Pulse
Think Globally, Eat Locally
St. Luke’s Hospital’s food procurement and waste management practices have become a national model for eco-friendly food service.
Chances are you separate recyclables at home, donate to food shelves, and buy organic food items. You may even compost table scraps. Now imagine trying to do these things if your job is to oversee the preparing and serving of 16,000 meals a week.
That’s what Mark Branovan, director of hospitality services at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, is trying to do in order to reduce food waste and promote healthful eating at his facility. In March of 2006, Branovan became the first head of a hospital food service to sign the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge, the nutrition equivalent of a “first, do no harm” commitment aimed at bringing hospital food services more in line with U.S. dietary guidelines.
By signing the pledge, sponsored by Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition of hospitals and health care organizations whose goal is to reduce waste in the health care sector, St. Luke’s and 122 other hospitals including Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota voluntarily commit to food procurement practices and reuse procedures that are healthful, socially responsible, and ecologically sustainable.
Taking the Pledge
In June of 2007, Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota became the second hospital in the state and the first children’s hospital in the country to sign the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge. Some of the things Children’s, which has facilities in Minneapolis and St. Paul, is doing include:
- Buying rBGH-free milk from a local dairy;
- Purchasing seasonal produce from local farms;
- Serving organic, shade-grown coffee;
- Using trans fat-free oil for frying;
- Reducing food waste by allowing patients to choose what they want to eat, when they want it; and
- Donating excess food to the Second Harvest Food Rescue Program.
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“It has never been about becoming an all-organic department but about taking baby steps that might impact employee health and patient healing,” Branovan says, explaining that the hospital began making changes in 2003, three years before taking the pledge.
The baby steps being taken at St. Luke’s have been written about in Time Magazine, Food Management, and American Hospital Association News. They are also the reason St. Luke’s received the 2008 Minnesota Governor’s Award for Waste and Pollution Prevention.
Starting with Spinach
In part, committing to the pledge means buying locally—no easy feat for a hospital located two blocks from the world’s largest and coldest freshwater lake. Anyone who has tried to grow tomatoes near Lake Superior knows why Duluth is called “the air-conditioned city.”
“Our growing season here is challenging and short,” Branovan says. Restaurant and institution demand for locally grown produce exceeds the supply at local farmers’ markets, so this year St. Luke’s contracted with a Two Harbors farmer to plant several fields of lettuce just for the hospital.
“For us, it all started with organic spinach,” Branovan says, explaining that the hospital got overwhelming support from staff, some of whom eat two meals a day at work, when they began buying a few organic items five years ago. Organic carrots and salad mix were next added to the menu. Then Branovan and his staff researched what they could buy closer to home. The thinking was that the food would be fresher and require less transportation and, thus, less fuel. The move also would give as much business as possible to local farmers in hopes they would consider St. Luke’s for their future health care needs. “We have many great relationships,” Branovan says.
But organic items can be more expensive, and finding the local egg man, bread lady, or vegetable farmer is labor intensive. To keep costs and effort down, St. Luke’s belongs to a group purchasing organization (GPO) that negotiates the best price possible for participants, leveraging the buying strength of many members including schools, businesses, hospitals, and other organizations with large food services. Several years ago, however, Branovan decided to go outside the GPO to buy half-pint containers of rBGH-free (hormone-free) milk from a small southern Minnesota dairy, expecting to pay more, but actually paying less. After three years of missing
St. Luke’s business, Branovan says the GPO is now providing rBGH-free milk in the size cartons they need.
Although St. Luke’s had purchased Atlantic Ocean fish for decades, it now buys Lake Superior smoked salmon and herring, bison from nearby Esko, locally made maple syrup, Caribou coffee from Minneapolis, and cookies from a bakery three blocks away.
Dietitian Paula Bursch, R.D., L.D., appreciates that St. Luke’s is always on the lookout for local foods. As the supervisor of clinical nutrition and diabetes education at the hospital, she uses the expanding menu of locally grown and produced foods as a teaching tool to increase awareness of products grown nearby. “Corn, for example, from our farmers’ market tastes better and is less harmful to the environment than a product transported from afar. People are getting back to the idea of eating what’s in season,” she says. Bursch is careful to point out that organic is not necessarily synonymous with fresh. “Especially in a climate like ours, your best nutritional bet is sometimes a frozen product.”
Something Rotten in Duluth
Although he is bringing more organic and locally produced items into the hospital, Branovan is also paying attention to what’s going out. Six years before Duluth’s waste-processing plant mandated that businesses take part in an institutional composting program, Branovan signed his department up for it. Twice weekly, the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District picks up two six-yard bins (those green dumpsters with two flip-up lids) of hospital kitchen waste (rinds, leaves, and peelings) to mix with grass clippings collected throughout the city. The end product is a mountain of black garden compost available to the public. Participation in the composting program has reduced the hospital’s solid-waste pick-up fees by 15 percent. In August, the hospital began placing small green bins throughout the cafeteria and dish room for the collection of table scraps for composting.
Reduce, Recycle, Rescue
In addition to reducing the need for fuel to transport food and recycling food waste, St. Luke’s is involved in a food recovery program in which food that has gone unused but hasn’t spoiled is sent to folks who can use it. Such food is actually called “rescued food.”
In partnership with Northern Lakes Food Bank, St. Luke’s food service employees will package the items in aluminum pans, and label and freeze them for pickup by drivers who will deliver them to area soup kitchens and food shelves.
“Rescuing good food is a wonderful alternative to composting,” Branovan says of the program to which St. Luke’s donates up to 500 pounds of food monthly. For example, at the end of the lunch service, the kitchen may still have four full pans of lasagna. It’s fresh, but there’s not enough to be able to feature it on the next day’s menu (St. Luke’s usually goes through 28 pans). Those four pans are immediately frozen for the rescued food program. Other commonly rescued items are rice, soup, noodles, and casseroles.
“We want to supply healthy alternatives, but we need to stay in business, too,” Branovan explains, when he apologetically admits that St. Luke’s has not yet dumped its deep-fat fryers. He says the hospital hopes to start “fat-free Fridays,” during which the cafeteria will not offer deep-fried items; it already offers a grilled chicken sandwich or turkey burger in addition to cheeseburgers with fries.
Branovan has also looked into eliminating the sale of soda—the most commonly rung item on cafeteria registers. But, he says, the sale of soda and individual bottles of water make it economically possible to do some of the other things they do such as buying locally and offering organic foods. “It’s a trade-off,” he explains.—Ann O’Brien Treacy