Healthy food in health care?

Fresh sautéed organically grown kale. Free range, antibiotic free chicken, roasted in the oven. Locally grown apples and Minnesota maple syrup reduced to a simmering sauce. It sounds like the menu at a fine restaurant, or a fancy dinner party.

But sustainable, locally grown organic foods like these are showing up in hospitals around the country.

Now at least one Twin Cities hospital group has signed on to the "Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge."

More than 100 healthcare facilities nationwide have signed the pledge. They plan to make the bright red jello seeping onto that piece of grey meat a thing of the past. It's happening because some healthcare leaders are coming to believe that dollars spent on healthy foods are actually dollars invested in preventing disease.

The hospitals that have signed this pledge are pledging to increase the offering of fruits and vegetables and to work with local farmers and food suppliers to increase the availability of locally produced food.

They also pledge to communicate with patients about nutritious, socially just and ecologically sustainable healthy food practices and procedures AND they pledge to minimize and beneficially reuse food waste.

Each year they report to the activist group Health Care Without Harm about their progress.

There’s already some changes in place at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis. They just served a holiday meal to their staff that was filled with organic and local foods. In their cafeteria and in their hospital kitchen, they’ve switched to a local dairy, Valley View Farms, in Hastings, which provides their milk, half and half and yogurt. These items are not treated with the growth hormone rBGH.

They’ve got shade grown, organic coffee. I walked into the Welcome Center to the smell of strong, fresh coffee, like what I would smell at my neighborhood coffee shop. It almost knocked me over.

I know that coffee isn’t the healthiest drink in the world (and it sure isn’t local), but it was very fresh coffee. They’ve got pastries, many baked with whole grains, from a local bakery, Franklin Street Bakery, just a few blocks away. Some items in their salad bar are organic. They try to get local produce such as apples, carrots, and greens, whenever they can.

Then there’s the big issue of patients getting their food at a time that is completely inconvenient for them. They might have just had some kind of procedure. Maybe they’ve got visitors.

Hospitals are starting “room service” where meals can come to them when they’re hungry.

More hospitals are serving gourmet cuisine. Some of it is locally sourced.

And hospitals are starting to pay attention to the ethnicity of their patients and patients’ families in order to cook for them what is familiar.

It’s very traumatic for a family to have someone in the hospital. Hospitals are trying to ease the transition to a temporary “home” at the hospital by having familiar food choices.

So as you’re recovering in a hospital, you need to eat what’s good for you. But you need to like it too, and it’s nice if it tastes familiar. In Alaska, The Alaska Native Medical Center is serving familiar foods like caribou stew, boiled fish and berries.

I have a relative in the hospital right now. I brought her a homemade meatloaf sandwich the other day, with mustard and lettuce. She said to me “anything but HOSPITAL FOOD!” When I told her we had just made meatloaf, she really wanted to have some (and it’s meatloaf that’s made from natural grass fed beef, without antibiotics, which she can’t get yet at her hospital).

In a competitive health care market, it does seem like hospitals are cashing in on these trends as a marketing gimmick.

But there’s clearly consumer demand for fresh, organic food.

I asked my own kids about this. They’ve been to hospitals before. They like the idea that the kind of milk we drink at home could be available at hospitals.

We always laugh about the McDonalds that’s right in the middle of Abbott Northwestern Hospital, right near the Heart Institute…

How about healthy food in nursing homes and assisted living facilities? Fresh vegetables and fruit. Whole grains. Lean meats. Variety. Choice. I wish I could say this is coming soon to a nursing home near you.

Good idea. I hope that as healthy foods catch on in places like schools and hospitals that nursing homes will join the party. Think how comforting it would be for nursing home patients to have familiar foods served to them. Warm apple pie with real ice cream!