Dietetic interns tapped to prepare meals for the community at Second Harvest
Volunteer hours help interns complete hours needed to become registered dietitians.
Janel Shoun-Smith | 615.966.7078 |
Katelyn McCormack (left), Jaclyn Morimune (center) and Grace White (right) prepared hundreds of meals to be flash frozen and delivered by Second Harvest.
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A partnership with Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee has provided new opportunities for Lipscomb’s dietetic interns while also filling a crucial community need during the city’s lockdown to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
The Dietetic Internship Program, which provides the final year of clinical training required for registered dietitians, has provided five interns to Second Harvest to help in their USDA-certified kitchen where they prepare fresh meals and flash freeze them for distribution to the community.
There the interns have gained experience in mass production of food, including preparing 4,000 pounds of chili in one day, preparing hundreds of frozen chicken to be chopped and cooked and preparing 900 meals with a meat and two sides in one day.
Second Harvest still ships plenty of the canned food that many people associate with food banks, but it also prepares perishable food and freezes it like TV-dinners to distribute in the community, said NK Kim, senior director of food manufacturing at Second Harvest.
After the March 3 tornadoes hit Nashville, Second Harvest used this method to provide meals for the disaster recovery teams. Now the organization is providing hot meals to 250 people daily at the city’s homeless shelters at the Fairgrounds opened in the wake of COVID-19, Kim said.
To do so, food must be prepared according to USDA safety standards so volunteers must have taken food safety courses at the manager level, he said. Such volunteers have become more scarce during the lockdown.
Alyssa Fauth (left) and Ellen Jones (right) prepare hundreds of ham sandwiches to serve to the community.
Lipscomb’s dietetic interns fit that bill, said Anne Lowery, director of the DIP program, who sent interns to work in the kitchen from March 31 to April 3. The interns were already familiar with Second Harvest as each intern completes a one-week rotation with their registered dietitian, creating nutrition curriculum and providing education in the community, Lowery said.
“This was a great way to experience mass food production from a non-profit standpoint,” said Ellen Jones, a native Nashvillian who earned her bachelor’s in health promotion at American University in Washington D.C. and her Dietetics Certificate from Lipscomb. “Producing food on a large scale is very different from just cooking in your own kitchen. It involves complicated equipment, math, organization and a lot of hard labor.
“I also realized how much food is wasted in this country,” she said. “All of the chicken and beef we used was donated by various companies or organizations and frozen right before the sell-by date. Had it not been given to Second Harvest, it would've been thrown away, which is what happens to a lot of other food.”
Jones said she worked with chicken, opening “hundreds, if not thousands” of packages of frozen chicken and meat. She also made hundreds of ham and cheese sandwiches during her rotation at Second Harvest.
Lowery said the opportunity to work in quantity food production at the Second Harvest kitchen was beneficial for the interns and would count toward their practice hours to become a registered dietitian.
“It is important for them to understand different methods of food production and the cook/freeze system at Second Harvest is much different than the school and hospital kitchens they have previously experienced,” she said.
ALYSSA FAUTH (LEFT) AND ELLEN JONES (RIGHT) also had to do plenty of washing dishes, an important part of the USDA-certified mass food production process.
“This opportunity provides practical food service experience and allows interns and RDs to implement concepts discussed in the classroom or office,” said Grace White, a Nashville intern who earned her bachelor’s in dietetics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
White said the experience allowed her to practice safe food production, handling and packaging; to understand calculation of food cost and gross profit; and observe how nutritious meals can be produced on a large scale while maximizing efficiency and minimizing cost.
“The experience not only helps in understanding the food service industry, it also allows dietitians to better understand the population they may counsel,” she said.
“Working at Second Harvest opened my eyes to the labor of love of feeding thousands of Tennesseans,” said Alyssa Fauth, of Clarksville, an intern who earned her bachelor’s in health and human science at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “It takes a huge effort to produce the amount of meals that they make. For my career, it was really neat to see the mass production on the cook-chill line and getting to see the planning and preparation of creating a product.”
Second Harvest has been providing frozen dinners in 30 styles for meals five days a week since 2003, said Kim. The homeless shelter meals are being provided in addition to the organization’s regular 450 customers in 46 counties, such as hospitals, nursing homes, churches and after-school programs, he said.
“(Lipscomb’s) students came in with great work attitude, I think, because of their intention of learning new things. Overall, they did a great job cooking and packing large-quantity food with high quality and nutrition in an efficient way,” said Kim.
“The work we did with Second Harvest was a great reminder that food insecurity isn't just a concept that you hear about or read in a book,” said Jaclyn Morimune, of Concord California, an intern who earned her bachelor’s in food and nutrition science from Seattle Pacific University. “It is a daily reality for many Americans, both those living across the nation and our neighbors down the street… It is inspiring to see how food production/distribution can be done in such an ecological and sustainable way!”
According to Lowery, the 2020 DIP cohort have enough practice hours in a variety of settings to be able to finish the program in May, despite the COVID-19 restrictions impacting student access to hospitals and other partnering organizations providing supervised practice for the program.
READ MORE: Pharmacy students are helping prepare for the surge during the pandemic.
READ MORE: Nursing students are volunteering on the front lines to fight COVID-19 in Nashville.