Hospitals dig into sustainable seafoods

SEATTLE — Kathy Pryor sits in the lobby at Bellevue's Overlake Hospital, one of the few in the state committed to serving what is called “sustainable” seafood, an amorphous concept that means everything from local fish caught with hook and line, to healthy wild stocks, to avoiding fish caught with bottom trawling or from stressed marine ecosystems. Pryor is at the hospital as a representative of Washington Healthy Food in Health Care. The effort is a national initiative of Health Care Without Harm whose mission is to get hospitals to use their purchasing power to invest in foods that heal. "That could be healing the patient,” says Pryor. “It could be healing the earth. It might even be healing the communities that they're purchasing food from.”

Hospitals' economic activity represents close to 18 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning their purchasing could be a driving force in the sustainable food movement, says Pryor. “The interesting thing is they are the only sector of the GDP that really has a moral imperative which is to, 'First do no harm.' ”

It might seem intuitive for institutions engaged in healing and helping people recover from trauma to want to nourish them with local and organic food, cage-free poultry and sustainably caught seafood. But their commitment is relatively new and the drive to source sustainable seafood even more recent, says Pryor.

Existing contracts with food distributors that may not offer sustainable options and a lack of know-how about accessing alternative local foods keep many hospitals on the industrial-food treadmill. Fletcher Allen Hospital in Vermont was one of the first in the nation to break the pattern. Today some dozen hospitals in New England pride themselves on sourcing local, wild-caught and under-utilized species.

Overlake and Seattle's Virginia Mason are leading the way among Washington's 108 hospitals.