Leslie Johnson has taken a long and winding road to Sandusky, where, for the last few months, she has worked as the director of the new Food Is Medicine Program at
Family Health Services.
After growing up in Madison, Alabama, she followed in her father’s footsteps by attending Transylvania University, a small school in Lexington, Kentucky. It was at college that she became interested in a career in nutrition.
There was only one problem.
“We didn’t have a nutrition major,” she says during a recent phone interview,” so I kind of made it – my own. It was Nutrition and Sustainability.”
Eventually, there was a second problem.
After graduating, she’d come to learn just how hard it would be to land a job as a dietitian without a degree from a college without an accredited nutrition program.
That led to graduate school in the Boston area at Tufts University — home of
The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy — and, finally, a year of supervised practice through Duke University in North Carolina.
“I really liked the more social side of nutrition — understanding why people ate the way they ate, what barriers people face to getting healthy foods,” Johnson says. “I have Type One diabetes, so I have always cared about what I ate because it affects me and I can tell a difference in (how) I feel when I eat.”
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Leslie Johnson is a dietician and the director of the new Food Is Medicine Program at Family Health Services.She was looking for a position where food was looked at as medicine, and the job at Family Health Services — a healthcare provider with two offices in Sandusky and one in Norwalk obviously fit the bill.
And it didn’t hurt when, during the interview process, she was told Sandusky had been named
Best Coastal Small Town in 2019 by USA Today.
“I wasn’t looking for a coastal town, but hearing that I was kind of,
‘OK, I don't know anybody there, but that’s really nice. I mean, that sounds good to me.’”
The Food Is Medicine Program — the idea of a doctor who left Family Health Services shortly before she arrived — is a collaboration between FHS, nonprofit mobile food pantry
Ohgo and
Firelands Health.
“It’s the crossroads of community and healthcare and prevention and treatment,” says Johnson, who works two days per week at Firelands.
To qualify for the 12-month program, Johnson says, a person must be a patient at Family Health services with a chronic health condition, such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity or high cholesterol, she says.
“And then the last criteria is they need to be food-insecure,” she says, “meaning they either are worried about not being able to afford their groceries or they’ve actually run out of money before being able to get groceries for a week.”
Once enrolled, the patient will see a doctor at one monthly appointment and a dietitian — namely her — at another. At each of those visits, he or she also will receive a box containing fresh produce along with foods such as low-sodium beans, whole-grain pasta, nuts and olive oil — what she calls “different healthy foods that can help support their health.”
Adds Johnson, “It’s a dual program where we address the medical side but also recognize that food is medicine.”
Although the program is not officially affiliated with the
Erie County Health Department’s Food Is Medicine initiative, Johnson said that the latter’s steering committee — physicians, dieticians, nonprofit workers and public health professionals — has been helpful in helping establish the program she heads.
“It’s exciting that everyone seems to be really on board with it,” she continues. “Everyone at Family Health Services, at Ohgo, at Firelands — it seems like everyone’s excited to have this common goal of understanding that food can be treated as medicine and there there are so many barriers people have that, if we can just address the social determinants of health, we can make a difference.”
She started working in Sandusky in June, with the program launching in September, so these are early days for it.
“It is new, so if we get feedback that something’s not working, we can change it. If we get feedback that something is working, then we can make that point of the program stronger. So I really like the adaptability of it.”
Johnson is happy she was able to move to Sandusky in the summer and already has had the chance to enjoy much of what this particular coastal city has to offer — even if she’s still getting used to Sandusky’s distinct grid.
“I have to use my GPS to get to the grocery store … but that probably says more about me than it does about Sandusky.”
However, one thing has helped make her latest transition easier.
“Everyone’s just been really nice,” Johnson says. “I don’t know — everyone I’ve met up here has been really nice.”
To learn more about Family Health Services’ Food Is Medicine Program, email Leslie Johnson at
[email protected].
Mark Meszoros is a Northeast Ohio-based features editor and writer and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer Approved Critic who spent two enjoyable years in Sandusky not long after graduation from Ohio University.