Delicious food, above all,
should be good for you.

When someone falls ill, people say, “Well, they always did eat whatever tasted good.” They say, “Keep eating nothing but delicious food, and you’ll get sick.”

Those words have never sat right with me.

Delicious food is not what harms us. It is simply that the craft of creating flavor and our knowledge of the human body have never yet truly met. That is what I believe.

Delicious food, above all, should be good for you.

This project began with that single conviction.

01“Delicious” and “good for you” lived in separate worlds

Take French cuisine. Butter, used generously. Salt and fat, never spared in the pursuit of flavor. Chefs have devoted their lives to the deliciousness of a single plate. Yet rarely have they had the chance to learn about illness and the body, about nutrition and medicine.

Hospital food, meanwhile, has poured its energy into managing protein, salt, and calories precisely. The work of registered dietitians is an indispensable foundation of treatment. But within that work, flavor all too easily comes last.

Masters of flavor, and masters of the body. Both are the real thing — and yet, until now, these two kinds of expertise have lived in separate worlds.

02What a few leftovers in a refrigerator taught me

As a dentist, I have cared for countless mouths. Even when we restore the ability to chew and to swallow, if the meals that follow do not nourish the heart, a person has not truly regained the act of eating. I have felt this, again and again, in the treatment room.

One day, from the few ingredients left in a refrigerator, Chef Yuichiro Watanabe made me a dish. It was astonishingly good.

A great chef does not shine only when the pantry is full. Limited ingredients; restrictions on salt and protein — it is precisely within such conditions that they compose aroma, temperature, texture, umami, and the lingering finish into a dish beyond imagining. They have the power to turn restriction into the starting point of creation.

What if that power were joined by medical knowledge?
Hospital meals, therapeutic diets, dining out — all could be transformed from the ground up.

03A one-way street never lasts

Chefs and hospitals have joined forces before — to create hospital menus, or to develop healthy bento boxes. These efforts made headlines, but most of them ended as one-off events.

The reason, I believe, is that they ran in only one direction. When chefs simply “provide” food to medicine, it does not last.

Clinical Gastronomy is a two-way project. From medicine to chefs flows knowledge of disease and nutrition, of chewing and swallowing. From chefs to medicine flow the craft and imagination that create flavor. The clinicians and chefs who join this project hold seminars for one another, and learn from one another.

• Chefs who gain knowledge of the body can bring an understanding of health not only to hospital food, but to their everyday menus. It is an evolution of their craft.
• Clinicians who come to know flavor can transform their patients’ meals from the ground up.
• Each learns from the other; each gains something. That is why it lasts — and because it lasts, it becomes a culture.

To that end, we carefully select chefs of proven skill and conviction — Michelin-starred chefs among them — and bring them together as one community, teamed with medicine. Only when we join hands in both directions can we create food that is good for the body and delicious from the heart. That is the project I envision.

04The deepest loneliness of illness

Even outside the hospital, countless people live with chronic conditions such as kidney disease or diabetes, and with a long list of dietary restrictions. They cannot go to the restaurants they long to visit. They cannot eat the same food as their family and friends.

The sorrow of illness lies not only in its symptoms. To sit within the circle of the people you love and be the only one facing a different plate — that loneliness, I believe, is the hardest part of all.

What I first pictured was a world where, just as you might find a restaurant in a guidebook, you could tell at a glance — by a simple mark — which restaurants can serve a dish suited to kidney disease or diabetes. A world where you can sit at the same table as your family in a first-class restaurant, and say “this is delicious” just as they do.

Illness or not, to laugh with the people you love at the same table.
Clinical Gastronomy can end that loneliness.

05From Japan, to the world

From hospitals to restaurants, and on to product development. And its reach does not stop at Japan’s shores.

All over the world, people live with diabetes, kidney disease and other conditions that restrict what they can eat. If we can carry Japan’s medical expertise and the world-class craft of its chefs across every border, we can help people at tables everywhere.

It will be a new stage for chefs, too. At home, ingredient prices are rising, and geopolitically difficult times may lie ahead. Rather than waiting within Japan alone, by finding a place to work on the world stage, chefs and their teams can see their possibilities grow far greater still.

Medicine and food, joining forces and creating together — this project is the bridge between them. I believe it can also strengthen Japan as a nation, and grow into policy proposals to the government.

Whatever the illness, whatever the country or language, people can sit at the same table and smile at the same “delicious.” When food connects people, I believe it brings the world a little closer to peace.

06What only we can do

If medicine and food can join hands on this scale, it will be an entirely new project — in Japan, and in the world.

Chefs, clinicians, researchers, companies, medical institutions, government. People who have given their all in separate places, gathering under one purpose. My role is neither to cook, nor to find the answer through medicine alone. It is to connect these people, and to build what they create into a social system that endures.

Maison de Santé is our banner. To the chefs, to everyone who works in medicine, to the companies: please lend your strength to this challenge. What only we can do — let us do it together, through Clinical Gastronomy.