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Emphasizing Food to Prevent Disease Got Panel Airing Before Fundraising Dinner
For most of our history, medical schools eschewed nutrition education in their curriculums. The course of treatment for individuals with diet-related diseases was reactive — providing medications and surgeries to control symptoms — rather than preventive.
A new and better approach is slowly gaining traction, spurred by a massive increase in diet-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension that has escalated U.S. health care costs and caused misery and shortened lives for millions of people.
The "food as medicine" concept has strong advocates in the non-profit community and among a growing number of policymakers. Programs are validating the "Produce RX" concept that funds "prescriptions" that enable people who are vulnerable to diet-related disease to afford healthier diets.
This topic was discussed by a panel of advocates within the Chicago food community that was part of the most recent Chicago Chefs Cook non-profit fundraising dinner.
The panelists were
Sebastian White of The Evolved Network non-profit, which helps underprivileged youths gain culinary and life skills.
Nick Davis, managing director of communications and engagement at Community Food Navigator, a non-profit that promotes food sovereignty efforts that enable underserved individuals and communities to grow their own food
Chef Ken Polk, owner of Batter and Berries restaurants and a strong advocate for food education
Shawanna Kennedy, chef educator for Common Threads, the food education non-profit that was the beneficiary of the evening's dinner event.
Television journalist Jamaica Ponder moderated their discussion.
The session was kicked off by Chef Sarah Stegner of suburban Chicago's Prairie Grass Cafe, a co-founder of Chicago Chefs Cook and strong advocate of building a better food system. She described the purpose of the event: "These are the change makers in our community. These are the people that are in the front lines, making our lives better. They are reaching kids for the future of food and understanding why local and sustainable is important."
She then introduced Chef Art Smith, another longtime leader in Chicago's restaurant community, who co-founded Common Threads in a church basement in 2004. He explained how the program, which provides cooking lessons to underprivileged children, opens mind about more than just food:
All of us who had the privilege to have great women or men in our lives who taught us to cook, we had the ability to learn many lessons, and it wasn't just how to make, you know, boiled eggs or scrambled eggs... We all believe that teaching someone how to cook is one of life's greatest lessons, and so got that. But the fact is that sometimes you can teach people a lot in the most interesting way, without them realizing they're being taught.
The panel discussion ensued. Here are takeaways from each of the panelists' comments.
Sebastian White
"I think food is medicine is an opportunity to clear space for all types of possibilities: choice, creativity, curiosity, power and be in the world, right? That's a different way of viewing what medicine is... What we're trying to accomplish through our mission, truthfully, is using food to create that space, whether you're growing it, cooking it, eating it, it offers all of those opportunities for possibilities to show themselves, and that's when you get to live into the uniqueness. That's when we get the best of people. That's when we connect."
"When I think about choices, I think that is an essence of what it means to be a human being, because that's freedom, true freedom... That's what's amazing about food. It highlights that concept around choice, around freedom, around being creative, curious and exploring the world. And I think that's what makes it so beautiful in so many different ways... If I get a kid to try something new, I don't change just what they think about the food. I change about how they think about the world, right? That changes. Maybe they take a chance that they wouldn't normally have taken before that they were afraid to take, because they remember, 'Oh, I tried something new, and had that type of an experience'."
"I'm not trying to create chefs, nothing like that. I'm trying to pull out the uniqueness in kids using food. And once they get to that unique space, like I keep saying, that's when we find potential."
Nick Davis
"People reduce it to this idea that is really important about what happens when we put food into our bodies, in terms of both the preventative aspects of it and then also what it can be used as a direct treatment for a condition... If you think about this a little bit more expansively, food is actually a medicine for a variety of things. Food can heal the land. If you grow food in the right way, you can extract toxins and heavy metals out of the land and restore bio-nutrients to the soil, and you can maintain really healthy ecologies this way, that, in turn, helps to heal our waterways."
"If you and a group of people decide to take over an empty block on your corner, especially if you're living in a community like Englewood, oftentimes these communities have been under-resourced... We start a farm on one of those empty blocks, and there's no longer trash on it, and there are people who are working it every single day. And every time that you walk by that farm, you have a friendly face who is making food for you, who's checking in on you, makes you feel comfortable to send your kids to school walking again, elders start to bring out the chairs onto their front porches, and you're actually being medicine for our culture and for our social infrastructure."
Shawanna Kennedy
"[Common Threads has] a two-hour after-school program that I really love, because that one really emphasizes culture, learning about different cultures and teaching kids about food all around the world..."
"They have a Farm to School curriculum, so it talks about how far has our food traveled and all of that. The impact that I think that it's making is, again, a lot of these communities that we're in are disinvested, so they don't have the resources. So sometimes I'm coming in with quinoa, and they've never seen that. So that's what I love about the recipes that we have, they're nutrient dense."
"I think it's important because it actually gives them a voice. So many times, their parents are like, You have to eat that, you have to put it on your plate. To give them an opportunity to speak what it is and to use their words, and sometimes we have to guide them, they may say, 'I kind of don't know,' but to incorporate that, and then it makes them more likely to try things at home that they normally wouldn't try."
Ken Polk
"I think we as we as a society, have gotten away from the whole basis of what food is. Food is nutrition."
"We used to always say you need to taste the rainbow or eat all the different colors. And a lot of people don't even know how to use those colors."
"At Batter and Berries, part of my job is educating the consumer as to what makes our restaurant different from a lot of other breakfast places. We only use natural ingredients."
"The value of food is not just food, but it's eating and community and getting to break bread with your brother, your sister, or whoever it might be, someone else. And so that is just as important in education and understanding why we're putting this in our bodies. Because a lot of us growing up, I didn't have choice. You get what's on this plate, you get what's on this plate, and not even understanding why. I was probably well into adulthood before I actually liked the beet. I'm still working on it."
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Many of those who attended the panel discussion in a ballroom at downtown Chicago's Pendry Hotel segued to the Chicago Chefs Cook dinner at the adjoining Venteux restaurant.
It was the second consecutive year in which the organization had partnered with Pendry Hotels' Chefsgiving promotion. A portion of each Chefsgiving ticket sold goes towards a worthy and deserving local cause in each of the property’s respective markets in line with the spirit of giving back during Thanksgiving. As mentioned earlier, the Common Threads food education non-profit is this year's recipient.
As is always the case with Chicago Chefs Cook event, the meal was a sumptuous collaborative effort of several outstanding local chefs:
Rickie Perez, Logan Oyster Social
Tigist Reda, Demera Ethiopian
Sarah Stegner, Prairie Grass Cafe
Art Smith & Hector Guererro, Reunion
Javauneeka Jacobs, Frontera Grill
D'Andre Carter and Heather Bublick, Soul and Smoke
Marcel Heiduk, Venteux
Mark Shoemaker, Pendry Chicago
Carla Henriques, Hawksmoor
Arshiya Farheen, Verzênay
The photos below give just some idea of the feast that attendees enjoyed.
