Kentucky Hunters for Hunger, Kentucky department of fish and wildlife, Feed My Sheep Food Pantry and UK Nutrition Education Program.

I hear you say “What do all these have in Common”?

Well, they are all concerned with providing healthy food and advice on cooking that food .  Cumberland County is a rural low income community. There is a big need for supplemental food for quite a lot of households. The extension agriculture and natural resource agent and the family and consumer science agent along with myself the NEP assistant had worked in partnership with the farmers market and health coalition to sponsor fresh fruit and vegetables programs at the feed my sheep food pantry program and farmers market . The programs had been in effect for a couple of years and each year we pre and post survey the clients on their health and eating habits we found there has been significant improvement in the health issues of their clients.

However, there has always been a battle to provide a healthy protein source such as chicken or canned beans and hams, peanut butter was in limited supply. Our local chicken plant supplies most of the proteins but sometimes it is in short supply or the pantry can’t afford to purchase it.

So when the” hunters for the hungry” approached the NEP Assistant and Extension office as the contact to receive free processed venison. Hunters for the hungry is  a program that works with the Kentucky department of fish and wildlife that permits hunters who like to hunt but don’t want the meat they donate the deer to a community processor to process it into one pound bags  and the extension arrange the distribution to the food pantries. We were happy to accommodate this program.

 The Universities’ nutrition education program had just been working with the Kentucky department of agriculture, department of fisheries and wildlife, developing recipes that clients could use to cook these foods. So then when the food was being given out we could give people these recipes on ways to use it. This was our first year of the community receiving the venison and we did not expect to receive much but we received about six hundred pounds of venison from the program. Clients at the pantries were very skeptical at first but once they had tried it two out of every three wanted more the next time.

Everyone wins with this program, Hunters can practice their sport and the processor gets paid to process the meat, the pantries get free meat and the community members get a healthy lean protein and recipes to cook with it.