Wed, 09/22/2010 – 10:42am

OK, I admit it, I’ve just fallen in love. This morning. Over my New York Times and coffee. With two guys, doctors no less. This is the line that got me:

Food is at the center of health and illness . . . and so doctors must make all aspects of it — growing, buying, cooking, eating — a mainstay of their medical educations, their personal lives and their practices.

Yes, doctor!

The doctors in question are Preston Maring and his son Ben Maring. Dr. Maring the Elder started a farmers market (all organic he insisted) just outside his workplace, the Kaiser Permanente medical center in Oakland, California. Dr. Maring the Younger began teaching his med school classmates cooking classes at NYU Medical School, and one of his classmates got a farmers market started at Bellevue Hospital, adjacent to the med school campus.

All this gives me hope for the future of the medical profession. All we need is more people like the Marings. Don’t worry, I have enough love to go around to all who love good food and know that it leads to good health — not only for the person who eats it, but for the community that benefits from greater environmental and economic health as well.

These vegetables were grown on The Land Connection farmland, and brought to the Bloomington Market by Central IL Farm Beginnings graduates Craig and Maria Cheatham.

For more on the topic of environmental impacts on health (cancer, specifically), be sure and catch one of the upcoming screenings of Living Downstream, and talk with the subject of the film and author of the book Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber.