Chef seeks to elevate hospital food

from The Press Democrat, 12/6:

At Sebastopol’s new Sonoma West Medical Center, chef elevates the menu
~ by Ariana Reguzzoni, Dec 4, 2015

Grass-fed beef teriyaki with sprouted brown rice and sautéed bok choy, followed by a dessert of Asian pears with orange zest, is a meal one might expect to find at a local farm-to-table restaurant. But if you’re a patient at the newly opened Sonoma West Medical Center (SWMC) in Sebastopol, this might just be your dinner.

“I definitely want to push boundaries,” said Executive Chef Rob Hogencamp. “Some I can’t push. I’m still figuring out what I can do.”

Hogencamp is one half of the team running the kitchen at the hospital, which officially opened its doors Oct. 30th. He has painstakingly worked with a nutritional analysis company to create menus for patients and staff that fit into hospital dietary regulations, but still incorporate his deeply rooted sense of the importance of healthy, tasty food. In fact, Hogencamp would like to go one step further and use as many local, sustainable and seasonal ingredients as possible in his cooking. But, as he has quickly realized in his short tenure as hospital chef, it isn’t as easy as buying produce from the farm down the road.

As Hogencamp explained, Department of Health regulations require hyper-vigilance when feeding a population with suppressed immune systems or that is elderly or fighting serious illness. Traceability is the primary factor that limits where hospitals can source from, said Hogencamp. In other words, if someone gets sick from something they eat, the hospital must be able to trace that food back to its original source – or farm – and account for how it was handled and processed.

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