Food, Wellbeing, and the Future

When Dr. Kate Shafto and Jenny Breen, Chef, MPH, M Ed, serendipitously crossed paths more than a decade ago, they connected over their synergistic backgrounds: Shafto’s experience as a doctor and teaching at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and Breen’s experiences both as a chef focused on sustainability and as a public health professional. Both were frustrated by the lack of nutrition education, not just for healthcare professionals, but also the average person just trying to stay fed and healthy. 

“To quote [poet and farmer] Wendell Berry, we’re fed by a food system that cares nothing about health and treated by a healthcare system that cares nothing about food,” Shafto says. The pair knew they could improve this situation from both sides—they both had seen cases where people were being done a great disservice by not knowing more about how to use the basic building blocks of health proactively in their lives. “As our grandmothers said, ‘You are what you eat,’ and that is literally the case.” 

Although some other classes were already being taught at the University and the Bakken Center – some led by Shafto and Breen, the Food Matters course sprouted from their shared beliefs. In this course, they teach students of all backgrounds about the food system, the basics of nutrition, and dietary patterns. Unlike other courses, they also teach students how to apply new healthy eating and cooking habits in their own lives as well as the lives of people they may treat, now or eventually, in their day jobs.

“Does all of that matter for health outcomes? The answer is yes. For individual health and the health of the planet,” Shafto says. 

Breen emphasizes that this is a shame-free class that demystifies food and nutrition on various levels to connect the dots between the agency we have with our lifestyle and health, and how systems benefit from people not knowing any better. “We have lost the skill of listening to our bodies, and that’s by design,” Breen says. “Our food system has taught us to stop listening because that’s how they sell us all the food they are selling us. We need the experience of getting back in your body and feeling what it feels like to be nourished, not just fed.” 

While it is not a quick-fix approach, it’s the holistic one that will continue to make generational change, the two posit. “I love food and I love teaching and the food industry is part of making people sick. I’m interested in keeping people well,” Breen says.

Bakken Center Founder and Director Dr. Mary Jo Kreitzer says this kind of education is critical to building and maintaining a healthy society. “Food security is a critical determinant of overall wellbeing—it impacts our body, mind, performance, and connection,” she says. “I think that it is so important that universities treat food access as a key component of student success and whole-person wellbeing. It is not just a financial issue.” 

As a board member for the nationwide Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, she sees a future where the University of Minnesota would create a best-in-class teaching kitchen with a perspective on cooking as a mindfulness practice, the relationship between stress and eating, cultural and spiritual dimensions of nourishment, and connection to nature and seasonal food along with nutrition and cooking basics. “I would love to see the concept of teaching kitchens deployed in mobile versions as well as a state-of-the-art kitchen and that programming be developed for students, faculty and staff, as well as health professional students and practitioners and the community at large,” she enthuses. 

Dr. Amy Taylor, an emergency medicine and integrative health physician who is also appalled by the historical lack of nutrition education in the medical school curriculum, sees how food plays a role in physical, mental, and spiritual health. Taylor pairs her education and experience as helping manage in-the-moment life-threatening disease like heart attack or stroke with her long-term prevention strategies for her course, Botanical Medicine for Integrative Healthcare, where she reveals, for example, that eating a cup of dark, leafy greens can help prevent the very diseases she attempted to stop in the emergency room. And she also wants it to be easy, approachable, and delicious. But, she notes, connecting it to purpose might be another key to helping people develop healthier habits. 

“Food is a thread that connects us all as humans, woven into life in a multitude of ways,” Taylor explains. “Exploring these connections can help strengthen our ties to our health, our communities, and our roots.” She grew up in Iowa, helping her uncle on his corn and soybean farm. And now getting her hands in the dirt in her own garden helps her stay connected to those roots. “I love growing food not only for my family, but to share with my neighbors, who in turn share food with us … Food helps not only nourish our bodies but is essential for nourishing our spirits.”  

Breen says emphasizing the significance of diet and lifestyle on any student is hugely relevant. “Public health is about prevention. We shouldn’t be waiting until people are sick to start talking about this stuff. …But we live in an environment that makes it hard to be healthy, which is wrong. People with resources and access need to do something about it, to use our platforms to make sure the system becomes more equitable.” 

Sue Nankivell, Center director of business development and community relations, points to the Center’s commitment to community programming around Food & Wellbeing, some of it spun from the Food Matters class, as one way to use these resources to improve all lives. “All of our community programming is open to everyone, with sliding scale pricing, and much of it held via Zoom,” she explains. A few ongoing series of programs have been a hit, including Nourishment to Lighten Stress and Support Metabolic Health, Nourishment in Every Season: Online Cooking and Nutrition Workshops, and Mental Health and Nutrition workshops. 

Nankivell says these classes are really well-received overall. Recently, Dr. Megan Voss passed along a powerful testimonial: “I recently referred one of my patients to the spring Nourishment in Every Season workshop. She couldn't say enough good things about it and the facilitators. She struggles a lot with shame and control around food and cancer recurrence. She said she'd never heard anyone speak about food the way Chef Jenny and Dr. Kate did. She felt so validated and capable by the end. The workshop significantly reduced her stress and left her feeling empowered.” 

Kreitzer also pointed to the power of a Zoom class where attendees learned how to make a basic frittata and a kimchi tofu scramble, each ringing in around three dollars. Plus, the class learned basic knife skills and how to shop and stock a pantry.

“I love helping people learn skills to take care of themselves, to reclaim agency for their own health,” says Shafto. “And this education and the work Jenny and I do is so much about empowering people with knowledge and skills to nourish themselves and, hopefully, to pass that along to their communities, families’ communities, to workplaces. To really make a difference in health and the health of people around us.”