Listening to ‘Voices at the Table’ to make dining healthier

Making restaurant meals healthier requires more than rewriting menus. It demands conversations between people who rarely have them.

A Tulane University initiative, “Voices at the Table,” was created to help solve those problems.

The initiative was led by the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine’s Dr. Melissa Fuster, an associate professor in the Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences department. Support by Tulane’s Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking enabled Voices at the Table to bring together city agencies, policy and advocacy groups, academic institutions, food producers, distributors, and independently owned local restaurants to talk about what gets in the way of offering consumers more nutritious dining choices. 

The effort began in March 2023 with the first of several workshops. Each workshop focused on a different topic, from how restaurants can help promote community help, to whap municipal resources might be needed, to how to build stronger collaborations between farmers and chefs. 

“If customers demand healthier options, there's a supply,” Fuster says, “But also, on the other side, if you supply the choice, that exposes people to healthier versions of their favorites and can change minds.”

— Dr. Melissa Fuster

Federal research shows that Americans now spend more money eating away from home than preparing meals at home, making restaurants an increasingly important setting for improving nutrition, a thought echoed by former Celia Scott Weatherhead School nutrition program director and emeritus professor Dr. Diego Rose.

“We're eating more and more of our food away from home, and so whatever we can do to make that healthier would be a good thing.” 

Culture was another important consideration for the Voices at the Table project, including the food-centric New Orleans culture and the influences that other cultures have on the dining experience. Each workshop was held at a different restaurant in the city, with a focus on Black and Latin-owner establishments.

Restaurants can be powerful influencers of how people eat and how they connect with their culture. That point had to be considered as the program connected restaurants and local farmers and growers.

“Surprisingly, the restaurants were the ones that said, ‘No, we really want to have locally grown foods,” Fuster said. “When we got the different groups together, we found they speak different languages, in terms of business and how they speak about food, but their goals were similar.”

Both the restaurant owners and the food producers talked about the challenges they each face that prevent them from being able to expand beyond their current offerings. For the restaurants, permitting issues, boil water advisories, electrical issues, street closures, and other logistical concerns chip away at their business, often leading to restaurant closings.

On the provider side, space can be an issue. Although there are a number of urban growers in New Orleans, they literally often don’t have enough land to produce more fruits and vegetables than they already do.

Such challenges point to bigger questions about urban planning and both state and city policies, and what structures can be arranged to overcome barriers to restauranteurs and growers.

“It becomes more complex and more interesting,” says Fuster. “But it also gives us more leverage points to tackle, which makes us think more creatively about how to address these complex problems.”

Finances were a major concern. Most of the restaurants eager to participate and commit to healthier menu options were upper scale establishments that could afford to make such changes. The question remained how to help more modest restaurants.

Fuster assured those restaurants that they too can invest in their customers’ health.

“The investment might not be as big as you think; it's just tweaking what you already have.”

Some healthier menu choices, she explained, can actually help expand profit margins. 

Vegetables typically cost less than meat, but with creative preparation can still command a higher price point. 

“The beauty of it, thinking as business owners, is that you can have a very beautiful vegetarian option that can be almost at the same cost [to the consumer] as the meat one,” Fuster said. “For chefs that have that know-how, that skill, then you have potential for more gain because a vegetable like cauliflower costs much less than a steak.”

Approaching nutrition from this perspective is a change for many researchers.

“For most of us that are in nutrition or health education, social and behavioral population sciences -- business isn't really part of what we do,” Rose said. “And yet understanding how restaurants can survive and how establishments that sell food can make it healthy and still make a profit -- because if they're not making a profit, they can't survive -- all of that is really important.”

For all participants, it was important to use a “systems thinking” lens to understand how the city’s food economy operates as a connected ecosystem.

“It's not just doing things at the restaurant that matter. We need to create an environment within the larger systems that make change not only easy, but also that it makes business sense.”

At its core, Voices at the Table was about relationships: between chefs and growers, between residents and institutions, and between food and health. By working across sectors and centering community voices, the project worked to provide a roadmap to strengthen local food systems to be more equitable, sustainable, and culturally grounded. 

Fuster hopes to continue having these conversations, perhaps with city agencies helping to facilitate changes. 

“My goal is that I'm not in the driving seat, but I'm supporting the driving -- and that it continues.” 

She would also like to see Tulane take a leadership role in promoting innovation in urban design and landscape architecture that could increase food growing space in the city. Innovations such as rooftop gardens can address the space issues faced by urban growers, while also bringing more fruits and vegetable to the city.

“We need that creative audacity and fearlessness,” she says. “This is not a crazy idea. We have a few rooftop gardens in the city. We have them over the world. Tulane can be a leader in this space.”

Fuster’s new area of work seeks to explore these possibilities. She also recently received NIH funding to expand her research to focus on the consumer’s perspective, bringing “customers to the table” as well. 

Find out more about Voices at the Table.