In the 1960s, Dr. Jack Geiger and a group of health professionals started a community health center in the Mississippi Delta, where children were dying from infectious diarrhea and malnutrition. Geiger and company began writing prescriptions for healthy food — patients would buy the prescribed food at a grocery store that would charge the clinic for the cost. When Geiger caught flack for prescribing food instead of drugs, he replied, “The last time I looked at my textbooks, the most specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”
