Chicken breast for the soul

News from Tampa that a culinary team from Swedish Hospital has won the national championship at the HFM cook-off . (That's the National Society for Healthcare Foodservice Management, dontcha know.) Swedish had already won the annual Ivy Award from the trade mag Restaurants & Institutions two years ago for serving the best, er, institutional food in the country.

Now before you start snickering, ask yourself where it's written that sick people have to eat cold, disgusting crap off a tray thrust at them in their time of misery by some dismal orderly. A tray that 90 percent of the time, by the way, gets dumped into the garbage untouched. Wouldn't it be nice, the thinking goes, to be able to order a tuna melt on rye when you wake up ravenous at 2 AM? Or a midmorning snack of cookies and ice cream? Why not, indeed.

Swedish, to its credit, hired a nutritionist named Robert Caudle to change the staff's approach to food service, which is now in the hands of his successor, Kris Schroeder, and a Paris-trained executive chef,
Eric Eisenberg. Their team of cooks feed 2,000 patients a day; because patients order what they want, when they want it, they actually eat the food, and the hospital actually saves money. The winning dish whipped up by the Swedish crew for the Florida judges: Mojito Chicken Cubanos al Espeton, no less, served with manchego fondue and savory mango-pinto bean purée. (Want the recipe? Click here.)

Footnote: why chicken breast? Ah, because Tyson, that stalwart of corporate and institutional foodservice, was a sponsor. A reasonable tradeoff? Or yet another example of the pervasive influence of agribiz on our industrial food chain?

Posted by Ronald Holden at September 7, 2006 10:51 AM

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