Healthier Hospital Food

By Margot Roosevelt

It's no accident that a punk-rock band from Salt Lake City, Utah, called itself Hospital Food. The typical fare at medical centers is ba-a-a-ad. "When you say 'hospital food,' people laugh because it's so lousy," says Jamie Harvie of Health Care Without Harm, a Minnesota-based nonprofit.

But there's hope. Nutritionists have started to address the incongruity of a medical establishment that bemoans obesity-related illness yet contracts with pizza and burger franchises for its cafeterias and loads its vending machines with trans-fat-laden cookies. Some health-minded activists have launched a movement to serve patients fresh, seasonal food, and hospitals are beginning to change their menus accordingly. "They're starting to see food not simply as a cost but as a prevention-and-treatment issue," says Scott Exo, head of the Oregon-based Food Alliance.

Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest nonprofit health system, has arranged for weekly farmers' markets at 29 of its hospitals and has switched to milk from cows raised without synthetic hormones at all its medical centers. Organic fruits and vegetables are now being served at St. Luke's Hospital in Duluth, Minn., and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. In Hermiston, Ore., Good Shepherd Health Care System banned potato chips in favor of baby carrots and replaced beef with antibiotic- and hormone-free bison. "It has 75% less fat than beef and a third less fat than chicken," says dietitian Nancy Gummer.

The benefits of eating natural are clear, says Gummer: "If you eat unprocessed foods, you avoid the sodium, fat, sugar and additives that contribute to diabetes, heart disease and other ailments."

Still, patients and their families trying to rewrite hospital menus face formidable obstacles. Big medical centers, which serve hundreds of thousands of meals a year, buy bulk food from large distributors--much of it packaged and precooked. For the most part, those distributors do not offer antibiotic-free chicken or organic broccoli.

But that's starting to change, spurred in part by hospitals' trying to attract well-heeled customers with generous health insurance. Last month MedAssets, a group purchaser for 2,400 hospitals, signed a contract with United Natural Foods, the nation's largest purveyor of organic products. And two months ago, Health Care Without Harm noharm.org launched a Healthy Food in Health Care pledge campaign for consumers to enlist their hospitals. So far, 47 medical centers have signed on to push for chemical-free food. Says Marie Kulick of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, author of a study on hospital fare: "The more patients ask for this food, the more likely they are to get it."