Above: Attendees at the first international Teaching Kitchen Symposium, hosted by the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative.
A bit before the holidays, I attended the first international Teaching Kitchen Symposium, hosted by the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Over 250 participants with varying backgrounds as doctors, researchers, dietitians, chefs, and educators came from far and wide to share what they are doing in their teaching kitchens and to explore together the transformative impact of integrating culinary education and “food is medicine” approaches in healthcare settings. The key goal of “showcasing how teaching kitchens and culinary literacy can improve dietary behaviors, health outcomes, and deliver measurable value on investment“ was cleary outlined by the collaborative.
I was pleased to see that the Esperance Community Teaching Kitchen, adjacent to the Groundwork office, is tracking with the best of the best around in this “Food Is Medicine” (FIM) space. On the last day of the summit, over 60 organizational members, including us, had a meeting and worked on collective research and other goal-setting for the year. We are in good company, with leaders like Harvard, Yale, Mayo and Cleveland Clinics, Google, and more. Everyone stood up and introduced themselves and our little corner of the world had good representation.
The Groundwork team understands and has shown how collaborations are necessary for good outcomes, and we have outstanding academic and community partners supporting us like, Michigan State College of Human Medicine, Munson Healthcare, and Munson Family Practice, Traverse Heart and Vascular clinics.
What makes us unique is that we’ve incorporated food access and equity from very early in our local food work, engaging with the Northwest Food Coalition, our regional Meals on Wheels’ organizations, and the Inter-tribal Council to learn about the needs of neighbors, how we can incorporate them into the goals of our kitchen. Along with partners at the Great Lakes Culinary Institute and the Grand Traverse Food Shed Alliance, our local farms, and the bounty of foods we are growing is also well represented and ready to engage in the teaching kitchen space.
2025 will be a big year for our teaching kitchen. We’ll be launching culinary medicine classes for continuing medical education modeled after our 10 years of successful Farms, Food and Health trainings. We’ll also offer more opportunities for community members and patients to join in the fun. We are working on installing video streaming capabilities so we can expand who has access to the classes and meet all community members right where we find them along their journeys of food, nutrition, and health. The Summit showcased best practices for virtual teaching kitchen classes and also the importance of recording continuing medical education, so busy healthcare providers can join the hands-on cooking classes when they can and also participate on their own time with recorded content.
Seeing old and new friends outside of a “little computer screen box” is a true joy of professional gatherings. Here Paula catches up with longtime friend to Groudwork Kelly Wilson. Paula and Kelly worked at Taste The Local Difference (TLD) together during its incubation and transition out of Groundwork to being a women-owned and -operated marketing company. TLD has supported connecting local food and farmers to the Food Is Medicine movement before it was cool. Kelly is also a innovating Registered Dietitian Nutritionist doing amazing work as part of Trinity Health’s Lifestyle Medicine team in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
My key take aways from the summit:
The Food is Medicine movement is moving rapidly. In the short span of eight years, we’ve seen tremendous growth and acceptance that healthcare and food systems need to be better aligned and working in support of each other.
Since 2014 (our first Groundwork gathering about Farms, Food and Health) we’ve seen a “whole of government approach” play out in real time. I’ve previously shared information with the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health about what’s happening with food and medicine in our region and nationally.
The National Institutes of Health’s Andrew “Drew” Bremer, Director, Office of Nutrition Research (ONR), shared that teaching kitchens represent what he called “The National Institutes of Hope.”
The mission of teaching kitchens is as follows:
To advance nutrition science to promote health across the lifespan and to support the development of evidence-based, equitable, context-specific, culturally appropriate, resilient, and sustainable solutions that can be disseminated and implemented at scale to inform practices, policies, and programs to reduce the burdens of diet-related diseases and health disparities.”
Bremer noted that the advancements championed in the mission statement can all take place in a teaching kitchen setting. He was also clear about why NIH cares deeply about nutrition, “Nutrition connects the foods we eat to our overall health and the health of our soil and water. Nutrition touches every cell and system in our bodies—at every age and stage across the lifespan—and is inextricably linked to all aspects of health and disease. Nutrition is everyone’s business and is disease agnostic, important for every person, every family, every society, and the planet.” He made the case that nutrition and nutritional status is a fundamental biological variable like age and sex in medicine and patient care. Biological variables are characteristics that vary between individuals and can be measured, like a blood test.
Big time research is happening now in four randomized controlled trials to “prove the concept” of teaching kitchens across the USA—more to come on that in the future as preliminary results are available. Other new research shared offered a realistic framework for the much-needed integration between medical clinics and community interventions (like teaching kitchens) I learned over the week that a key feature of the Food Is Medicine movement is the need for more integration between the clinic and the community.
Quoting from a document referred to as “The Frederick’s Paper”: “The evidence to date suggests positive effects of Food Is Medicine on a range of measures, from food insecurity and diet quality to biomarkers such as blood pressure, blood sugar, and body weight, as well as cost savings and potential return on investment.” and “The integrated approaches are (1) standard clinical nutrition intervention, or Medical Nutrition Therapy; (2) food access in the form of medically tailored foods (MTF); and (3) culinary medicine interventions delivered through a teaching kitchen. Currently, a number of randomized controlled trials—the “gold standard of nutrition research”—are underway in academic healthcare settings. This is type of research is key, as much of the aforementioned existing research is based on post–cooking class evaluation and assessment, which is still good research but usually not used for making healthcare policy decisions. We heard from the National Institutes of Health about how important his multi-site research will be in the years to come. Most teaching kitchens are housed within academic and healthcare systems. We have a unique opportunity in our kitchen to be more flexible, open to all and innovative to test out new ways of delivering nutrition services for our rural community.
Qualified health professionals are leading these interventions, starting with patients in medical settings receiving nutrition assessments and moving outward into the community, into teaching kitchens and other hands-on cooking and nutrition education programs. Michigan is poised to reinstate license requirements for over 4,000 Registered Dietitian Nutritionists in Michigan. This will help connect Michiganders to quality nutrition assessments and Medical Nutrition Therapy at doctor offices across the state, leading to more opportunities for everyone to engage in integrated approaches to offer food access in the form of medically tailored foods (MTF); and culinary nutrition interventions delivered through a teaching kitchen, like the Esperance Community Teaching Kitchen.
Lastly I learned about new grant and philanthropic opportunities and also how media is a vital tool to service model equity and business sustainability for teaching kitchens.
We are tracking right along with the internal leaders and are off to a great start in the Esperance Community Teaching Kitchen. We are fundraising for our technology and support staffing. Our staffing goals include partnering with health and culinary students in training, bringing them together in the space so they can learn and share knowledge to become our next Farms, Food and Health leaders of tomorrow.
Maximizing our shared asset of the Esperance Community Teaching Kitchen is our goal over the next 5 to 10 years in our region. You can get involved in this work by supporting Groundwork so we can continue to engage at this international level and take part in building the research and knowledge base for our unique community-based teaching kitchen to improve our rural population’s health. Also we hope you will attend our classes as they are offered in 2025!
As a lifelong learner, I have fond memories of watching Jacques Pépin on his many PBS programs that connected food and nutrition so cleary for my aspiring mind. At the summit we learned that Chef Pépin will be 90 in 2025 and is still going strong supporting the Food Is Medicine movement. His sign-off was with the phrase “Happy Cooking,” and I incorporated that into my professional salutations many years ago, but with a twist. Food doesn’t become nutrition until we eat it, so make those bites happy. Here’s to local food, farms, health and longevity in 2025! 
See you in the Kitchen, and Happy Eating!
Paula Martin is Groundwork’s Community Nutrition Specialist.
paula.martin@groundworkcenter.org
