RFRK is honoured to be a recipient of a Greenbelt Fund grant that helps bring more local food into Ontario’s public institutions. Thanks to the grant, we’re one step closer to bringing real food into Toronto hospitals.
It’s mid-morning, and David Farnell’s kitchen is a hive of activity.
Freshly blanched green beans are piled in a sink the size of a bathtub, and warm cornbread muffins poke out of silicone trays on a rack nearby. A chef pulls aluminum foil over endless pans of white bean soup, readying each to be delivered and served to thousands of Toronto students.
The bounty is part of Real Food for Real Kids, a lunch program Mr. Farnell and his wife, Lulu Cohen-Farnell, started five years ago. The business provides fresh, locally sourced meals and snacks to nearly 200 daycares and elementary schools every day, part of a mandate to encourage kids to enjoy healthy food from a young age.
They use recipes that deliberately keep sugar and salt levels low, source raw ingredients locally whenever possible, and avoid both artificial additives and factory-farmed meats. “We do this because we think it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Farnell says before he ushers reporters into the kitchen. “In fact, we know it’s the right thing to do.”
Now, with the help of a grant from the Greenbelt Fund and the provincial government, he is trying to expand the business beyond the school system – and into oft-reviled hospital kitchens.
He isn’t the first to try to tweak patient fare in the province. While a growing number of Ontario hospitals are looking to add more local and fresh food to their menus, the barriers – which often include nutritional labelling requirements, portion-controlled packaging and managing dietary restrictions – are significant.
“Hospital food services are set up in a very particular way,” says Anne Marie Males, vice-president of patient experience at the Scarborough Hospital, which has been working to revamp its menu over the past year. “And really the whole system supports that, from the dieticians, to the clinicians, to the tray delivery system, everything is set up to support that kind of factory food.”
The hospital was interested in experimenting with Real Kids’ food, but couldn’t do so until the company found a way to package and label it according to hospital standards – no small challenge for a business that is more accustomed to reusable metal trays than plastic packaging.
The new grant aims to bridge that gap by providing $53,000 for Real Kids to buy packaging and labelling equipment along with new industrial-scale mixers.
The Scarborough Hospital’s Ms. Males says staff there began tinkering with the food system last year, recognizing that what patients eat while they’re recovering can have a big impact on their overall experience at the hospital.
Using an earlier, $191,000 grant from the Greenbelt Fund and the province, the hospital hired a chef to co-ordinate the shift and partnered with Local Food Plus, a group that certifies farmers who meet a set of sustainability criteria and connects them with institutions looking to buy more locally grown food.
It’s tested many of its new recipes on patients, sending trays of food to their rooms with comment cards attached asking for feedback. The hospital isn’t ready to abandon the old system yet, Ms. Males says, but change is coming.
“Hopefully what will happen is we’ll go from a pilot at Scarborough to – if the program catches on the way we think it will – to the norm there,” said Ted McMeekin, Ontario’s minister of agriculture, food and rural affairs. “Then hopefully other hospitals will embrace the concept as well.”
Mr. McMeekin declined to specify whether the province would make funding more widely available for hospitals if the Scarborough test case is successful. But he added, “We’re prepared to look at that.”
Real Food for Real Kids expects to have its first products – likely its popular seed-free hummus and homemade glazes, among other things – sampled on Scarborough Hospital trays this spring.
To read this article on the Globe and Mail website, click here.