Imagine chatting with your primary care physician and discussing two options for treatment: Take a pill, or eat a hamburger. Which would you choose?
Casey Carr, a licensed naturopathic doctor in Coeur d'Alene, isn't out to take down pharmaceuticals. She is, however, trying to offer her patients a wide range of wellness tools before reaching for the prescription pad. To Carr, one of the best medicines to protect and heal our bodies is something we put in it every day: food.
"When given the right sort of ingredients and foundation, the human body does have a self-healing capacity," Carr says. "I'm trying to encourage that through a variety of means."
To that end, Carr is co-hosting three farm-to-table events this summer with local growers and ranchers for a series she calls "Food as Farmacy." It's an effort to discuss how soil, food and farming practices impact not just the earth, but our own physical and mental health. In addition to dinner, each evening includes an educational component and lots of time to chat with the star of the meal: the farmer.
"Most farm-to-table meals, it's all about the food," Carr says. "I mean, yeah, it's great food of course. But the farmer is often missing. [After] having worked alongside so many passionate farmers, they need to be at the center of this conversation because they're also contributing to human health, like a doctor, just in a different way."
The first Food as Farmacy event is being held at Quillisascut Farm in Rice, Washington, on June 1 for $70 a seat. In addition to a meal sourced completely from the farm, 15 attendees learn cheesemaking with farmer and artisan cheesemaker Lora Lea Misterly and take home their very own, freshly made goat chevre.
The second event is a family-friendly burger night at Castle Rock Ranch in Kingston, Idaho, on June 29. As many as 150 attendees are welcome to come learn about ranchers Albert Walsh and Jordan Shay's regenerative cattle herd and feast on some tasty hamburgers between homemade buns. Adult tickets cost $40, kids under 12 get in for half that price, and kids under 6 eat free.
The last event of the season is at the new Genesis Mountain Farm near Sandpoint. Take a tour of an aquaponic greenhouse that can feed hundreds all year-round, and learn about low-waste Italian salumi making from Seattle chef Seamus Platt. The high-end feast costs $160 per person and can seat about 50 people.
"I think it's a big draw for people coming out here to be able to talk to the people who actually manage the land and manage the animals," Shay at Castle Rock says. "Our hope is that people who are coming out to eat with us or spend time with us, they're not necessarily just coming for a meal. They're coming in for an experience — they want to learn something or see how what we do is different."
Carr always knew she wanted to be a doctor. As a child, she experienced multiple family members die early, mostly from cancer. As a teenager, her aunt was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
"She did all the conventional things — chemo, radiation, surgery," Carr says. "But she was the first in my family I saw who also changed her diet. She and her husband both totally overhauled their diet. I saw how her health and the health of her husband really changed. That was what first opened my eyes to the 'food as medicine' concept in a very generic way. To see it firsthand — see it extend her life and her quality of life — was really pretty amazing."
Her study of medicine and nutritional sciences first took her to Cornell University, and then a four-month internship on a farm in Tuscany.
"I learned more about food and food as medicine in my four months there than I did in my four years at Cornell," she says. "It was so eye opening, and it really just ignited this awareness in me of the difference between nutrition and nourishment. Both are very important. But we often forget the nourishment piece in our current food system."
To Carr, nourishment is more than inputting calories — it's putting good things into your body to protect from illness later on, or checking how stressed you are at a meal to understand how that affects digestion, or feeding your body what it needs to regulate hormones or fight an infection. Nutrient-dense foods come from nutrient-dense soils, which is why Carr thinks farmers are so important for health.
"There's a difference between a carrot that comes out of the ground from organic soil that's had compost on it versus one that you get at a grocery store in February in Washington state," she says. "The type of medicine I'm practicing came from that recognition of 'Oh, what we eat three times a day is medicine that we take, whether we think of it that way or not.' [I try to be] careful about food shaming, but just really try to get people to think about 'where's your food coming from,' and a little bit more about quality versus quantity."
Carr encourages her patients to view food as an empowerment tool, a way to take their health into their own hands every day. No one's perfect, she's quick to add. Plus, she's more than aware that healthy food is often the most expensive food in the U.S. But, as she puts it, chronic disease is expensive, too.
The three Food as Farmacy events are a way for Carr to invite the larger community into deeper thinking about the interconnectedness of soil, animal, plant and human health.
"It's a mix between all those things," she says, "my passion for food, medicine, farming and the farmers who pretty much make it all happen." ♦
Visit foodasfarmacy.com for ticket sales, location details, and other information.