'Thrifty Throwdown': Lewis County Public Health gets creative with WIC benefits

Children rely on their parents and tasty food to get everything they need to grow healthy and strong.

Lewis County hopes to help parents find a great way to make creative and tasty meals as affordably as possible.

Lewis County Public Health and Social Services hosted a special event this week for county employees. The event intended to teach them about the Women, Infants and Children benefits program, or WIC.

Framed as a competitive potluck, county employees were invited to bring meals to the Public Health building that were made using recipes relying entirely on food purchased using WIC benefits.

The event welcomed 10 dishes prepared by county employees, including the winner, a Mexican-style tuna salad sandwich, and other meals such as cowboy caviar, and hummus and avocado deviled eggs.

Each dish included a printout of the recipe, including how much the meal cost to make using WIC.

The end goal, according to Lewis County Public Health and Social Services employee Madi Riley, is to collect the WIC recipes and provide them to Lewis County residents who use the benefit program.

"We'll take all of that today. We'll create copies for our clients," Riley said. "When clients come in for in-person appointments, that's an example for them."

WIC is a country-wide benefit program similar to the nationwide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Unlike SNAP, however, WIC is only available to pregnant women and mothers of children under 5 years old. It also is more restrictive about which foods can be purchased.

The program, which is intended to improve nutrition in early childhood and promote healthy development, restricts eligible foods to those that meet certain nutritional standards. The program is a great help to mothers and children across the country, including roughly 1,600 in Lewis County, according to longtime Lewis County Social Services and Public Health employee Alisha Griffith said.

"We provide nutrition education, and so allowing them to make recipes that are using WIC ingredients ... and show them to WIC participants, and say, 'we've tasted this, and this is delicious, and it uses this many WIC ingredients, or you can make this entire thing without using additional items,'" Griffith said.

The event, which was open just to Lewis County employees, was about education. When talking about the event and her motivations, Griffith pointed out that she and her colleagues had noticed that many county employees didn't fully understand what WIC was and how it differed from programs like SNAP.

She hopes the relatively small event will help more members of the county better understand what WIC is so that they can help connect community members in need with the program.

"I wanted there to be an understanding that they're not just getting like a card where they can go buy whatever they want every month," Griffith said. "Participants are having appointments as frequent as every every month or every three months, where they're getting nutrition education or breastfeeding support. We're teaching families about how to use WIC foods."

WIC is a more restrictive benefit program than SNAP, but it also comes with more direct support, including meetings with county staff and education to help improve the health of future and current mothers in the area.

Learn more online at https://lewiscountywa.gov/departments/public-health/wic/.

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This story was originally published July 4, 2026 at 11:19 AM.