After a month of eating hospital food, I am lying in bed with a cup of homemade vegetable soup contemplating the meaning of it all.
There are few better places to draw attention to your health than hospitals. After all, the place is filled with sick people and the healthy people who are present are only there to visit or to treat sick people. Without sick people, there would not be hospitals.
I would have thought that by now we would recognise the important role of food in the physical healing of sick or frail humans. But after a month of chomping down on hospital food, I can assure you we have a long way to go.
I recognised so many of our standard family favourites – Shepard’s pie; spaghetti bolognaise; lasagna; tuna bake with pasta; macaroni and cheese; and beef stew – on the hospital menu, I could only deduce that they were trying to emulate mom’s home-cooking, for why else would you feed these starch-heavy meals to frail people?
I often had to wait for the late-night snack with tea to find something fresh – usually a slice of tomato. And before you think I am bashing the hospital, I am not.
They looked after me very well; but their menu was far from adequate.
Too much starch and too much sugar, too much processed food and not enough fresh food. Even on a good day, I found the menu depressing.
So I started thinking: Would it not be great if hospitals start serving fresh and healthy food? After all, they are in the business of healing, right? I know that fresh food and ingredients are expensive in this country and all large catering operations work on very tight budgets.
But what if our hospitals grow their own food? Think of it as a garden-to-bed project, where the hospital grows at least part, if not all, the food that is served to patients. And the food – mainly vegetables but also things like honey – can be grown on site or at a location nearby. Growing vegetables in urban areas is nothing new, and quite a few hospitals have joined the urban food growers’ movement.
The Boston Medical Centre is but one such an example.
The hospital has a 650 square metre vegetable farm and a farm manager who oversees the production of vegetable crops on the farm. Some of these vegetables are used in the hospital’s cafeteria, while others are used in the demonstration kitchen where a registered dietitian teaches patients to prepare healthy meals, and patients also receive locally grown food on their plates.
As part of the hospital’s community out-reach programme, some of the locally grown food will be donated to the hospital’s preventative food pantry from where low-income patients can get food that meets their nutritional needs.
The number of hospitals growing their own food is on the rise worldwide. They do it for a number of reasons: To address issues of sustainability; to encourage healthier eating; and to strengthen community connections. Hospitals have established farms either on their own facilities (including roof tops) or on nearby spaces, and in most cases they employ at least a manager to oversee production and make use of the local community to help with harvesting.
Another model of food production for hospitals sees the hospital teaming up with local farms to produce the food needed for their patients.
I left the hospital contemplating what it would take to convince the hospital owners to start such a gardening project. It does not have to be a big farm. Aquaponics and other urban farming models have proved to be quite efficient with high yields of especially leafy green vegetables on a relative small footprint.
No doubt we’ll all benefit from better food choices: Less animal protein and more leafy green vegetables. Institutions should become more involved in the providing these choices; it is in their interest too.
Somehow, however, I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.
Sad but probably true.
• 4 tomatoes, large, ripe
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 2 1/2 cups tomato juice
• 1 cup stale white bread, crusts removed
• 1/4 cup sherry vinegar
• 2 English cucumber, seeded and chopped
• 1 red onion, medium, chopped
• 1 tablespoon garlic, chopped
• 1 fresh parsley leaves, big handful, chopped
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