What's for lunch?

Our lunch menu - notice the "geese soup"

Ptarmigan (bird) soup. This is a very common food here.

This is a view of the hospital's kitchen.

When the planes don't fly, due to weather (which happens a lot), we run out of food.

Produce in the kitchen's cooler.
It can be a real challenge preparing meals for the hospital patients. During the winter months, the weather can be so bad that planes can't/won't come to Bethel. This can last for days, which results in food shortages. In the summer, we suffer from fires and fog - so again planes sometimes don't come in.

I don't order the food for the kitchen, but I do plan the menus for the inpatients. We must get pretty creative when we are running low on food. The other problem is the quality of the food. It is very difficult to get produce here, and you can see from the picture how poor the quality is.

This hospital serves the YK delta, and the diet is of course very different. People live off what they hunt and gather. The large portion of the diet comes from animal meat - such as seal, walrus, whale, moose, caribou, beaver, muskrat, and muskox. Fish is also very important here. People eat dried fish, and fish strips every day.

I recently wrote the "subsistence food donations" policy for the hospital. What that means is that people can donate certain subsistence foods to be used for hospital inpatient meals. We have received donations of birds, fish, and caribou to be used for meals. The patients really appreciate it, and I am a big believer that foods can be healing. I'm hoping more and more people will donate as we move from season to season.