Pandemic exposed weakness in ensuring healthy food access in child care

FACULTY Q&A When child care programs across the country closed due to COVID, millions of children lost access to the healthy food they had been receiving through the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program, exposing the weakness in our country's systems for ensuring young, low-income children have access to healthy food. Katherine Bauer , assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, discusses the issue and proposes strategies to repair problems. Her research focuses on identifying social and behavioral determinants of obesity among children and adolescents, and the translation of this etiologic research into feasible and effective community-based interventions. How was the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program affected by the pandemic? The federal Child and Adult Care Food Program ensures that 4.6 million children in the U.S. are fed healthy meals and snacks by their childcare providers. We know that these meals and snacks meet rigorous nutritional standards and keep families from being food insecure. When COVID spread through the U.S. and child cares across the country closed or had their enrollment dramatically limited to allow for social distancing, few people were talking about the fact that millions of children had lost access to this healthy food. Strong measures were put in place to ensure that older children who could no longer attend school weren't going hungry, and the government did put some provisions in place to make food distribution by child cares easier during COVID, but most child care programs just did not have the capacity to feed children during this tumultuous time. Why?