Northern California farmers are helping hospitals practice what they preach

Farm Fresh Healthcare How-to Guide

Inspired by an uptick of diet-related diseases and emerging antibiotic-resistant microbes, doctors are overdue when they insist that hospitals practice their prescriptions for healthy diets and healthier agricultural practices. Anything less would be a violation of their ethic to “first, do no harm. 

However, transitioning hospital food service to what they would like their patients to eat has been a two-year struggle. Many institutions do not systematically provide higher budgets for food procurement just because their doctors insist. Organic or antibiotic-free foods are consistently more costly and seldom available in the form that foodservice facilities have grown dependent on: prewashed, precut and preportioned.

Nonetheless, lessons have been learned and six hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area are sharing those in a How-To Guide based on two years of collaboration through the Farm Fresh Healthcare Project (FFHP). The guide describes how the hospitals were able to purchase almost 67,000 pounds of local produce from 10 family farmers who practice sustainable agriculture.

The guide features a photo of Capay Organic mandarins arriving at UCSF. The other hospitals in the project are John Muir Health, San Francisco VA Medical Center and Washington. (Stanford recently joined.)

Participating farms also include Coke, Durst Organic Growers, Las Hermanas, GreenSolar, Greene & Hemly, Dwelley, Zuckerman's, Casteneda Brothers, and Gowan Orchards. 

The project and the guide is the result of a collaboration between Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Health Care Without Harm, and San Francisco Bay Area Physicians for Social Responsibility.

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