From Wards to Fields: Reconnecting Food, Land and Healing in Healthcare

Hi I’m Sammy,

Your Good Farm in-house nutritionist. Here to bring you essential information on nutrition, diet and permaculture gardening - in a bite size, easy to understand, science-backed way.

This week... From Wards to Fields: Reconnecting Food, Land and Healing in Healthcare

For most of human history, food and health were inseparable. To eat was to move: to walk, dig, harvest, gather, hunt, tend and wait. Human bodies evolved not only to digest food, but to participate in its acquisition, shaped by rhythms of daylight, seasons, soil and community. Nutrient-dense food was not an abstract concept or a labelled product; it was something known through touch, effort, smell and place. Nourishment was embodied.

Today, that relationship has largely been severed. Food arrives anonymously, wrapped, processed and detached from its origins. Many people live increasingly sedentary lives, with little physical or sensory connection to how food is grown, how soil is built, or what truly constitutes nourishment. This disconnection is not benign. It contributes to metabolic dysfunction, chronic disease, micronutrient depletion and widespread confusion about what “healthy eating” means. Modern healthcare is left responding to illness downstream, while the ecological, nutritional and behavioural roots of health remain fragmented upstream.

In Australia, this disconnect is particularly striking. We live in a country capable of producing abundant, nutrient-dense food, yet our diets, including those served in institutional settings, are increasingly dominated by refined and ultra-processed products. This is perhaps unsurprising when our dietary guidelines continue to promote processed grains as a staple of the everyday diet, reinforcing patterns that prioritise convenience and shelf-stability over nourishment. At the same time, chronic disease places growing pressure on a healthcare system designed primarily for acute intervention. The environments in which we treat illness often remain disconnected from the conditions required to sustain health.

Within this context, a quiet but radical shift is emerging. Some hospitals around the world are beginning to re-embed food, land and nourishment back into the very places where people come to be treated, or perhaps more accurately, to be healed. By transforming hospital grounds, rooftops and underutilised spaces into working farms and gardens, these institutions are restoring an ancient relationship between food, movement, environment and health. Feeding these elements back into healthcare settings does more than improve meal quality; it signals a more integrated, preventative and sustainable approach to healing, one that recognises health is grown, not simply prescribed.

Healing Landscapes: When the Environment Becomes Part of Care

The benefits of these initiatives extend beyond nutrition alone (see our previous article Choosing the Leafiest View). Views of greenery from patient windows have long been associated with reduced stress, improved mood and faster recovery. When those views are not merely ornamental but productive, fields of vegetables, herbs, fruit trees and pollinator plants, they reinforce a deeper message: healing is an active, living process.

Food as Medicine in Practice: Hospitals Leading the Shift

Boston Medical Centre: Rooftop Farming as Preventative Care (USA)

Boston Medical Centre is one of the most well-documented examples of this integrated model. Its rooftop farms produce thousands of kilograms of fresh vegetables and herbs each year, supplying inpatient meals, hospital cafeterias, teaching kitchens and community food programs. Crops are selected not only for yield, but for nutritional value and cultural relevance.

These farms are embedded within broader initiatives addressing food insecurity, chronic disease and preventative health. They function as both food source and signal: nourishment is central, not peripheral, to healthcare delivery.

Eskenazi Health: The Sky Farm (USA)

At Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis, a rooftop “Sky Farm” produces fresh food while also serving as an educational and wellbeing space. Patients, staff and visitors can see food growing within the hospital environment, reconnecting nourishment with place and process, something increasingly rare in urban life.

While modest in scale, the visibility of food production within a clinical setting reshapes how care is perceived. It quietly challenges the assumption that hospitals are places solely of extraction and intervention, rather than cultivation.

Cleveland Clinic: Food Systems as Clinical Infrastructure (USA)

The Cleveland Clinic operates an on-site organic farm that supplies fresh produce to hospital kitchens and staff dining facilities. Integrated into broader food policy reform, the farm reflects a systemic approach to nutrition, recognising food quality as foundational to cardiometabolic health, chronic disease prevention and workforce wellbeing.

Europe’s Approach

Across Europe, hospital-based food production is often more modest in scale, but intentional in design, integrating wellbeing, sustainability and education.

At Oslo University Hospital, rooftop gardens developed with patients and families grow vegetables, berries and flowers, creating restorative spaces that also support food literacy and engagement. In Toulouse, France, the Pasteur Clinic operates a rooftop vegetable garden supplying organic produce and herbs to hospital kitchens, maintained by staff and volunteers. In the United Kingdom, hospitals such as Southmead Hospital in Bristol have developed rooftop herb gardens that support catering services while offering calm, regenerative environments for both staff and patients.

These projects reflect a shared recognition: food, environment and recovery are inseparable.

Integrated Models Beyond Western Healthcare

While hospital-based food production may appear innovative within Western healthcare systems, it is not universally new. In many parts of the world, including India and across parts of Latin America and Africa, food, land and medicine have never been fully separated. Traditional and integrative medical systems continue to operate within hospitals where therapeutic diets, medicinal plants and locally sourced food are central to care rather than supplementary. These models remind us that the fragmentation of nutrition, environment and healthcare is cultural, not inevitable.

What This Means for Australia

While Australia does not yet have large-scale hospital farms comparable to some international examples, there are growing signs of change. Therapeutic gardens, green roofs and nature-informed hospital design are increasingly recognised for their role in patient recovery, staff wellbeing and mental health. What remains largely unexplored is the next step: fully integrating food production, nutrition and healthcare delivery within institutional settings.

This raises an important question. If hospitals are where we respond to the consequences of disconnection, could they also become places where reconnection begins?

In a time of climate instability, supply-chain vulnerability and rising chronic disease, hospital-based food production also offers practical resilience. Locally grown food, green infrastructure and ecological design support not only human health, but environmental sustainability and institutional preparedness.

A Different Vision of Healing

Re-embedding nourishment and land into hospitals does not resolve chronic disease overnight. But it begins to repair a fundamental rupture, one that emerged when food became disconnected from bodies, and bodies from the landscapes that once sustained them. In doing so, these hospitals are not inventing a new model of care. They are remembering an old one: that health has always been grown long before it is treated.

Thanks for reading! Until next time! 

Sammy :)

References & Further Reading

• Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science.
• Boston Medical Centre. Rooftop Farm and Preventive Food Program.
• Cleveland Clinic. Food Is Medicine and Integrated Food Systems Initiatives.
• Eskenazi Health. Sky Farm and Community Wellness Programs.
• World Health Organization. Traditional Medicine Strategy.
• Monteiro, C. A., et al. Ultra-processed foods and health outcomes.
• Prescott, S. L., et al. The role of environment and lifestyle in chronic disease prevention.