Can Food Actually Be Medicine?

Prescribing produce, crafting meals: More medical schools are teaching students how to cook and use food as a tool for treating patients.

Lauren Estess, a third-year student at Tufts University School of Medicine, believes knowing how to make chickpea stew will make her a better doctor.

She and 14 other students spent a recent evening making dinner as part of a two-month culinary medicine class to train doctors, dentists and dietitians that the university began offering last spring. Using case studies and cooking, the course aims to convince future medical professionals that good, affordable food targeting specific diseases can be as important as medication.

“It’s unfortunately a big misconception that medicine doesn’t have anything to do with food,” she said, chopping dill with hands she hopes will one day be delivering babies.

That the modern American medical system should view the kitchen as an extension of the doctor’s office isn’t a novel idea. But it’s riding a populist wave that merges the traditionally progressive Good Food Movement — with its focus on local food, the environment and food justice — with the largely conservative, food-centered Make America Healthy Again agenda.

The medical school at Tulane University established the first teaching kitchen in 2012, and formalized a style of evidence-based curriculum that embraces a simple tenet: Food is an essential part of health care. Now more than 60 medical schools, residency programs and nursing schools use a version of Tulane’s curriculum adapted by the American College of Culinary Medicine.

Teaching doctors kitchen literacy is one piece of a growing movement called Food Is Medicine. Think of it as a modern, research-backed version of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Plenty of data show that if physicians know more about cooking, they are more likely to use food as a tool to treat patients, said Wendelin Slusser, an associate vice provost and professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, speaking at a panel last year.

“Are we preparing them to prescribe it with the same confidence as medicine?” she asked.

The practice of treating disease with home-delivered food began during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Volunteers created palatable, nutrient-dense meals to help combat H.I.V. wasting syndrome, which essentially caused patients to starve to death even when they ate.

Over the years, community organizations expanded beyond AIDS and began designing meals carefully calibrated to combat food-related illnesses like Type 2 diabetes and cardiac and kidney diseases. A handful of doctors started prescribing produce for low-income patients facing diet-related illnesses.

Cooking and nutrition electives arrived in medical schools in the early 2000s, driven by researchers at Harvard University and the Culinary Institute of America who brought white coats and chef’s whites into the same room. Two decades later, the Biden administration declared Food is Medicine a formal health strategy. Foundations and grocers committed hundreds of millions to research. Programs that provided prescription produce and special meal kits — once paid for with donations and grant money — became part of the Department of Agriculture budget.

The holy grail is to get health insurers and the government to pay for food-based treatment, a concept that a doctor named H. Jack Geiger tested in the 1960s at a clinic in Mississippi. He prescribed food for patients to be purchased at Black-owned grocery stores and paid for it with a mix of federal dollars and grants intended for pharmaceuticals. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent an investigator to Mississippi to stop what officials thought was a misuse of money earmarked for medicine.

“The last time I looked in my medical textbooks,” Dr. Geiger told the investigator, “they said the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”

- Author: Kim Severson, The New York Times

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