Service Providers, Policy Makers, Healthcare Professionals
Bring a “food is medicine” policy into our hospitals and nursing homes. The current average food budget in hospitals and nursing homes is disproportionately low compared with pharmacological medicine. This needs to change.
A reduction in the amount of processed food coming into the hospital is essential to demonstrate to patients and staff how to eat healthy.
Turn the hospital grounds into a food garden. Create jobs by employing a full time Garden Facilitator.
Role of Hospital Garden Facilitator:
– Design, manage and maintain the food garden.
– Liaise with the kitchen.
– Recruit and manage volunteers.
– Promote the garden.
– Source locally produced or foraged, natural*, unprocessed food for the kitchen.
– Arrange garden workshops for staff and the community eg. composting, planting, harvesting, pruning, etc.
The garden will supplement the hospital canteen with sustainable high quality produce that will be the benchmark for the canteen suppliers.
The kitchen will benefit from the greater variety of highly nutritious food.
Using less prepackaged, ready prepared food will create more employment opportunities for kitchen staff. The cost of this will be offset by less medical intervention required for hospital workers and patients due to healthier diet.
“Food and medicine are not two different things: the are the front and back of one body.” Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
Organic phytonutrients biome. The relevance and benefits of bacteria have recently become a hot topic in scientific research. The influence of bacteria on plants and humans, and the importance of their role in our gut biome and in fertile soil cannot be underestimated.
Transition Galway have a volunteer-run garden at Presentation Primary’s School, a short walk from UCHG. For more information on small-scale sustainable food production come along and visit, Sundays at 2pm.
* Food that is naturally farmed. Natural farming is a closed system, one that demands no human-supplied inputs and mimics nature.
A Vision for Galway 2030 