Webinar: Institutional Change from the Kitchen
Posted: March 15, 2013
Categories: Events / Food in the News / Local Procurement / News from Sustain Ontario / Webinars
Institutional Change from the Kitchen: How chefs are changing food procurement practices in hospitals and universities
Farm to Cafeteria Canada‘s “Dig In” webinar series, in cooperation with the Ontario Farm to School Challenge, are pleased to bring you an exciting opportunity to learn from chefs working in institutional environments. This webinar will focus on the efforts of Joshna Maharaj and Steve Golob to bring more healthy, local, and sustainable foods into hospitals and universities and how they are changing the ways in which these institutions source and provide food.
This webinar will be held Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 3pm and will be 30 minutes long. Register now!
Webinar Description
The Institutional Change from the Kitchen webinar will showcase the work of a couple of chefs who are changing the way that institutions source and provide food to patients, visitors, and students. These chefs will present an overview of the work they are doing, how they are working to include more healthy and locally sourced foods in their menus, how they are connected to Farm to Cafeteria Canada, and how they are connecting to the broader food movement.
Joshna will be providing an overview of how hospitals can embrace local, sustainable eating for both retail and patient food services. In particular, she will focus on the structural challenges that exist in this effort, as well as the supplementary initiatives that really drive success. Learn about how hospital food has become a universal joke, and the real, effective things that we can do to reconnect nutrition and wellness and revive the patient dining experience.
Steve will focus on some of the menu changes he has made in his role as the residence chef at Vanier College at the University of British Columbia and how this role has not only involved sourcing local produce and providing more healthy food options but also involves a lot of student engagement.
Register for the webinar!
Joshna Maharaj’s Bio
Joshna Maharaj is a busy chef with big ideas about good food! Joshna’s strong social justice and sustainability ethics flourished during her time as the chef at The Stop Community Food Centre, where she created and facilitated innovative and delicious community food programming, putting a grassroots kitchen on par with the rest of the kitchens in the city. In addition to teaching, writing, recipe development & television appearances, Joshna also speaks with groups of students about food and sustainability, consults with community organizations about grassroots-level food programming, and even led a troop of chefs to city hall for a deputation in support of a city-wide food strategy.
Joshna is working on a project at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, focusing on serving patients and their families locally sourced, wholesome, homemade food. Joshna is also the Chef in Residence for the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Joshna was a speaker at the 2011 TEDxToronto conference, and the Toronto Star named her as one of the 12 people to watch in the city for 2012.
Steve Golob’s Bio
Steve was born and raised in Toronto and attended George Brown College. He has 37 years of experience as a chef with experience across the country. He was an apprentice at the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto and has worked at the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto, The Banff Springs Hotel, The Fairmont Hotel in Ottawa, and in Vancouver he worked as the Executive Chef at the Sheraton Burnaby Hotel and at the Sheraton Plaza 500 Hotel. He has been the residence chef at the University of British Columbia since 1997 and will soon be hosting a radio show at UBC on healthy cooking, sustainable food, and local procurement methods. He has hosted two TV cooking shows called “T.V. Dinners”, and is involved in an ongoing research project at UBC called “Think and Eat Green At School” to incorporate healthy cooking, composting, and urban gardening into schools from grades K to 12. He has also been involved in the Farm to School program with Farm to Cafeteria Canada.