VANCOUVER — For the past six months, inpatients receiving care at Vancouver Coastal Health’s (VCH) Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) have been able to fuel their healing with a diverse selection of nutritious and environmentally sustainable menu items from the Planetary Health Menu Pilot project.
The Planetary Health Menu Pilot project was led by Dr. Annie Lalande, surgical resident and PhD student in Resources, Environment and Sustainability at University of British Columbia (UBC), and Tiffany Chiang, director, Food Service Transformation and Strategic Projects at VCH. They brought together food-services staff, dietitians, clinicians and planetary-health experts to work alongside Ned Bell, chef and sustainable food champion, in developing the menu items.
More than 20 new menu items have been developed to offer patients a diversity of choices, incorporating patient preferences and ingredients with lower environmental impacts. These include dishes such as Steelhead Trout with tomato-miso dressing, Creamy Coconut Chickpea Curry with cauliflower and cashews, served with mango chutney, and a Korean Gochujang bowl. The new dishes were evaluated by patient partners who provided feedback on the meal’s desirability during times of illness. Dishes that were favourably reviewed were served on a trial basis to inpatients at VGH. Feedback was solicited through surveys and interviews throughout the process, and helped tailor the dishes to patient preferences. Food-waste rates were also measured to complement patient feedback in determining how the new dishes were received.
“Sustainable food and food systems have been a passion of mine throughout my career,” says Bell. “Working to develop menu items that are sustainable and also appeal to a wide variety of tastes on such a massive scale was challenging, but the work we’ve done here has been so rewarding.”
