Source: The Tyee- October 18, 2012
Following on the example of St. Joseph’s hospital in Guelph, a nationally-recognized model of bringing local food into big institutions, we wanted to find out how patients’ meals measure up in Vancouver.
Indeed, could we do a plate-by-plate comparison of hospital meals: their ingredients, how far they’d travelled, what our health system paid for them?
Reasonable questions, we thought. Finding a satisfactory answer proved much more difficult.
Information about ingredients and food sources that other hospitals handed over readily, was refused by both Sodexo — the $8 billion-a-year French corporation in charge of food service at Vancouver Coastal Health Authority (VCHA) facilities — and the public health authority itself. Both parties cited contractual confidentiality for what they couldn’t share about what’s being provided to the sick, injured and elderly in Vancouver’s hospitals…
