A new study published by Feeding America, a nonprofit organization that is home to 200+ nationwide food banks, found that 42 million Americans struggle to put food on their table, and over 13 million children live in food insecure households. A lack of accessibility to healthy foods at the developmental stage can lead to detrimental health consequences, researchers said.  

        “There’s a lot of food insecurity around the city of Boston. There aren’t any real grocery stores here in the area, [of South Boston]. People just end up going to a fast food place and eating all the wrong things,” said Lorrie Young, senior director of the Inpatient Dietitians at Boston Medical Center.

        “There’s no real place where you can buy fresh fruits and vegetables in here. This can lead to serious health issues in the long run and is why we say obesity and poverty go hand in hand,” said Young.

        To alleviate food insecurity and malnutrition in the community, registered dietitian and chef Tracey Burg runs Boston Medical Center’s Demonstration Kitchen. The Demo Kitchen, alongside the Preventive Food Pantry go hand in hand, as the hospital’s Nutrition Resource Center, to bridge the gap between medical attention and food insecurity. The Nutrition Resource Center helps BMC’s patients provide food for their families and gain valuable disease-specific nutritional knowledge.

        Open since 2001, the Demo Kitchen has been a growing project at BMC.

        “I was hired as a consultant 16 years ago. Then I came back 6 and a half years ago, and before I was here the kitchen was underutilized; they would do 5 classes a month, now I’m doing up to 5 classes a day,” said Burg. “Since those years we have expanded it to 30-35 classes a month, and we are now open 5 days a week.”

        Burg’s passion for food and health has made her the reason behind  the program’s success. Patients who suffer from cancer, diabetes, and obesity are encouraged to attend Burg’s classes, so that they are able to receive nutrition information centered around their health condition during an interactive cooking demo and tasting session.

        Besides attending the needs of BMC South End patients, the program now has affiliations with the Supporting Parents and Resilient Kids BMC program in Mattapan, which seeks to help underprivileged kids with a wide range of health issues, and with the hospital’s Margaret M. Shae RD Adult Day Health Program, where Burg teaches at risk seniors about healthy eating. These affiliations have helped the program expand in order to cover all demographics, from infancy to old age.

        “I drive to Mattapan because 90% of their seniors have diabetes, so I always talk about that and also about geriatrics and safety,” said Burg.

        Burg’s Wednesday lunch-time class at the kitchen, “Diabetic Cooking Essentials,” teaches patients how to cook diabetic-friendly meals, and features ingredients and tips she shares both with the Mattapan seniors and Boston-based patients.

        “Today we are cooking a crispy sweet and sour fish with mango and brown rice on the side, so that the patients can get a healthy and nutritious yet flavorful meal. I try to make it fun, engaging and interactive, an overall a tasty experience, you know?” said Burg.

        Burg finds her inspiration anywhere she can. She uses online resources, magazines, and cookbooks, to find recipes she can easily adapt to the participants' health issues. The Crispy Sweet and Sour Fish recipe was tweaked from the original Crispy Sweet and Sour Pork recipe featured in renowned PBS chef Ming Tsai’s cookbook “Simply-Ming One-Pot Meals.”

        Massachusetts born and raised chef Tsai attended the 22nd annual Food For Thought dinner in 2015, hosted by BMC to raise money for the Grow Clinic and Grow Partners, including the Demonstration Kitchen and the Preventive Food Pantry.

        “I did a demo with him and Joanne Chan from Flour Cafe at the dinner as their sous-chef, to get donations because we’re run entirely by philanthropy. Every year we raise millions of dollars for many BMC programs, including ours” said Burg.

        During her "Diabetic Cooking Essentials" class, Burg’s sous chef was Patty,who declined to give her last name, a 55 year old woman suffering from several health issues, diabetes being one of them.

        “We go way back. She showed us how to make popcorn in a brown bag in the microwave and also how to make soup from scratch, she’s the absolute best,” said Patty.

        To which Burg added, “No you are the best, and that soup was vegetable broth, remember?” Before Patty left for her physical therapy appointment at 1:30 p.m., she helped Burg cook and clean, all while learning about nutrition.

         "It’s like with Patty who has diabetes, I talk about whole grains while we cook ‘eat brown rice, it’ll make you feel fuller so you’re not hungry.’ It’s a support group, where I can help them learn to see it as ‘I can have this, but can’t have a lot of it, I can have it in moderation.’ We reiterate the healthy foods, where to buy them, and introduce them to the pantry as well,” said Burg.

        Being part of a safety net hospital, Burg focuses on creating classes that introduce participants to inexpensive and simple ingredients that can be found anywhere. The Demo Kitchen has a special class called “4 for 10, a healthy cooking class for people on a budget,” where patients can learn how to prepare a quick meal for a family of four for only 10 dollars.

        “Usually I just go into the supermarket and don’t know what I’m gonna cook. So I went in this week and bought 4 pork chops, huge, I have 2 in the freezer still. I pounded them out, and I made kind of like a schnitzel, with honey roasted carrots and brussel sprouts, and there were still some left over in the end,” said Burg.

        “The demo kitchen is now smack right by the cafeteria. It used to be up in Dowling on the 4th floor by the pantry, now visitors or staff that go to the cafeteria can see it, it’s more visible, and therefore more available,” said Young, who will tell any outpatients she sees to go check it out.

        Besides being able to attend any of the Demo Kitchen’s classes and use the pantry, BMC’s staff is able to participate in the Iron Chef Challenge, an interactive cooking class where staff from the same department, or two different departments, work against each other to create a healthy meal with ingredients from the pantry.

         This is not the only team-building class in the demo kitchen; SNAAC, or Student Nutrition Awareness and Action Council, is a class made especially for Boston University’s first and second year medical students SNAAC club, where they can learn about culinary medicine and food as a means of prevention. Managers can also ask Burg to teach a special demo class to their department.

        To continue educating their patients and growing as a program, BMC’s Demo Kitchen is taking on new projects. BMC has been invited to form a part of the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, an initiative that stems from the program Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives, formed by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and The Culinary Institute of America to help teaching kitchens around the United States connect.

        The Demo Kitchen also seeks to appear in more nutrition and cooking related conferences, after their poster “A Hospital-Based Food Pantry and Demonstration Kitchen: A Unique Role for the Dietitian,” presented at last year’s Food and Nutrition Conference and Exposition here in Boston won them a prize for most innovative poster in the “Innovations in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice and Education.” The Demo Kitchen also won the 2012 James W. Varnum National Quality Award with the Preventive Food Pantry, and as a gift received a video about their leading-edge healthcare project. 

        Burg is also working closely alongside the hospital’s Marketing and Communication teams to create awareness in and out of the hospital of the benefits of the Demo Kitchen.

        “Cook from home, that’s the most valuable thing I tell the participants,” said Burg. ”Bring your lunch in, make big batches, but cook from home. And that’s what we’re teaching, we’re teaching people how to cook. We give them food, knowledge and skills.”

        With inexpensive ingredients that can be bought in the local market or found in the food pantry, basic cooking skills, and easy to follow recipes, BMC’s Demonstration Kitchen is providing patients with nutritional knowledge, making their medical care a more rounded experience, and ensuring food security.