Season 3

Aired: Fall 2020 to Spring 2021

Season 3 of Policy in Plainer English was produced during the first year of the planning grant for integrating food and health care in rural Vermont. It supported the grant goal of outlining common ways that health care practices help patients connect with food access resources in their communities.

Hunger Screening - Part 1: Kristen Bigelow-Talbert (Bi-State Primary Care Association) and Katy Davis (Hunger Free Vermont) discuss screening for food insecurity. Recommended pre-listen is Community Health Needs Assessments. See also these resources.

Hunger Screening - Part 2: Kristen and Katy from Part 1 are joined by Christina Quinlan from Islands Community Medical Services, Inc. in Maine. Recommended pre-listen is EHRs.

Mini-Episode — Predicting Food Insecurity: A quick look at using predictive analytics to assess which patients might be at risk of food insecurity and how to best reach them with resources they can use.

Care Coordination: Following up from the screening episodes, Kaylana Blindow (Bi-State Primary Care Association) and Laurie Somers (Northern Counties Health Care) walk through the common next step, which is care coordination.

Care Navigator: Jodi Frei (OneCare Vermont) and Patrick Clark (Gifford Medical Center) take a deep dive on a particular platform: Care Navigator. This platform combines care coordination and also care management. These types of inter-organizational information exchanges are notoriously difficult, and they get even trickier if attempting to include community organizations.

Bonus: Panel on Connecting to Food Resources: Roundtable discussion of outreach systems to help FQHCs connect their patients to nutritious food. See also this resource page.

Help Me Grow: Janet Kilburn and Elizabeth Gilman discuss Help Me Grow, and the role this program's coordinative services play in helping families with young children connect to food resources.

Food and Transportation: Faye Mack (Hunger Free Vermont) and Maureen Boardman (Little Rivers Health Care) join us to talk about how to tackle the related problems of barriers to transportation and barriers to food access.

Medically Tailored Meals: David Waters, CEO of Community Servings , a Massachusetts-based Medically Tailored Meals (MTM) program, explains what defines this approach to food as medicine. See also many more resources at this page. A good companion piece is Food As We Age (Season 4), an episode with Chris Moldovan from AgeWell about meals for older Vermonters.

Lifestyle Medicine - Part 1: Dr. Elisabeth Fontaine and Dr. Scott Durgin provide background on the Lifestyle Medicine framework ahead of Part 2, which outlines the Lifestyle Medicine program at Springfield Medical Care Systems.

Lifestyle Medicine - Part 2: A conversation with the Lifestyle Medicine team at Springfield Medical Care Systems - Laura Jensen, Adam Ameele, Scott Durgin.

Children & Healthy Eating: Featuring two leaders of programs that engage with children around topics in healthy eating: Koi Boynton, from Healthy Roots Collaborative, and Emmy Wollenburg, from RiseVT speaking about Dinner Together.

Food Prescription Pilot Progra: Chelsey Canavan and Natalie Romano from Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Jennifer Fontaine from the Upper Valley Haven to discuss a new Food Prescription pilot.

Season Wrap Up

Season 4

Aired: Fall 2021 to Winter 2022

In this season of Policy in Plainer English we looked at skills food professionals use to understand how people experience flavor and what influences food choices - and what implications that might have for health professionals working with patients on diet change. Find the season episodes below, and click here for an Extended Playlist.

Season Intro 1 and the Bonus Season Intro - Designing Better Health Systems.

How We Experience Flavor: Author Rowan Jacobsen discusses how all of our senses, plus context and memory, shape our experience of food. This episode also introduces a central theme of the season – what happens if our perceptions change? For example, if we lose our sense of smell?

What Makes a Food Popular?: Sensory analyst Roy Desrochers has worked with some of the largest food companies on designing new products. He explains Flavor Leader principles used to create foods that will appeal to consumers. He also discusses how some of the key modern principles used to understand what makes a food popular began with work on medicine.

All You Need to Know About Flavor Appreciation: Master Sommelier David Keck rounds out the introduction to sensory analysis by explaining his approach to wine, how he got interested in this topic, why wine tasting should not be intimidating (and yes, the principles he discusses are applicable beyond wine).

Putting Appreciation Into Practice: Research chef Dale Conoscenti is one of the world’s leading authorities on ‘ice cream inclusions’, while chef educator Leah Pryor is co-founder of the Culinary Nutrition programs at UVM Medical Center. The two chefs each discuss how they apply the analysis skills discussed in the first three episodes to adjusting foods and shaping diets.

A Pause to Think Bigger: This season is about bringing insights from food professionals to bear on how we shape our individual diet . . . but what about moving the other way, from individuals to commercial scale production? This end of year special episode looks at the question of scale, helped by clips from the Sporkful’s Mission ImPASTAble series.

Food Journals: We do not mean food logs or calorie counting. Instead, essayist Alexandra Johnson provides insight on using a journal to foster creativity, and how this creativity practice can be brought into the realm of food and diet.

How to Cook: Professor Amy Trubek, and instructors John Corliss and Emily Barbour, join to talk about core principles in the courses they are developing at the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. Their curriculum combines sensory analysis with basic cooking skills to increase food agency.

Food As We Age: We all benefit from paying greater attention to our sensory experience of food and how that shapes our enjoyment of what we eat, that insight will help us modify our diet successfully when we need to make changes. And we will all, eventually, need to make changes because our relationship with food shifts with age. In this episode, registered dietitian Chris Moldovan gets into the details of maintaining a nutritious diet as we get older.

Building a Team: The previous episode offered a look into the work of a registered dietitian; this episode considers different ways to build teams of people with multiple skill sets to support healthy diets. We revisit key ideas from previous guests, offer a new interview with the director of the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, and attempt several sports metaphors.  

Season Finale: A season finale. . . with special guests! Dr. Edward Phillips and Juna Gjata, creators of the podcast Food We Need to Talk, join us to comment on common themes between the two series, and suggest what should be next in your food & health podcast listening line up.