a rural problem, there are some factors that make it more difficult to get fresh produce far away from a big city.
Abby Gold, a health and nutrition specialist at the University of Minnesota Extension, said that rural grocery stores often struggle to maintain and provide a wide range of fresh produce since they see fewer customers.
"They'll stock onions and potatoes and, you know, green peppers — things that have a longer shelf life,” Gold said. “Things like leafy greens or bananas, if people don't buy them quickly, they don't look so good after a few days. And then the grocery stores don't really want to stock them because they're not being purchased."
The produce also tends to be more expensive for rural consumers because the food has to travel a longer distance, and the smaller grocer likely pays higher prices because they can’t buy in bulk at cheaper rates like a bigger supermarket chain, such as Trader Joe’s, Wal-Mart, or Costco would.
Gold explained that programs like Fresh Food Farmacy can’t be the only answer to food insecurity, primarily because they rely on grant funding and private donations which aren’t always sustainable long term. But they do help. And she said their growing popularity is a big step forward.
"Providers are starting to recognize the importance of food as a part of health,” Gold said. “It’s not enough to just say to your patients, ‘Hey, you need to lose weight,’ and send them off. They’re actually trying to think of ways to help their patients access healthy foods, so they can follow their doctor's advice.”
How is H.R. 1 impacting SNAP food benefits?
But healthcare providers, food banks and food shelves still have a long way to go to make healthy food more accessible to rural residents, and the number of Minnesotans who are food insecure is rising sharply.
H.R. 1, which Republicans in Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in 2025, included much stricter eligibility requirements for people to receive food aid benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, or SNAP. The law cuts off benefits for some legal, non-U.S. citizens, including refugees and those seeking asylum. It also expanded work requirements for people aged 55-64 and parents whose children are 14 or older, and the law shifts SNAP administrative and benefit costs onto states and local governments.
The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families reported that since the law Trump calls his One Big Beautiful Bill Act was enacted in July 2025, 26,000 fewer Minnesotans are receiving SNAP or Minnesota Family Investment Program assistance, a 6 percent decline — pushing more people towards already overrun and financially-strained food shelves. In fact, the food bank Second Harvest Heartland reports record demand for food aid over the last year.
Special thanks to Danger Boat Productions and the Minnesota Humanities Center for their Sketches of Minnesota events around the state that helped inform this report.
