Nancy Gummer, the director of Nutrition Services at Good Shepherd Medical Center in Hermiston, has been working for the last 10 years to bring sustainable foods to the hospital cafeteria.
Gummer’s goal is to serve food that supports patient wellness, has no negative effect on the environment, and supports local farmers.
“What I was recommending to (patients with diabetes) and what we were serving here didn’t really mesh up,” said Gummer, who is a generalist dietitian and certified diabetes educator. “That’s kind of what drove the change in the kitchen. Hospital food should be something that’s going to make you well and keep you well.”
The main goal has been to eliminate unwanted additives in the food. For example, several years ago Good Shepherd began searching for bread that didn’t contain azodicarbonamide.
“Azodicarbonamide is an EPA-registered pesticide,” Gummer said. Azodicarbonamide has been banned from use in food products in many countries.
“But here, it’s put in bread as a dough conditioner,” she said. “Now it is getting some publicity. Subway has recently taken it out of their bread, for example.” Good Shepherd buys azodicarbonamide-free bread from Wheat Montana.
Gummer is also trying to eliminate phosphate additives, which the human body absorbs completely. “That can be damaging to healthy kidneys,” she said. Such additives are regulated to an extent, “but when you have that little bit in several things you’re eating throughout a day, you’re eating a pretty toxic cocktail — and that’s just additives; not to mention the other stuff like pesticide residue.”
Part of Good Shepherd’s goal in the sustainable foods program is to reduce food travel by buying about 90 percent of their meat locally. Most of the beef and pork in Good Shepherd’s cafeteria comes from Blue Valley Meats in Walla Walla.
Gummer spent many years searching for chicken she would gladly serve to patients. She buys chicken from Mary’s Free Range Chickens in California.
“When (other providers) butcher chickens, they put them in a big water vat to cool them down. It’s all intermingled. The chicken I buy is air-chilled individually,” she said.
Good Shepherd also buys much of its produce from Finley’s Fresh Produce in Hermiston. Finley’s is Food Alliance certified.
Due to distribution challenges, Gummer is unable to buy as much local organic food as she would like. “It’s getting better,” she said. “Tri-Cities is growing so fast, and as more people in this kind of business get interested in buying quality food, then more of it becomes available.”
What sets Gummer’s program apart is that she doesn’t simply add healthier food to the normal food supply; she replaces the harmful with the helpful.
“The first year that I started doing this, I got rid of 200 items out of the store room that we quit buying because they had ingredients that we found objectionable,” she said. “That’s how you do it. When people say, ‘It’s too expensive for me to eat healthy,’ you have to buy this instead of that. Nothing’s cheaper than beans and rice, right?”
All of the food prepared in Good Shepherd’s cafeteria is made from scratch.
“You can’t buy prepared foods and have a healthy diet,” Gummer says. “It isn’t like food processing is evil. It can be good. There are companies doing it well. We just need to have people demanding that everybody does it well.”
Good Shepherd cafeteria staff also avoid using cans lined with BPA and make sure not to microwave plastic containers because of the chemicals that can leach into food.
Gummer is convinced that if individual businesses and institutions continue to implement more health-conscious food programs on a small scale, the entire face of the food industry will change for the better.
She emphasized that people have a right and a responsibility to know what they’re putting into their bodies, and that nutritional labels tend not to be helpful.
“Like ‘caramel color’ — that’s ammonia,” she said. “You would never know that by looking at a label. Chemicals are natural, too. Everything started out as something natural. ‘Natural’ means nothing on a label. I think that having food companies make decisions about what we’re going to put into our bodies, and whether we have the right to know that, is completely wrong.” All it takes to form healthy eating habits is a little research and a little strategy.
“Every major disease we have is a lifestyle disease” Gummer said. “Most of it relates to the grocery store. There are stages of change, and a big one is just being aware — just giving it a little thought.”
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