HJNO May/Jun 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAY / JUN 2021 21 really enjoy learning how to grow their own food, and we find that it makes themmuch more open to trying new things, too. What do you see as the future of culinary medicine? I would personally like to see culinary medicine being taught in every medical school across the country and for more healthcare providers to incorporate culi- nary medicine in their practices. On a larger scale, I’d love to see our healthcare system focus even more on preventative medicine and how interventions like our cooking classes can provide great bene- fits to patients. If we could get our cooking classes to be prescribed by physicians and covered by insurance, I think we could do a lot to help people avoid and treat chronic disease. The interest is there for people in the community to participate in classes like ours as we always have a waitlist for our community programming. I think that more and more, the general population is realizing that they can do a lot to improve their health through lifestyle and are open to learning more. We can’t help but ask for your favorite snack, entrée and dessert recipe. It’s hard to pick favorites, because I really love so many of our recipes! We firmly believe that at the end of the day, if the food doesn’t taste good, no one is going to want to eat it, no matter how nutritious it is. All of our recipes have been developed by chefs, and we test recipes multiple times until we perfect each dish. We also complete a thorough nutrition analysis on each recipe so that people can understand where they stand for things like calories, saturated fat and sodium. One of my favorite entrees is our “Cheeseburger Pasta,”which is a homemade version of Hamburger Helper. It’s such a great example of how you can take some- thing really familiar and just by making it even the simplest food taste amazing. We can do wonders with the most basic of ingredients, and we love sharing that with others so they can improve what we refer to as their “kitchen confidence.” I think if we can have more opportunities for peo- ple to come to something like our cooking classes, we can demystify a lot of the noise out there surrounding eating well. We help break it down into more digestible bits of information. Besides our medical student programming, we host a few different six- week community cooking class series where we do exactly that. Each week focuses on a different nutrition theme, and we educate people on these topics while also showing them the culinary skills and techniques to put it all into practice. Getting more people into programs like this could really change things on a bigger scale, and we see it hap- pening with the growth of the culinary med- icine movement. Tell us about the ReFresh Project. The ReFresh Project is a really spe- cial place for the Goldring Center to have found its home here in New Orleans. The ReFresh Project is a community health hub located in the Midcity neighborhood, which houses nine organizations working to achieve health equity in the surrounding neighborhoods. There are neighborhoods within New Orleans where we see huge health disparities, and we hope to be able to work with our partners to address that fact. Our free community cooking classes feature chefs and dietitians working along- side medical students to deliver the nutri- tion education to a diverse audience of local residents. These classes are a wonderful way for the students to practice their counseling skills in real time and to engage with local residents. Our kids and family class series tie in our partner, SPROUTNOLA, who manage the community garden outside our building. This allows us to expand the conversation into knowing more about different types of local produce and how to cook it. The kids Chimichurri Shrimp with Grilled Vegetables and Couscous