People talk a lot about the health benefits of individual foods.

I hear a lot about blueberries.

They’re supposed to be filled with antioxidants that stop cell damage, for instance.

You got one, Tanya?

Yeah, kale! It’s a superfood, or so they say.

It packs a ton of vitamin K and vitamin C.

Okay, I confess, I know very little about kale and have no idea how I would eat it.

Well, I actually know a pretty good recipe for massaged kale salad.

Massaged?

Yeah, you just take raw kale and rinse it, and then you add lemon juice and olive oil and salt and pepper and just, you know, massage it until it tenderizes into a nice salad.

Cool, I’ll totally take your word for that.

The other food I was thinking about was my grandmother’s chicken soup.

It was supposed to be a cold remedy.

Actually, it was supposed to be a remedy for just about anything in my family.

That sounds tasty.

While we’re at it, I believe that chocolate croissants are scientifically proven to be good for the soul.

But don’t fact-check me on that.

Oh, no fact-checking here!

Debates about the health values of specific foods go back and forth anyway, and you’re probably tired of the whiplash.

So today we are not going to talk about blueberries or broccoli or chocolate croissants by themselves.

We’re going to talk about a trend in medicine in which doctors prescribe healthy food, like bags of fresh produce, just like they’d prescribe blood pressure medication.

And a colleague of ours just wrote a news article about this “food-is-medicine” movement in the journal JAMA.

What “food-is-medicine” is, what makes it distinctive, is it is getting people healthy food or groceries that will create healthy food with the explicit involvement of the healthcare system.

So prescribing medically tailored meals or prescribing groceries or actually giving people prescriptions to go and get produce for free.

That’s Maryn McKenna.

I am a journalist, I focus on science and public health.

I'm the author of a couple of books and a science writing professor and a contributing editor at Scientific American.

It's great to have you here, Maryn.

Happy to be here.

Now, can you tell us how a food-is-medicine program works?

In what I think is the most interesting example, there's a very famous physician in Michigan; her name is Mona Hanna-Attisha.

We know that name because Hanna-Attisha is the pediatrician who helped expose the high levels of lead in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water a decade ago—levels that were really toxic.

But she also is an activist for children's nutrition.

And since 2015, through her own pediatric clinic, which is part of Michigan State University's College of Medicine, she has been writing produce prescriptions for a farmer's market that was in the same building as her pediatric clinic.

In fact, Hanna-Attisha moved her office above the market to make it easier for patients to get their food.

She moved into the second story of a freestanding brick-and-mortar permanent farmer’s market in downtown Flint, Michigan.

And for every child who came into that clinic, she gave that child's family initially a $5 voucher for produce downstairs; it's now $15, and they've expanded to a couple of different sites.

Sounds like a really clever idea.

Has it actually made people healthier, though?

Well, it’s certainly improved the kids’ nutrition.

The Flint program has written 55,000 prescriptions for this food and given out the vouchers.

Now, the amount of fruits and vegetables and fiber and whole grains and dairy that the children ate went up—though it’s still not at the levels of federal nutrition guidelines, Maryn says.