Hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area are seeking to improve the taste, health, and sustainability of the food they serve, by reducing meat consumption and adding fresh, organic and higher quality ingredients to meals, reports Ingfei Chen for FERN in “Rehabilitating hospital food: aiming for healthy, sustainable and savory,” published today online at The Guardian.
The story features the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where the kitchen staff prepares around 1,500 patient food trays a day, along with thousands of meals for cafeteria patrons. Over the last seven years, food service representatives from UCSF and several other San Francisco Bay Area hospitals joined Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit organization, to brainstorm ways to change hospital food.
By reducing meat purchasing overall by 20 percent, UCSF diverted the savings into purchases of grass-fed ground beef now being served in their hamburgers, priced at $4.50. Combining efforts with six other local hospitals to negotiate pricing was key, Chen discovers. “The group realized that, by pooling their purchasing power, they could prod the mainstream food distribution chain to include more sustainably produced items,” she writes. “And, in the process, maybe turn the stereotype of bad hospital food on its head.”
Together the group has purchased 67,000 pounds of green beans, pesticide-free strawberries, squash, and other crops grown by 10 local family farmers. One farm cited in the story increased organic strawberry acreage by 30 percent to keep up with demand.
The campaign, which was adopted by a global coalition called Health Care Without Harm, is catching on: Nearly 500 hospitals in the U.S.–including hospitals in Los Angeles, Portland, and New England–have since joined and more than 150 of them have been cutting meats or switching to sustainable sources of it, reports Chen. The U.S. healthcare industry spends $12 billion a year on food procurement.
You can read the full report here at The Guardian and on our Web site.