Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Farm to Hospital: Healing Patients, Ecology and Economy

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 3-20-07

Each week, Spade & Spoon discusses the localization of the food system in the Rocky Mountain West by profiling organizations and individuals who are attending to the issues and possibilities of eating closer to home.

When we got to the hospital’s maternity ward, my sister-in-law was watching the Food Channel and planning what she would cook once she got home. When her dinner of French fries arrived with an iceberg salad, ranch dressing in a plastic packet and mandarin oranges from the can, I raised my eyebrows and cringed. She responded, “It was the only thing that looked good.”

She described the soggy chicken, bland vegetables, “rubbery pancakes,” and grainy milkshakes that had constituted her caloric intake since delivering a 9lb 4oz boy who was now taking a solid share of the nutrition she wasn’t really getting.

As she picked at the flaccid fries, I thought of all the farms located within a hundred mile radius of the Portland hospital, beginning to pick the first kale and spinach of the year. (Turns out, there are about 35.) I imagined her eating a spinach salad with hazelnuts and farm fresh eggs, and how many more nutrients that food would send to her wound and her child who was just beginning to taste the world.

In the last few decades, the tasteless, caloric charlatans we call hospital food have become a national joke. The worst you can say about a meal is that you’ve eaten better in a hospital, where food is processed, unpalatable and often nutritionally deficient. (A recent study indicates that Vitamin C levels in hospital food are extremely low because food is overcooked.)

But even if this nasty food were nutritious, patients wouldn’t eat it. People without an appetite are less likely to be tempted by stringy green beans and gray meat.

While American patients squirm at meal time, countries providing national health care seem to be more attentive to the issue. In London, National Health Service hospitals initiated the Hospital Food Project in 2004 with the goal of increasing the use of local and organic food in four London hospitals. They aren’t just doing it for patient health; they are doing it for soil and economic health, noting that “increased support for local and organic supplies,” yields, “economic, environmental and social rewards.”

The Project’s activities include:

• Working with hospital staff to change menus and contracts
• Identifying suitable suppliers
• Helping suppliers to collaborate to meet contract requirements
• Training and supplying chain events
• Brokering
• Researching distribution methods
• Feasibility study into a local food distribution center
• Telephone help line and web based information service
• Informing policy makers

The project is also expected to stimulate new activity elsewhere such as research into economic and health effects of the project, production and dissemination of information, a practical study group for others wanting to set up similar projects and a conference to examine the work.

The same year that the Hospital Food Project was initiated, U.S. hospitals purchased over $3.3 billion worth of food (opens pdf), making hospitals the third largest institutional purchaser in the nation. Most of this money goes to private companies who are contracted to manage food service, preparation and sales.

But like Farm to School programs, which directly connect farmers with large institutional buyers like cafeterias and university food services, Farm to Hospital programs are burgeoning.

In Traverse City, Michigan, the Munson Medical Center buys from local farmers and holds “Meet Your Farmer” lunches for employees. Kaiser Permanente has initiated thirty farmers markets at medical facilities. In Santa Cruz, the nonprofit Sutter Maternity and Surgery Center has partnered with a local farmer to get fresh fruit and vegetables for new mothers and devoted seventeen percent of its produce budget for local purchases. In Billings, Montana, the Community Food Campaign urged a hospital to continue buying local turkeys even when the private company running their food service did not renew the contract.

And just up the hill from where my sister-in-law had her baby, the Oregon Health & Science University has increased purchases of local produce. The University serves patients 7,000 meals a day, and plans to increase the amount of heirloom and local varieties in order to support the health of patients, land and farmers alike. Currently, OHSU uses 130 tons of produce. Two percent of that is from local growers.

This is just the beginning of a purchasing program that could heal patients and the local economy. Until then, new mothers, their babies, the dying and the healing will have to keep watching television for tempting, tasty food.

As my sister-in-law picked at her fries, the television chef sliced garlic, sautéed it with onions in olive oil. She stripped rosemary from the stalk. She cooed at the smell. And the newborn baby began to cry.

Look for the Spade & Spoon column here every Tuesday. If you have article ideas for Spade & Spoon (www.newwest.net/spadeandspoon), email kisha@newwest.net.

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