On Tuesday, the 21st of March 2023, Professor Sumantra Ray and members of the NNEdPro team from both the UK as well as the United States joined Dr Terry Stone at MedStar Health and Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC to give a guest talk on the initiation of the Mobile Teaching Kitchen (MTK) initiative in the United States within the Fresh and Savory culinary medicine program, which also saw its first session being delivered that morning to 3rd and 4th-year medical residents in Georgetown. Furthermore, also on the 21st of March the Lafayette Center, courtesy of Dr Teresa Stone hosted a hybrid session for stakeholders of the US Mobile Teaching Kitchen adaptation in Washington, DC. This session included around 20 attendees, including key leaders from nutrition, health care, and medicine, and those with an interest in lifestyle medicine, culinary medicine, and with links to universities within Washington, DC.
The outcome of the multi-stakeholder workshop discussions on the 21st was a blueprint for the coming months in which an intercollegiate model has been proposed for the MTK adaptation in the Washington, DC area. In this model, five or more preceptors comprising mainly medical students in collaboration with culinary professionals would recruit at least 10 champions from across five college communities within Washington DC.
These champions would be drawn from amongst college students who have insights or lived experiences regarding college hunger. The objective would be to train these college students with preceptorship from the medical student facilitators, such that they can become MTK champions and within coming months conduct two pop-up events around micro enterprise. This food based micro enterprise pop up events would target two audiences. One would be potentially medical residents, and another would be other college students at large.
These ticketed events would provide culinary experiences for these audiences in which they would be served low cost, healthy, nutritious, and tasty meals which are nutritionally complete and served up along with health education. The entire process of training Champions using a “See One, Do One, Teach One” model as well as the impact of the pop-up events, centred on food based micro enterprise, would involve the measurement of knowledge, attitudes, and practices as well as other cognitive measures which would enable us to predict the future course of both the culinary health education as well as micro enterprise. Early insights would be shared at the learning lab within the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior annual conference in Washington DC on the 20th of July 2023.
Participants:
Washington DC Area Stakeholders / Attendees
Alka Gupta – Zoom
Brad Moore – In Person
Dorothy Nankanja – Zoom
Dr David Bowman
Martin Tull – Zoom
Neha Kumar – Zoom
Robert Hay – Zoom
Scott Nichols – In Person
Terri Stone – In Person
Virginie Zoumenou – In Person
Representative from the Georgetown University School of Medicine Food is Medicine Club – Zoom
[Nicole Farmer – Remote Liaison]
NNEdPro Global Institute / MTK International Organisers
Kai Kargbo – Zoom
Matheus Abrantes – In Person
Sucheta Mitra – Zoom
Sumantra (Shumone) Ray – In Person
Tecla Coleman – In Person
Veronica Flores – In Person
Wanja Nyaga – Zoom