USDA Blog

When you recognize the food on your plate, you recall memories of sharing meals with loved ones.

It was a sunny fall day in mid-October when I had the honor of visiting the Omaha Nation WIC program. Upon meeting WIC Director Jessika Free-Bass, I visited the Tribe's WIC garden, which they use to grow produce for client nutrition education. For the Omaha Tribe, nutrition education is a community...

Oklahoma Tribal Engagement Partners, or OKTEP, collaborates with sovereign tribal nations and tribal organizations throughout Oklahoma to tailor SNAP-Ed programming to meet the needs of Native families. Over time, focus groups have expressed what matters to Natives: the need to be “real.” As...

As USDA Rural Development (RD) highlights National Cooperative Month, one worker owned co-op in Massachusetts stands out as a model for sustainability, collaboration, and local food system resiliency. The saying goes “it’s not easy being green.” But for Real Pickles in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the...

On the brinks of Beaufort, South Carolina, lies the brimming, remote island of St. Helena where the Gullah farmers are hard at work. For years, the Gullah Geechee community, an African American ethnic group located in the low region of the U.S., have struggled to make a living off their biggest...

October is more than a time for crisp temperatures and vibrant autumn leaves. It’s also Farm to School Month, when USDA joins schools, farms, and community organizations across the country to celebrate the role of farm to school programs in getting healthy, locally grown foods onto children’s trays...

With a desire to create healthy relationships between American children and food, a group of chefs created Pilot Light in 2010. This program partners with Pre K–12 teachers to make food education a part of everyday classroom lessons. Through holistic food education, students learn about the...

Co-ops are a business structure, and like any business, they require hard work to be successful. They are unique in that they bring individuals together to solve issues they wouldn’t be able to solve on their own. Cooperatives can help communities by creating jobs, meeting social or economic needs...

School lunch sometimes gets a bad rap. But I am here to tell you that school lunch is amazing and looks a lot different than what you may remember if you’re a kid of the 90s, like me.

McClellanville County is a rural community in South Carolina, and like many communities across rural America, access to high-speed internet presents real barriers. Families like Lindsay’s struggled to stay connected in the digital age. “When the kids came home from school and I was working, no one...