Even Seattle hospitals are full of sustainable, local food…

IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 29th 2008

CONTACT: Holly Freishtat, 360-391-2888, holly@cultivatehealth.com

Seattle Hospitals Purchasing Local, Sustainable Food: National Report Outlines Leading Trends in Health Care Sector

127 Hospitals nationwide are buying healthier food to promote public health

(5/29/08 – Seattle, WA) 

For 127 hospitals across the United States, the words “hospital food” and “healthy communities, healthy environment” are one and the same, according to a new report released by Health Care Without Harm (HCWH)  today. The Healthy Food in Health Care Report outlines concrete steps being taken by hospitals regionally that support the national trend to change their food buying practices towards more sustainably produced, healthier choices for patients, staff and visitors.

Eight Seattle area hospitals out of the 127 facilities, in 21 states across the country, pledged to source local, nutritional, sustainable food. “When hospitals sign and implement the Healthy Food in Healthcare Pledge they redefine healthy food beyond nutrition to include community and environmental health. Hospitals are changing the culture of food in healthcare by sourcing local produce, hormone-free milk, meat without hormones or antibiotics, sustainable seafood and through hosting farmers’ markets, community- supported agriculture boxes for employees,” says Holly Freishtat, Sustainable Food Specialist for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR), a  member organization of HCWH. 

The Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge outlines the steps to be taken by the health care industry to improve the health of their patients, local communities and the environment. This Pledge Report details the concrete food purchasing steps these facilities are making. For example:

·         80 facilities (70%) are purchasing up to 40% of their produce locally

·         Over 90 facilities (80%) are purchasing rBGH-free milk

·         100% have increased fresh fruit and vegetable offerings

·         50 facilities (44%) are purchasing meat produced without the use of hormones or antibiotics

·         63 facilities (60%) are composting food waste

Seattle area hospitals have been leaders in the movement of providing healthy sustainable food. The eight hospitals that have signed the Healthy Food in Healthcare Pledge are; Seattle Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Overlake Hospital Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and Medical Center, University of Washington Medical Center and MultiCare Health System that includes Good Samaritan Hospital, Tacoma General Hospital, Mary Bridge Children’s and Health Center, and Allenmore Hospital. Each of the facilities is implementing their Pledge commitments in various ways. They are rolling out new patient menus featuring healthier selections, purchasing locally grown produce when possible, and increasing the amount of organic sustainable foods. A few highlights include:

• Food Composting: Four hospitals composted a total of 310 tons of food compost in 2007, two more hospitals are planning to compost by the end of 2008
• Farm Stand and/or CSA: three hospitals have a farm stand and/or a CSA, thus increasing the access of organic fruit and vegetables to over 14,000 employees
• Nutritional Quality: All the hospitals are decreasing the amount of processed foods and Transfats while increasing whole grains and fruits and vegetables

Hospitals around the country are linking their operations to impacts on human and environmental health, and an emerging part of this trend is increased attention to food service.   Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) is joined in its work to encourage support for local, sustainable food by major medical associations.   In 2007, the American Public Health Association recognized the urgency of transforming our food system and passed a policy to promote environmental sustainability, improve nutritional health and ensure social justice.  That same year, the California Medical Association passed a resolution that encourages hospitals to adopt policies that increase the purchasing and serving of local, sustainable food .

“When hospitals serve and promote nutritious, local, sustainably grown food to patients, families, staff and visitors, hospitals are modeling preventive medicine,” stated Sue Heffernan, RN, MN, Clinical Nurse Specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Across the country, pledged hospitals are continuously working to address the public and environmental health impacts from current industrialized food production practices by sourcing nutritious, local sustainable food.

For more information and expert list please contact:

Holly Freishtat, WPSR Sustainable Food Specialist, Food & Society Fellow

360-391-2888, holly@cultivatehealth.com

Heath Care without Harm, an international coalition of more than 473 organizations in 52 countries, is working to transform the health care sector, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment. For more information on the healthy food pledge seehttp://www.noharm.org/us/food/pledge.

To learn more about HCWH’s work on food and other issues related to health care www.healthyfoodinhealthcare.org

To view the Healthy Food in Healthcare Pledge Report:

 

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 The 2007 California Medical Association resolution encourages hospitals to adopt policies and implement practices that increase the purchasing and serving of food that promotes health and prevents disease. Included are meat and dairy products produced without non-therapeutic antibiotics, meats derived from non-CAFO sources such as free-range animals, food grown on non-industrial agricultural operations such as small and medium-sized local farms, and food grown according to organic or other methods that emphasize renewable resources, ecological.

 

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 The 2007 American Public Health Association policy “Towards a Healthy, Sustainable Food System” urges support of environmentally sound agricultural practices to reduce contamination, resource use, climate change, in addition to improved food labeling for country-of-origin and genetic modification, and a ban on non-therapeutic antimicrobial and arsenic use. It recognizes the urgency of transforming our food system to promote environmental sustainability, improve nutritional health, and ensure social justice.

 

Rocket Science – An edible rooftop garden in Portland

Photo by Kym Pokorny from her blog “Dig in with Kym”.

 

“If you look around and see all the flat roofs, you can start to imagine a food-sustainable city,” says Marc Boucher-Colbert, one of the partners who contracts with Rocket restaurant to design and maintain the garden. “We’ve taken away all this space, but we can reclaim it.”

 

Click here to read the article at City Farmer News

 

 

Anna Lappé, Maverick Farms, and the next generation of farmers

Watch this video from MSN about Maverick farms hosted by Anna Lappé of the Small Planet Institute

 

Maverick Farms is an educational non-profit farm dedicated to family farming as a community resource and reconnecting local food networks.

Maverick Farms formed in spring 2004 to preserve a small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, an area under intense pressure from development. It operates as an open laboratory, experimenting with human-scale farming techniques and traditional food preparation.

Maverick Farms works to reclaim the pleasures of eating and sharing meals in a culture overrun by industrial agriculture and flavorless food. The project arose out of Springhouse Farm, which for 30 years sold hand-picked vegetables to local restaurants. Maverick Farms is continuing with that tradition while embarking on new education and outreach projects to connect local food producers and consumers.

They just started a new program that they call Farm Incubator and Grower Program (FIG) on mentoring aspiring young farmers and teaching them over the course of two years all that great stuff you need to know about planning crop rotations and balancing farm budgets, and running a CSA and restaurant supply business.  On successful completion of the training, Maverick works with the young farmers gain access to land, financing, equipment, and a ready-made markets to launch their own farm enterprises.  The program will hopefully help to reestablish local food sources in the area.  Because viable local food systems are often constrained by a lack of both land under cultivation and new farmers, FIG will collaborate with local landowners, land trusts, and town and county governments to identify land that could be rented at below-market rates or deeded as common agricultural property.

I found Maverick Farms from this Grist article.  Grist is great for all environmental news!

 

New report shows edible cities are the future

02/05/2008 

There are huge opportunities to grow more food in our cities, a new report by Sustain[1]  shows.  Edible Cities,[2]  looks at examples of urban agriculture projects in cities including New York, Milwaukee and Chicago and identifies a series of opportunities that other cities could be adopting. 

Ben Reynolds, one of the authors of the report explains: “We are all familiar with allotments, and the odd community garden as features of the city landscape, but more often than not a lot of space is wasted, where with a little support we could see projects like this in the UK, where salad crops, vegetables and even fish are produced commercially within the city.”

One project in Milwaukee, Growing Power,[3]  has set up a fish farm as part of a river ecosystem where they are able to harvest watercress and fish to sell to local restaurants. This holistic system goes one step further, by feeding some of the fish on worms that are produced as part of a large scale composting enterprise on site.

The report is the result of a visit by a group of London officials, supported by the US Embassy.  Amongst the visitors[4]  was Colin Buttery, Deputy Chief Executive of the Royal Parks.  Colin commented: “We saw some really inspiring initiative in the States. In Chicago, they were growing food amongst the ornamentals flower beds in the central park.  There were no fences, and yet there was no vandalism, with the harvested produce sold at a nearby market .[5]  It would be great to see some of these ideas adopted in London and cities across the UK.”

The report draws many parallels with the situation in London, where food growing, despite being a genuinely successful way of bringing the capital’s diverse communities together, is often forced to the extremities of neighbourhoods rather than celebrated and built into the heart of an area.

Many of the opportunities[6]  identified by this report are going to be explored at the Growing Food for London conference in City Hall on the 30th June,[7] where it is hoped the city’s planners, architects, growers and policy makers will buy into an edible vision for the Capital’s future. Watch this (green) space…

ENDS

Press contact: Ben Reynolds, London Food Link project officer, tel (work): 020 7837 1228; (mobile): 07939 202711. Ben@sustainweb.org

Notes

For copies of the report or photos please contact Ben Reynolds.

  Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming represents around 100 national public-interest organisations, Sustain (a not-for-profit organisation) advocates food and agriculture policies and practices that enhance the health and welfare of people and animals, improve the working and living environment, promote equity and enrich society and culture. http://www.sustainweb.org

  Edible Cities: A report of a visit to urban agriculture projects in the U.S.A is launched on April 29th 2008. It is available at www.sustainweb.org/publications (for press copies please contact Ben Reynolds above).

  For more information on the Growing Power centre in Milwaukee visit www.growingpower.org/

  The four visitors included; Colin Buttery, Royal Parks, www.royalparks.org.uk/; Tony Leach, London Parks and Green Spaces Forum www.lpgsf.org.uk/; Catherine Miller, Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens (London officer), www.farmgarden.org.uk/london-pages.html; Ben Reynolds, London Food Link, part of Sustain,www.londonfoodlink.org.

  The organisation Growing Power, established the potager kitchen garden in Grant Park, downtown Chicago in 2005.  The food growing plots replaced a formal annual bedding area, so that park users do not realise at first sight that planting is entirely made up of over 150 varieties of heirloom vegetables, herbs and edible flowers.  For more information see www.growingpower.org

  The main opportunities the report identifies for growing more food in London can be summarised as follows:

• Planting more fruit and nut trees in parks and along routeways 
• Planting beds of edibles instead of traditional ornamental plants in bedding in parks 
• Grow more food in under-utilised spaces, setting up community gardens in parks, derelict council facilities, social housing land and unused private gardens. 
• Alternative food production such as mushroom growing, bee-keeping and planting edibles on roves and window boxes. 
• Re-establish food growing as a major land-use on the green belt/urban fringe.

  The Growing Food for London conference is an all day event held at City Hall, on Monday 30th June.  Booking is necessary.  Speakers include Tim Lang (City University), Joe Nasr (author of Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities), Fritz Haeg, (author of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn) and Ian Collingwood (Middlesborough Council regeneration, and lead on the Middlesborough Urban Farming project). The event, which is jointly organised with the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum, is part of the London Festival Architecture