WELLNESS on the MENU
Chef Santana Diaz pioneers a much-needed revolution in hospital food, prioritizing a nutritious road to recovery.
by KATE MONTANA photographs courtesy of UC DAVIS HEALTH
/ HEALTH SPR UT
the picture, then Super Bowl 50, and eventually I wanted to come back home to Sacramento. The opportunity to open the Golden 1 Center for the Kings came up so I did that. The next challenge was seeing if we could do a farm-to-fork program in a hospital, which was what the leadership at UC Davis Health was trying to accomplish. The answer, six-and-a-half years later, is yes. We’ve done it.
Hospital food has arguably long been in desperate need of a makeover. So when UC Davis Health had ambitions to overhaul its cuisine, they called a chef who was no stranger to cooking for large crowds: Santana Diaz. Diaz, a native of California’s Central Valley, had already successfully implemented a “farm- to-fork” ethos at Super Bowl 50 and the Golden 1 Center, home of the Sacramento Kings, alongside other culinary projects. The chef’s deep belief in the transformative power of food informed the design of a first-of-its-kind meal program at UC Davis, built around the idea that “good food is good medicine.” Diaz launched the initiative on joining UC Davis in 2018 and today, he says, the hospital’s kitchen serves more than 6,700 nutritious meals to its patients and staff daily. The institution does so by partnering with local, mostly organic and regenerative farms in the Central Valley, reviving a community of growers that has experienced decline in recent decades due to factors like rising costs, climate change, and aggressive competition in a global market. Here, Diaz speaks with The Rooted Journal about UC Davis Health’s farm-to-fork program, the importance of seasonality and supporting local farmers, and the future of America’s food landscape.
At what point in your career did you recognize the importance of seasonality when it comes to ingredients? As a society, we’ve gotten desensitized to seasonality because we go into our grocery stores and tomatoes are always in the same part of our produce section all year round. We know they taste better at different times of the year, but we still buy them in winter. If we invite guests over for grilled burgers on a nice day in December, we’ll still have the same lettuce, tomatoes, and onions on that sandwich. As I looked at larger entities, I started paying more attention to how we were sourcing. Sourcing in larger quantities and wanting to serve ingredients that were fresher — not just chicken fingers and fries — led me to looking at what was abundant.
Did that prove to be simple to do or challenging? Well, it was deeper than just straight sourcing. Looking at Sacramento, family farms that grow seasonally just don’t exist anymore. Farmers were sending their children to higher education to learn to do something else. I asked myself why. When I started connecting the dots, I realized that communication wasn’t always there between the market and what someone was growing. A farmer can be growing produce or raising cattle blind and not sure if there’s going to be an end buyer. So at the end of a season when their product is ready to harvest or their cattle is ready to sell, that farmer might not have realized that there are others growing or raising the same thing; now, the market is saturated and that farmer is broke. That cycle isn’t sustainable for a family. So when I started in the large- capacity venues and the hospital, I realized that those relationships with farmers and ranchers are very important, and to help them guarantee an end buyer ensures that I will have quality, in-season ingredients to serve. As one example, through UC Davis we’ve helped secure sustainable, organic asparagus for our region through a partnership with Durst Organic Growers in Yolo County. They are able to grow a little more than what we commit to and provide to
ABOVE: EXECUTIVE SOUS CHEFS JAMES ABLETT (RIGHT) AND JET AGUIRRE (LEFT) FINISHING OFF APPETIZERS FOR AN INTERNAL SCHOOL OF MEDICINE GRADUATION EVENT. BELOW: FOOD SERVICE WORKERS LABELING FRESHLY MADE PASTA SALADS FOR THE OPERATION.
Tell me a bit about your background and how your upbringing informed your interest in the culinary world. I grew up in Yuba City, an agro- town that is a producer of a lot of stone fruits about an hour north of Sacramento. My family immigrated from Mexico and worked in the fields harvesting; my mother became a teacher, my aunt became a nurse, and my grandfather and uncle were farmers. I’ve always been around fresh fruit and seasonal food. With that upbringing
came an expectation of certain foods to taste a certain way, not having to manipulate seasonal food because it’s already at its peak ripeness. I always worked in restaurants and ended up going to culinary school. I then went into fine dining and wanted to take that quality of food to the masses. So I just started going to bigger entities, like Hyatt Hotels and Omni Hotel Resorts in San Francisco, and then was asked to go to stadiums to increase the quality of their food programs. Levi’s Stadium came into
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