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Valley Hospital Offers Healthy, Delicious Cuisine Prepared by Top-Notch Chefs
St. Luke’s Medical Center cafeteria offers meals from seasonal “Heart Healthy” menus
PHOENIX, Ariz. (January 1, 2011) – For most people, the notion of eating hospital food has them running anywhere but toward the hospital cafeteria. But St. Luke’s Medical Center has raised the bar for hospital dining, offering delicious and health-conscious cuisine prepared by internationally trained chefs.
“It would seem at first blush that fine dining and hospital food lie at opposite ends of a quality spectrum,” said Jeff Mason, director of Food Services at St. Luke’s Medical Center. “But why should that be? While the economics of a fine dining restaurant support more expensive ingredients, the fundamental techniques and principals should be the same.”
Mason and his team prepare almost all hospital meals from scratch, using 90 percent fresh ingredients. The team serves approximately 1,750 meals daily (1,300 at St. Luke’s Medical Center, and 450 meals at Tempe St. Luke’s Hospital), for doctors, patients and visitors alike.
“We are challenged by the sheer volume of food that we prepare each day,” Mason added. “But it’s just that – a challenge, not a prohibition against serving freshly-prepared, healthy food.”
Mason credits the hospital environment for inspiring the change to healthier food practices.
“The dramatic increase in obesity in America over the past couple of decades is even more frightening when you see those consequences up close in an acute care hospital every day, in the form of patients with diabetes and heart disease,” Mason explained.
In 2008, St. Luke’s Medical Center brought its food service operations in-house, and began converting from mostly frozen prepared and packaged foods to fresher, healthier ingredients. In November of that year, the hospital recruited William Redmond to serve as executive chef. Redmond has worked in the culinary field since 1972. Trained in Europe, he has extensive experience in hospitality, fine dining, and high-end catering, which has made quite an impact on the culinary offerings at the hospital.
“The mission of a hospital is to promote health in the communities we serve,” Mason said. “That’s not just a slogan kept in a notebook somewhere that gets dusted off and read occasionally. It’s what we do every day, and what we are passionate about. We take this responsibility very seriously.”
A few examples of healthy dietary changes Mason and Redmond are in the process of implementing at St. Luke’s Medical Center include:
Rather than using a low-sodium chicken base to prepare chicken broth for patients on a clear liquid diet, Redmond and his staff make fresh chicken consommé from scratch as is done in fine dining establishments.
Redmond’s team makes teriyaki sauce from scratch so that they can control the sodium and sugar, to make it healthier, fresher and tastier than the bottled version.
The team is currently experimenting with healthy varieties of homemade muffins to offer patients on their “Healthy Start” breakfast trays. They’re trying various combinations of unbleached, whole grain, all-purpose flours and sweetening the recipes with agave syrup.
Mason and the chefs at St. Luke’s Medical Center provide heart healthy cooking classes to the community through the hospital’s Healthy Living Seminar Series, and have developed a series of “Heart Healthy” menus, which feature recipes for many of the healthy meals served at the hospital.
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