New York Times Profiles California Organic Food Bank for HIV-Positive People

The New York Times on Tuesday profiled the Food for Thought Sonoma County AIDS Food Bank, a not-for-profit organic food bank and garden in Forestville, Calif., founded in 1999 to provide produce to HIV-positive people. About 450 HIV-positive people, including 60 women and 75 Latinos, regularly visit "what may well be the country's hippest food bank," the Times reports. "It's important that the people not just be passive recipients of care, to be conscious of what they put in their bodies," Allen Nishikawa -- an analyst at the Sonoma County, Calif., Department of Health Services -- said, adding, "It's part of a bigger movement to get people to be more thoughtful about things as basic as eating." Horticulturists from the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center help manage the garden, and many of the garden and food bank's volunteers are HIV-positive. According to the Times, the food bank -- which receives some federal funding but draws most of its budget from private donations -- "serves as horticultural therapy for the volunteers." Volunteer coordinator Stewart Scofield said, "You can't give away food without an emotional and spiritual component," adding, "We're friends and neighbors taking care of each other" (Brown, New York Times, 9/26).

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