How does Physicians for Social Responsibility work with local healthcare centers to improve food?
We provide technical assistance, organizational support, and forums for food service directors to share what they’ve learned about how to purchase, prepare, and serve nutritious and healthy food that’s good for people and the environment. This kind of institutional change is really challenging. There’s an entrenched system of buying and making food in hospitals with purchasing contracts that can be tough to work around. But I’ve seen a shift here since a conference in Oakland in 2005 called FoodMed, where we brought sustainable agriculture representatives together with hospital food directors. Why is this work important to you? It’s one thing to make the personal decision to eat locally grown produce and cook meals at home and grow your own food. That’s all good, but it’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. I want to affect food change in a large-scale way, and tackling hospital food is one way to do that. I do think it’s important for patients to get healthy food while they’re in h
