HJNO May/Jun 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAY / JUN 2021 19 most current evidence. The “Health meets Food” team is also continuing to develop newmodules that focus on specific health- related issues to add to the existing curricu- lum, which features eight core foundational modules and over 20 condition- and dis- ease-specific modules. Most recently, two modules on food insecurity were launched to address the issue of safe, reliable access to healthy food for diverse populations, which is something that has become even more of a concern in the past year for many people around the country. What’s really exciting to me about our program at Tulane is that our courses are required for all first- and second-year medi- cal students as part of their “Foundations in Medicine”courses. That means that each year, we are reaching, at minimum, around 375 medical students with our cooking classes. We also offer two different elective There are currently over 60 institutions that teach the curriculum, including medical schools, nursing and residency programs. Originally, the program grew through word-of-mouth interest from other medi- cal schools that wanted to start similar pro- grams to Tulane’s teaching kitchen. As inter- est continued to grow, the curriculum was made available for licensing. The growth of the culinary medicine movement is impressive for having hap- pened in a relatively short time, but we still have room to grow even more. As a part of the network of schools using this program, we are able to collaborate with healthcare providers across the country on research that demonstrates the effectiveness of the curriculum on both medical trainees as well as community members. We also partici- pate in monthly meetings to continuously update and improve the curriculumwith the series and a monthlong fourth-year rotation for students who want to dive a little deeper into the world of culinary medicine. Was the program affected by COVID-19? If so, what adjustments did GCCMmake to continue offering the same curriculum? This past year has been really interesting as we were forced to shut down our kitchen facility to the public. The good news is that our program translates really well to our “virtual teaching kitchen.”We’ve been host- ing all of our medical student programming this academic year online, and it’s been very successful. We prepare a bag of ingredients for the students to pick up the day before their class with everything they’ll need, and then during the class, we all cook together from our home kitchens. Our chef instruc- tors are able to work with smaller groups Asian Peanut Tofu with Noodles