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HealthConnections: The Effect of COVID-19 on Childhood Nutrition

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Close to half a million Tennessee children are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. For many of those students, the food they eat at school might be the most substantive meal they get all day. When schools closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, that reliable daily connection to nutrition was severed. School systems scrambled to provide workarounds, usually in the form of food pickup sites.

In this edition of HealthConnections, we take a look at the scope of school lunches in East Tennessee and what they mean for the thousands of students that depend on them. Our guest is Dr. Betsy Anderson-Steeves of the University of Tennessee Department of Nutrition.