In the bowels of an east Toronto hospital lined with aquamarine tile and vintage Garland ovens, a star chef has begun a year-long experiment to revolutionize the most mocked and inedible of institutional foods.
Joshna Maharaj built her reputation whipping up healthy feasts at disparate venues, from a food bank to a high-end cooking school. The challenge of restoring palatability to in-patient food is her most daunting yet – and whether she succeeds is likely to influence the future of hospital food across the country.
The presence of the Toronto-based chef at Scarborough Hospital is proof that people in power have begun to recognize the link between health and good food, and believe it should be heeded in a place that caters to the ailing. Paradoxically, hospital patients are fed some of the nation’s cheapest food – each meal costs less than three dollars per person. Much of it goes into the trash: About 40 per cent of what kitchens dish out is rejected. Administrators everywhere are struggling with this and low patient satisfaction; many admit they would never feed their families the low-budget food their kitchens serve to patients.
“Hospital food is a joke. There’s not enough fresh vegetables, no salads,” said Anne Marie Males
The most tantalizing prospect involves adding fresh or local foods and returning to scratch cooking. Most Canadian hospitals have long since given up the basics, such as distilling soup stock from simmered bones, in favour of convenient powdered mixes. Some have gutted kitchens altogether, lured by the 30-per-cent labour cost savings that comes with installing what the industry terms “kitchen-less” systems. These consist mainly of “re-thermalization” units used to reheat food that is prepared offsite in massive kitchens. They formulate nutritionally correct meals with scientific precision.
These systems, which gained popularity in the 1980s, are “the only way of operating an efficient food service operation within the funding envelope of the Canadian Public Health Care system,” according to material published by Burlodge, a large meal delivery equipment vendor.
Ms. Maharaj’s mission is to prove that scratch cooking is a feasible panacea in this publicly funded, cash-strapped system. She’ll try to do it by shifting the hospital’s procurement – when it’s cheaper – to produce certified by the sustainability inspection group Local Food Plus. She imagines a pot of curry on the fire to appeal to multicultural tastes; recipes will be sent up to patients on friendly prescription-type cards so they can replicate them at home.
She has her work cut out for her: Hospital kitchens have long been seen as little more than a cost-centre ripe for cutbacks. That she has taken on the challenge is already a small victory for the food movement, which has long eyed the health and education systems as avenues for democratization.
“Food needs a champion. It needs someone to fight for it,” she said. “What you eat directly impacts your health and recuperation.”
The reams of studies documenting this led the hospital to hire Ms. Maharaj after winning a $191,000 grant from the provincial government and the Greenbelt Fund. That the government backed the proposal is a sign of Canada’s flirtation with an American trend: 40 U.S. hospitals run by the firm Kaiser Permanente have transformed themselves into community food hubs by hosting farmers’ markets to ease access to healthy fare. Propelling the effort is the belief that nutritious food is a public-health tool, one that can address many of the issues that cause illness – obesity, heart disease, diabetes – and drive up healthcare costs.
