HOSPITAL HEALTHCARE
How Mayo Clinic’s Bites of Belonging initiative offers diners a meal with a side of community The initiative gives Mayo Clinic employees a way to connect with their peers by sampling their family recipes.
through food. “This initiative really began as a way to engage with the community,” says Angela Selnes, coordinator for practice operations, training and recruitment at Mayo Clinic, adding that, so far, employees have responded enthusiastically to the dishes. “Our employees are really engaged with these events. They’re really looking forward to learning about their colleagues, learning about their heritage, their culture,” she says. “They come with so many amazing questions. They’re curious, they’re enthusiastic to learn.” The menu items featured represent all corners of the world and previous dishes include Swedish meatballs, an Afghan flatbread, African pepper soup, a cactus salad and more. While scaling up the recipes can be a challenge, Senior Director of Food and Nutrition Jon Klinger says that his team loves finding ways to recreate the dishes while staying as authentic to the original recipe as possible. “We are one of the most diverse kitchens that I’ve ever worked in,” he says. “I believe that we have some of the best chefs in healthcare as well. So, their ability to recreate these items, alongside with some of the people from the other countries that work within their kitchen,
it’s just so much fun. They have a lot of fun with it.” The Morrison team also visits local specialty stores to procure certain ingredients as another way to maintain the featured dishes’ authenticity. “The cactus salad, it’s not something we can source from our vendor,” says Klinger. Feedback from the event has been overwhelmingly positive, Selnes says, especially from the Mayo Clinic employees. “They rally around the event every week,” says Selnes. “And the feedback from them is that this part of the work they do brings them such joy and fulfillment.” Last year, the Morrison team did showcase some of the Bites of Belonging recipes at its café after the summer wrapped up. The dishes went over well, says Klinger, and there is a chance that some additional recipes from the initiative could make it on the café’s permanent menu rotation in the future. “Everybody’s kind of gravitating more towards globally inspired food. So, yes, [Bites of Belonging] is definitely something we consider when we’re engineering our future menus,” he says.
BY BENITA GINGERELLA
O n Thursdays during the summer in Rochester, Minnesota, the Morrison Healthcare food service team at Mayo Clinic spends the afternoon serving a rotating selection of global dishes to hungry members in the community. The special menu items are created through the hospital’s Bites of Belonging initiative which was launched through a partnership between the food management company and Mayo Clinic’s Office of Belonging. As part of the initiative, Mayo Clinic employees submit their recipes and the stories behind them to the Office of Belonging, who then chooses which recipes to spotlight. Then, the Morrison Healthcare team scales up the selected recipes to serve them during the city’s Thursdays Downtown events. The initiative started two years ago as a way to connect the community
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PHOTO COURTESY OF MAYO CLINIC
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