Family Café - Serving Up Healthier Fare

 

Business manager Louis Gilbert and cook Barbara Jones serve up low-fat entrees at the Family Café.

 

 

The Family Café has been a popular Houston tradition for the past 15 years, serving ham hocks, fried chicken, sweet potato pie and peach cobbler to customers from all over the city and country.

 

This past fiscal year, the restaurant veered slightly from its Southern traditions, and patrons not only love it, but also are healthier for it.

 

In fall 1996, with the encouragement and assistance of M. D. Anderson's Public Education Office and the Cancer Information Service (CIS), the Family Café added new low-fat entrees, more vegetable selections and a salad bar to its standard daily fare. Now, healthier main courses such as grilled chicken breast, pan-broiled catfish and salmon croquettes supplement the menu that has made the Family Café an institution in the African-American community.

 

Using recipes found in the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) cookbook, Down Home Healthy, and adapting other recipes to reduce salt and fat, Family Café cook Barbara Jones says that customers have embraced the new menu items wholeheartedly.

 

"Every day, when customers first come in, they always look to see what the healthy special is," she says.

 

Representatives from the Public Education Office and CIS approached the Family Café as part of NCI's "5-A-Day" program, a plan to encourage Americans to add more fruits and vegetables to their daily diets. In addition to assisting the café with recipes, they provided customers with information about nutrition and the importance of a healthy diet in preventing cancer.

 

Louis Gilbert, business manager for the Family Café, says many of their customers already have a high awareness about the importance of good nutrition. Of the more than 1,000 customers who come through the cafeteria line weekly, about 10 percent of them select the daily healthy special.

 

Gilbert says the addition of the healthy entree was one more way the restaurant could give back to its community and help educate future generations about nutrition.

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