New Coalition Forms to Get Plant-Based Foods into Hospitals in 2020

A new coalition comprised of five non-profit organizations is working to provide hospital patients across the United States with plant-based meal options to help combat illness such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Oldways, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), and Meatless Monday are working individually and collectively to provide free support, resources, and hands-on training to hospital culinary teams to help them provide more plant-based meals. The HSUS is offering new training created specifically for chefs, dietitians, and physicians with an aim to get healthcare systems to commit to have 50 percent of their daily meal offerings be plant-based by 2025. PCRM’s registered dietitians, nurses, and medical doctors are offering lunch-and-learn and employee wellness programs in hospitals to provide education about evidence-based plant-based nutrition, and nutrition nonprofit Oldways has developed a free Oldways Plant Forward Plates Healthcare Toolkit—featuring recipes scaled up to 100 servings for hospital settings, therapeutic menu plans, HACCP instructions, and nutritional analysis—to help hospitals add quality, cost-effective vegan meals to their food service programs. Additionally, HCWH partnered with the World Resources Institute to bring the Cool Food Pledge to healthcare, with the aim of reducing signatories’ greenhouse gas emissions from food purchasing by 25 percent by 2030. Meatless Monday is promoting its concept of reducing meat consumption, starting by going meatless every Monday, in the healthcare sector by offering free resources to hospitals to help them embrace the concept for patient health and environmental sustainability.