Food Insecurity Screening & Referrals

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.

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