In-Person Workshop: Leveraging Culinary Medicine to Promote Health Equity

THIS WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE TEACHING KITCHEN AND INCLUDES COOKING DEMONTRATIONS AND ATTENDEE HANDS-ON PARTICIPATION.

Culinary medicine (CM) presents an engaging, evidence-based means to help advance health equity by reaching and empowering historically marginalized and underserved communities to improve their health through food and cooking as foundational aspects of their cultures. Therefore, this workshop aims to inspire and empower diverse healthcare providers to work with interdisciplinary teams to improve healthcare delivery, patients’ health outcomes, and providers’ well-being through CM. Attendees will practice hands-on cooking and learn skills that will help them adapt recipes based on medical, cultural, and socioeconomic considerations. They will leave the workshop with an appreciation for nutritious cuisine, community, and culture.

The workshop will begin with a didactic portion that will include:

- very brief background about CM (to not be redundant with other potential educational content/workshops on this topic)

- the importance of adapting CM programming and nutrition recommendations to reflect multicultural communities

- how to use recipes as frameworks to teach healthy behaviors and empower providers to perceive culturally relevant foods as healthy, practice cultural humility, and identify possible community partners to engage for delivering accessible programs

- recognize concrete examples of healthcare systems and professional organizations putting these tactics into action.

- briefly describe the current prioritization by CMS and The Joint Commission on addressing health equity that are influencing decisions by administrators of healthcare systems around the country to help explain why this field is important and help attendees to articulate the connections.

- briefly review kitchen and food safety practices.

The next portion of the workshop will consist of an interactive challenge in which participants will be randomly grouped into teams and tasked with creating an example class for a community program of their choosing. They can choose a culture that represents either the background of one of the group’s members or a common culture from their patient population. Teams can choose from the base ingredients and diverse flavorings (spices, herbs, vinegars, etc.) provided to create a healthy dish that would be provided to the theoretical patient population. Teams will also need to include in their class plans an outline of content, at least one example of a community partner to involve, and at least one means to involve participation from the target patient population in either planning, implementing, or evaluating the program.

In the final portion of the workshop, each group will present its respective lesson plan and dish and attendees will sample each dish. Finally, they will vote on the winning presentation. A brief period for questions will conclude the workshop.