More
| Subscribe
| 14-Day
Archives (Free) | Long-Term
Archives (Paid)
• Part 1: This is hospital food?
• Part 2: WHAT'S COOKING AT PORTLAND HOSPITALS
This is hospital
food?
LESLIE
COLE
Picture
hospital food.
Now picture this:
A hungry new mom orders wild
salmon with a side of roasted organic sweet potatoes from a hospital kitchen
that cooks it on the spot and hustles it to her room.
Doctors sip organic,
fair-trade coffee from biodegradable bamboo cups. Cafeteria chefs walk to a
weekly farmers market steps away from the hospital's doors, filling baskets with
pesticide-free fruit and vegetables for the next day's meals.
Quite a
contrast from a bowl of canned fruit cocktail.
Hospitals nationwide are
starting to follow their own advice: In order to be healthy, your food and
environment should be that way, too. It's happening right here in
Food-service managers are
tweaking cafeterias to look more like restaurants, pushing recyclables and
trimming kitchen waste. They're serving patient meals in the style of hotel room
service, and looking for ways to get locally grown foods and hormone- and
antibiotic-free milk and meat on their menus. Some are even rethinking the
contents of the hallowed hospital vending machine.
"What I'm hearing is, they
are increasingly seeing food as a treatment issue and not necessarily as a cost
center," says Scott Exo, executive director of Food
Alliance, a nonprofit organization that's working with hospitals to get more
local, sustainably grown food into their supply chains.
It's still early in this
revolution in
Purchasing plans call for
buying more local products, steering clear of pesticides and antibiotics, and
reducing or eliminating waste. Some food service-directors are thinking more
like restaurateurs, asking how good the food can be, to draw more people in and
push profits higher.
This is hospital
food?
Page 2 of
5
Kaiser Permanente -- with
billboards brimming with blueberries, and a two-year-old food policy that calls
for, among other things, modeling healthful eating habits and buying locally
grown, chemical-free food -- is out in front of the pack, at least on paper.
"That's very much a
long-term vision," says Sandra Kelly, Kaiser's regional food-service
coordinator. "But I think the train's really going down the track."
A small hospital
makes big changes Despite big plans and
wish lists, little has changed so far at
At Hermiston's
Nancy Gummer, the hospital's
nutrition services director for 11 years, introduced scratch cooking and
made-to-order meals last year, and recently overhauled
her menu with more healthful choices, because it was the right thing to do, she
says, and because the old way wasn't working.
"It was an exercise in
futility," she says. "You'd send up trays, bring them back down, and throw it
away. People didn't especially like the food."
Now, instead of dishing up
meals from a steam table at the stroke of noon, Gummer's staff stays busy from 7
a.m. to midnight, trimming organic broccoli for stir-fries, dicing tomatoes for
fresh salsa, mashing avocados for guacamole. They're grilling fajitas when
orders come in, toasting and grinding flax seed for the salad bar, making pots
of chili from scratch.
Out went the old gravy mixes
and high-sodium canned soups, laced with additives that "have no benefit for the
person eating it," says Gummer, who also teaches
nutrition classes for diabetics.
If you want salmon, you can
have it, and it's wild-caught. Your burger, as of January, is made with ground
bison meat; Gummer pulled ground beef off the menu, a risky move here in cattle
country, but burger sales bumped up 25 percent with the meat that's 75 percent
leaner. You can still order roast beef or a steak, but it comes from cattle
fattened up without hormones or antibiotics.
This is hospital
food?
Page 3 of
5
And in this
meat-and-potatoes town of 15,000, roasted sweet potatoes and brown rice, two new
side dishes, get ordered just as much as regular spuds and fries.
The 52-year-old registered
dietitian says she makes her decisions by asking a few simple questions: "What's
the healthiest food I can feed these patients? How can the food we buy
contribute to the health of the environment we're living in?"
And, Gummer asks, does it
taste good?
The answer is in the
numbers. She's serving more meals now, around 15 percent more. Patients ask for
recipes, and nonpatients can, and do, eat here as
well, calling in orders and swinging by the hospital to pick them up. Her 26
employees are busier, but happier, she says. Some of the items are more
expensive, but she is more accurately able to estimate the amount of food she'll
use. A few things are cheaper, such as new take-out containers made of corn and
sugar cane, from Biodegradable Food Service in
"What we're discovering is,
it's a perception that doing the right thing is more expensive," Gummer says.
"It's not a reality. . . . I haven't been a month over budget, on food or
anything else."
Even if it were, a hospital
comes out ahead, Gummer says. "When you're looking at food costs and health
costs, you can't look at, 'How much per pound am I paying?' You have to look at
the whole picture. Healthier people use less health-care resources."
While it can be tough to get
certain foods in Hermiston, far from urban truck routes, Gummer's been able to
find almost everything she needs from her regular distributor, Food Services of
America in Spokane. The only new piece of equipment required for scratch
cooking: two stainless-steel pizza prep tables, with extra work space,
refrigerated compartments and bins to hold fresh, chopped vegetables.
Changing her approach was
easy, she says, because the hospital is small. "We don't have as many layers.
When we want to make change, we just do it."
Distributors supply lots of
food, but not always what's wanted Hermiston's model is harder to duplicate in
Hospitals typically buy food
from large national food distributors, under contracts approved by a Group
Purchasing Organization, which pools transactions to keep costs down. The
distributor (
This is hospital
food?
Page 4 of
5
In exchange for getting lots
of food delivered on schedule at a low price, hospital kitchens sacrifice
flexibility and control: They can ask for Oregon-grown berries and broccoli, or
biodegradable coffee cups, but if the distributor doesn't carry them, they can't
get them without going outside the contract.
"Most of the hospitals would
like to feel that we're actually the customer again," says Steven Hiatt, food
and nutrition services director at
Some are leaning on
distributors to pull in different products, others talk
of pooling their buying power and finding vendors willing and able to get them
local, sustainably grown foods.
"We're hoping it keeps them
awake," says Lin Rush,
However attractive buying
from a local farmer might seem, it's not always
realistic for big institutions.
"We're very much at the
beginning of this conversation," says Suzanne Briggs, a
Even if they could get fresh
broccoli and spinach from the farmer down the road, many hospital kitchens --
designed for reheating, not cooking -- aren't set up to handle it. They need
refrigerated space to store it, sinks to clean it, counters to chop it and staff
to do the work.
Kitchen scraps now go
to composting company But in other
areas, hospital kitchens already look different.
This is hospital
food?
Page 5 of
5
OHSU and two of Legacy's
hospitals replaced disposals with waste pulpers, which
grind up leftover food and compostable garbage, suck
out moisture and drop it into biodegradable bags. Trucks pick up 2 tons of the
stuff each week from OHSU's loading dock and haul it
to Cedar Grove Composting in Everett, Wash. (the company is looking to open a
new facility in Portland), where it's piled into windrows and eventually breaks
down into a garden mix that's bagged and sold at home improvement stores.
Nancy Oberschmidt, assistant director of food and nutrition
services and the kitchen's recycling guru, also has found biodegradable
replacements for nearly all Styrofoam and plastic dishware and utensils the
kitchen once used.
Also at OHSU, where 80
percent of the meals are served to visitors and staff, Hiatt wants cafeterias to
act more like restaurants, pushing flavor and the pedigree of products. Early
signs: Coffee pots campuswide brew organic, fair-trade
and shade-grown coffee; vegetarian sushi and grilled vegetable wraps aren't just
a sop for nonmeat-eaters; they actually taste good.
At
The Wednesday farmers market
across from Kaiser's North Interstate Medical Offices will be back for a second
season in May, bringing farm trucks to the neighborhood, and fresh berry
smoothies and local salad greens to the building's cafe.
Providence Milwaukie started serving room service-style meals to
patients last year, following a national trend, and other hospitals in the group
will switch from the old tray-line system this year and next. Rush, the hospital
services director, is working with the Food Alliance, an advocacy group for
sustainable farming, to get more locally grown foods on menus, starting with a
trial run of Country Natural Beef burgers at Providence St. Vincent Hospital.
"I think we have a community
that's ready for this. I'm not sure the whole country is ready, but we are in
the Northwest."
Leslie Cole: 503-294-4069;
lesliecole@news.oregonian.com
WHAT'S COOKING AT
PORTLAND HOSPITALS
KAISER
PERMANENTE
Serves
1,200 meals per day at
Corporate food policy
emphasizes healthful choices, local purchasing of food produced without
synthetic pesticides or antibiotics.
Quotable: "Some would say,
'You shouldn't be serving beef at all.' We're not going to get to that, but it
would be nice to get to a place where we could have meat produced with as little
antibiotics and hormones as possible."
-- Sandra Kelly, regional
food service coordinator, Kaiser Permanente
4,500
meals per day at campus cafes, catering and coffee bars, plus 1,000 patient
meals.
Revamping
cafeteria choices to look more like restaurant fare, emphasizing fresh, seasonal
and local. Vegan sushi, fair-trade organic coffee, rBST-free dairy products, biodegradable plates and compostable silverware. Replaced
disposals with "pulpers," diverting nearly 2 tons of
food waste per week from landfill.
Quotable: "Our idea is, two
years from now, you walk up here, and you would not have the sense you were
eating in a hospital. Maybe it's not exactly
-- Steven Hiatt, director of
food and nutrition services,
WHAT'S COOKING AT
PORTLAND HOSPITALS
Page 2 of
2
LEGACY HEALTH SYSTEM
8,500 meals per day served
at five area hospitals. Formed healthy environment committee
to address purchasing and food procurement; rBST-free
milk systemwide; hormone-free meat at
Quotable: "Just in this
region alone, we're way ahead of the country on recycling. Food is the new big
wave."
-- Tom Badrick, recycling and waste manager, Legacy Health System
6,700
staff and visitor meals, 2,800 patient meals per day at four
hospitals. Whole-grain hot cereals, rBST-free dairy
products, daily choice of low-fat entree in cafeterias. Trial run with
Country Natural Beef burgers at St. Vincent Medical Center; working with Food
Alliance, a group that certifies sustainably produced food, to get more local
products in the pipeline. Room-service-style patient meals at
Quotable: "As a part of the
hospital, we need to be consistent with the health message they are trying to
send. We should start at home, in our own backyard."
-- Lin Rush, regional
hospitality services director, Providence Health System