Sam Diminich Partners with HopeWay on Culinary Mental Health Programming

At first glance, a collaborative project between renowned chef Sam Diminich and HopeWay, a nonprofit mental health treatment center in southwest Charlotte, might seem like an unlikely pairing.

For those involved, however, it’s a wonder the partnership didn’t come sooner. From their perspective, a mental health treatment center teaming up with a culinary organization creates a symbiotic relationship that can possibly be transformative for both.

It was leadership at HopeWay, launched in 2014 to broaden the scope of mental health care and education for adults in the area, who sought out Your Farms Your Table (YFYT), a farm-centered and generally people-centered restaurant group led by chef Sam Diminich of Restaurant Constance, to launch a new onsite food program at the organization’s 20-acre campus in southwest Charlotte.

Starting Feb. 1, Diminich’s team will dish out more than 100 daily meals to the residential patients, outpatient clients, visitors, and staff on HopeWay’s campus. The team will manage HopeWay’s 9,000-square-foot, in-house kitchen, emphasizing fresh, local ingredients from its farm partners and fresh herbs grown on-site for menus designed to support clients’ diverse dietary and therapeutic needs.

These meals are nothing of the standard medical center sort — stark, bland, dense, nutritionally lackluster food — but the type of vibrant, local, seasonal food that’s made Diminich and Restaurant Constance into popular names within Charlotte’s culinary scene.

The new partnership is part of HopeWay team’s process of making an “intentional, purposeful decision to integrate” nutrient-rich food and further the food education at the organization’s campus, according to HopeWay CEO and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Alyson Kuroski-Mazzei.

Read more: HopeWay Expands Mental Health Services to Teens and Young Adults (2023)

Now Diminich and his team will play a large role in the organization’s holistic, evidence-based model integrating nutrition into treatment. Clients will spend time in the Learning Kitchen as part of HopeWay’s integrative therapy, building skills and confidence through hands-on meal preparation, group therapy and meeting with dietitians.

For the accomplished chef, working with HopeWay is just one more step forward in his own personal mission — one that goes far beyond business interests and more into helping his community.

Sam Diminich has been open about his own personal struggles and journey through recovery.

“I was in more than a dozen treatment centers and detoxes myself,” he told me. “I experienced depression, alcoholism, substance abuse.”

Now, more than 10 years sober, he attributes his success in recovery thus far to many factors including treating his body better and becoming increasingly mindful of what he puts in it. That’s one reason why he didn’t have to consider it for long when the HopeWay team approached him with an offer to partner up.

The center’s whole-person, compassion-based care hits home for Diminich, whose YFYT team has since 2022 prepared more than 24,000 meals for those receiving inpatient recovery and psychiatric services at Charlotte facilities such as McLeod Centers for Wellbeing and Monarch Behavioral Health.

“I was immediately moved. It immediately spoke to me … it’s like hospitality personified from the minute you walk in the door,” he said.

The partnership helps him live out the idea that “food is the connector between worlds,” as good food offers real advantages for the health and wellbeing of patients at HopeWay.

HopeWay makes the gut-brain connection

Dr. Kuroski-Mazzei is an avid believer that food quality has a direct impact on mental wellbeing.

“When you are looking at the quality of your food and you’re intentionally making it healthier … you’re modifying your risk for depression and anxiety,” she said.

She pointed to a few notable findings. One, the World Health Organization highlighted nutrition as a key component in reducing the life expectancy gap between people with psychiatric disorders and the general population.

She also pointed out that many individuals with mental health issues have been found to have excessive caloric intake in their diet or some other form of poor nutritional status. Altering and expanding food choice is a modifiable risk factor for improved care.

Thirdly, while it may seem like a buzzword by now, the brain-gut connection is real, Kuroski-Mazzei insists; the gastrointestinal tract and the microbiome are directly related to mental health.

“Nutritional psychiatry research shows that diets rich in whole foods like vegetables, fruits and lean proteins can reduce the symptoms of depression up to 30%,” Kuroski-Mazzei said.

And finally, for folks on psychiatric medications that may affect appetite and/or weight, the need for balanced, nutritious meals is pivotal in aiding recovery.

HopeWay’s choice to improve the facility’s food quality makes it a pioneer in the Food as Medicine movement, which refers to a science-backed approach to care that has been gaining steam for a few reasons.

Learn more: Nooze Hounds: HopeWay and Mental Health in Charlotte (2023)

According to The Rockefeller Foundation, Food as Medicine programs “use food-based interventions to help prevent, manage, and treat diet-related diseases,” enabling “doctors to prescribe healthy food, reducing the need for invasive health services while lowering healthcare costs.”

Programs can include medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, and general culinary education.

Kuroski-Mazzei said that, throughout her time in medical school and her residency at Duke University, she didn’t take a single course focused on nutrition, despite the fact that leading health issues — eating disorders, anxiety and depression — all affect and are affected by one’s relationship to food.

Now HopeWay is integrating the movement into its treatment in a few ways.

“I do think we’re a leader in this area,” Kuroski-Mazzei shared. “Nutrition is rarely integrated into psychiatric practice and it needs to be.”

That’s where Sam Diminich and his team come in. The meals will be an active part of the patients’ dietary and therapeutic needs.

HopeWay already has a horticultural therapist working on site, using plant-based activities as a form of healing. Registered dietitians are there too, providing nutritional guidance for clients while sharing tangible skills like how to prepare their own food.

Now that they are also working on the campus, Kuroski-Mazzei hopes to have Diminich and his team become an active, educational part of the Learning Kitchen, filling in a large piece of the Food as Medicine puzzle.

Sam Diminich cooks food for and with the community

Reflecting on his past as an addict and the related mental health effects that came with that, Diminich emphasized that each problem one faces due to addiction can be isolating in its own way.

Dr. Kuroski-Mazzei noted how the type of isolation Diminich references is a primary driver of depression. That’s why the food itself is just a starting point at HopeWay; real magic happens when she and her patients actually gather around that food — whether in the process of cooking it or eating it.

“Having that opportunity to bond with other people and to share experiences and find comfort is really important to us,” she said.

Talking to Diminich today, it’s hard to imagine a time when “isolation” would be a word that describes his aura. He is connected to the extreme — highly active in the community with an energy surrounding his work at Restaurant Constance and now HopeWay that’s contagious.

Read more: At Restaurant Constance, Sam Diminich Cooks Like His Life Depends on It (2023)

This he credits in large part to his sobriety and the food he consumes.

“The regulation and the mental acuity and the availability to be present in the moment is directly impacted by what we consume,” he told me.

Diminich and his staff members — about 25-30% of whom are also in recovery — “get to lean on each other as we move through our daily tasks …. we get to channel that super optimistic, recovered energy into what we do,” Diminich said.

The proactive decision to integrate food into mental health care has rippling effects that move outside of individual health into the entire food ecosystem.

“We’re helping the farmers in the community, employing team members who have had their own issues with substance use disorders, helping the clients, supporting the staff,” Kuroski-Mazzei said.

As she rattled off the positive, downstream effects of this work, she paused. “It just truly gave me goosebumps.”
Add another physical effect to the list.