Challenging the Reputation of Hospital Food on a Rooftop Farm

Uli Seit for The New York Times

At Stony Brook University Hospital, a farm has been a team effort. Interns like Nadeem Marghoob plant and harvest the crops.

Cheryl McAndrew, seated, said she usually ate pasta but had recently enjoyed a serving of just-harvested turnips.

But this was not a hotel in the more trendy precincts of Manhattan or San Francisco. It was Stony Brook University Hospital, in the middle of Suffolk County, Long Island, where a rooftop farm is feeding patients and challenging the reputation of hospital food as mushy, tasteless and drained of nutrients. (No, Jell-O is not growing on the roof.) But the sick, who have bigger problems than whether their broccoli is local and sustainable, can be tough customers.

“Swiss chard went over well, kale maybe not so much,” said Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, executive director of the nutrition division at the hospital. “When people are not feeling well, they want their comfort foods.”

Hundreds of hospitals across the country host a farmer’s market, have a garden on their grounds that supplies fresh produce or buy at least some of their food from local farms, ranches and cooperatives, according to a survey by Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition of health care groups.

But hospital rooftop gardens are still unusual in New York, Eileen C. Secrest, a spokeswoman for the organization, said. “It’s really sweeping the country, but New York is kind of a dry zone for us right now,” Ms. Secrest said.

There is little scientific evidence to suggest that fresh vegetables can help sick people in their recovery, though Dr. Connolly-Schoonen and her colleagues say that their antioxidant properties might do so. But at the very least, she says, serving fresh food has psychological benefits and sets a good example for patients for when they go home.

The first spade of earth was turned in July 2011 on a fourth-floor deck of an academic building. Since then the farm, which can be seen from some patients’ rooms, has expanded to 2,200 square feet from 800, with an $82,000, five-year grant from the State Health Department, shared by several community gardens.

Faculty members and workers brought bags of earthworms from home. Farmers — interns from the department of family medicine, where Dr. Connolly-Schoonen is an associate professor, and the sustainability studies program, run by her husband, Martin Schoonen — hauled 70 bags of compost and 20 bales of straw up two flights of exterior stairs.

Interns like Michael Geddes, a 23-year-old from Flushing, Queens, harvest crops daily and carry them down to the hospital kitchen, where they are weighed and put in cold storage.

The farmers make a note of the day’s crop on a white board so the chefs can incorporate it in their menu. In keeping with the good-for-you theme, the newly hired head chef, John Mastacciuola, has banished bacon, soda (well, there was some ginger ale in cold storage), hot dogs and salt packets.

Stony Brook has room-service style dining, meaning patients can order meals from a menu between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. When they call, a room service associate tells them of any daily farm specials.

But some of the sickest patients are least likely to get fresh farm food: many are on restricted diets that have to be computer-coded for compliance with dietary standards. No one has yet figured out how to recode items for those diets. But they are working on it.

More than 550 pounds of crops have been harvested this season. Recently, Iman Marghoob, who is the head farmer and the farm’s only paid worker, walked among the plantings and pointed out hakurei turnips, red and yellow potatoes, cilantro, spinach, tender young collard greens and rows of broccoli. The broccoli was more stem than flowers, but Ms. Marghoob said the stems made a nice fall soup.

Sunflowers were planted along the borders to attract bees for pollination. Soon, Ms. Marghoob said, she will plant garlic to harvest in the spring.

The kitchen has used one day’s lettuce harvest in 225 salads and one day’s radishes in 521 salads.

Still, the farm has a long way to go before it can truly sustain Stony Brook’s more than 500 patients. Even at 500 salads a day, it accounts for only a fraction of the 1,200 to 1,300 meals a day that the kitchen produces for hospital patients.

“It’s creating a culture,” Dr. Connolly-Schoonen said. “We’re not going to meet the patients’ vegetable needs with our farm.”

The farm food seems to go over better with adults than children. In pediatrics, said Denise Malandrino, a sous-chef, “they love the personal pizzas with toppings and baked fries.”

The other day, the kitchen turned a bumper crop of turnips into whipped turnips to accompany grilled chicken with spinach as a special of the day. Ms. Malandrino sautéed the spinach (which was not from the farm) in olive oil. She mashed the turnips with some butter, milk, salt and pepper and scooped them onto plates with an ice-cream scooper. “Mashed turnips have actually been a favorite,” Ms. Malandrino said. “We get 25 to 30 orders of the turnips on a weekly basis, depending on the harvest.”

Two plates were ferried up to the cardiac unit, where Cheryl McAndrew and Barbara Ryder, roommates, had ordered the dish at the urging of a hospital dietitian.

“To be honest, I’ve been sticking with the pasta,” Ms. McAndrew said. Ms. Ryder said that she normally only ate turnips at Thanksgiving.

Yet after a cautious start, both women devoured the decorative dollop of turnip as if it were ice cream. “I did eat all my vegetables,” Ms. McAndrew said, pushing away her leftover chicken and wan-looking iceberg lettuce (not from the farm). “When they’re good, they’re good.”