Rural communities in Ohio like Preble County face unique challenges when it comes to food access and hunger.
Full-service grocery stores aren’t often accessible to those without reliable transportation, leaving many to shop for less nutritional options.
Less development in rural counties can lead to food deserts and higher rates of food insecurity, said Amber Wright, development and marketing Coordinator for the Foodbank Inc.
“Rural counties are also often food deserts, which means that there's not a grocery store nearby that people can walk to," she said. "So if you don't have transportation and you're in a rural area and there's no bus line, you're just kind of out of luck.”
To combat this, The Foodbank hosted a mass food distribution for the county on Aug. 1.
The Foodbank offers between five to eight mass food distributions a year in Montgomery, Greene and Preble counties.
According to Wright, the Retail Rescue Program works with local grocery stores who donate their excess product to The Foodbank. From there, the organization redistributes the products to the areas that are most in need.
While the Foodbank does offer a retail rescue program in all three counties, Wright said without the retail stores to provide food for the program in Preble County, it can be hard to collect donations.
"Even though things typically come to us, we do try to connect our partners directly with some of our retail rescue partners so they can go and do their own pickups. And it goes directly to their warehouse instead of having to funnel through here. But we can't do that if there's just not [enough] grocery stores in Preble County," she said.
According to The Foodbank’s most recent Map the Meal Gap data, Preble County has 5,500 food insecure residents, including 1,500 children.
“Typically, rural counties do experience higher rates of food insecurity because it just goes hand in hand with the fact that rural counties have higher rates of poverty," Wright said. "They have higher rates of unemployment and, like I said before, lack of resources.”
Wright said food insecurity in Preble County nearly matches numbers in Montgomery County, which has a higher population.
"Typically, I would have guessed that the food insecurity would have been higher in Preble County compared to Montgomery because food insecurity typically is higher in rural counties. But Dayton is a different beast," she said. "Because Montgomery County contains Dayton, and Dayton has one of the highest poverty rates out of cities in comparable size in the nation, that kind of skews the data."
The Foodbank reported serving 216 families and households on Aug. 1. The team offered an array of staple pantry items, proteins, fresh produce and books for Preble County residents. CareSource also supplied residents with personal hygiene products such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, menstrual products and more.
