Anthony Burns grew up eating premade or packaged foods. In their late teens and early 20s, they noticed their health was declining.
So burns took the initiative to learn to cook and change their lifestyle. At a local market, Burns was gifted a 1950s Chinese cookbook that helped them learn about new ingredients and cooking techniques.
Burns, who uses the pronoun they, is now the culinary lead at Aurora St. Lukes Medical Center, 2900 W. Oklahoma Ave., where they focus on creating dishes that are plant forward, healthy and comforting for hospital visitors and staff.
Burns was inspired by the Blue Zones Project, an initiative that aims at transforming communities through health and well-being actions. The project studies places with extensive human longevity and aims to imitate them.
In August, Burns won the title of Top Healthy Hospital Chef during the national Healthy Hospital Chef Challenge at the International Conference on Nutrition and Medicine. Their winning dish was jeweled rice with sauteed vegetables in a harissa-mint sauce.
Burns recently spoke with the Journal Sentinel about their culinary career.
What brought you to Milwaukee?
I’m not from Milwaukee. I am originally from Ohio, but I’ve lived all over the country over the last 15 years. I was with the military for a while, so I did a lot of traveling because of that, and I’ve just done a lot of personal traveling since then. Most recently, I came from Los Angeles, and I’m actually headed back there in a couple of months. I came here specifically because of family.
How did you get started?
I got started for my own health. We didn’t have a lot of very good food at home. No one really did much cooking, and I noticed my health going downhill. I was going to a place I really didn’t want to be, so I decided to learn how to cook.
What kind of food do you focus on cooking?
My focus for the last six years has been on plant-based foods, since I went vegan myself, but here at Advocate Aurora, the food that I cook is for our visitors and our staff, so I’ve had to obviously include a lot more meat than I normally cook and flex to a lot of palates that I’m not normally used to cooking for. In the Midwest, the food culture here is very different from the coast.
On different food cultures
Here in the Midwest — from what I’ve seen from our sales — people like more comforting foods, a lot more starchy, meat-heavy dishes, rather than plants. When they do eat vegetables and plant-based foods, they tend to want them to be served with very strong flavors or with creamy sauces, I’ve noticed. We’ve had to make adjustments to our menu to focus on getting plant-based foods out there that people want to eat.
Where did you get your training?
I finished a course of training in plant-based Culinary Arts at the Institute of Culinary Education, and I’m going back there to finish restaurant management and baking pastry, just to round out my education.
When you describe healthy eating and healthy cooking, what does that mean for you? And can you see that being a part of a Midwest diet?
I’d say that the pillars of healthy eating really are just finding foods that are going to end up hitting all of your micro and macronutrients that you want to eat. We try in the industry to cook foods that are sourced locally. So we are very lucky here in Wisconsin to have a ton of amazing local farmers. Our vegetable sourcing here is wonderful.
Here in the Midwest, that means cooking a lot of three sisters foods — so squash, beans, corn, things like that.
When you’re trying to eat healthy here, I’ve noticed that those foods do sell very well out here, so trying to center our vegetable-based dishes around that.
We also want to make sure that the foods are familiar. Foods that our customers recognize are much more likely to sell than foods that are wild and from cuisines that they might not be used to. We’ll try and flex flavors from those cuisines while still making sure that the base dish is something they recognize. That way we can help get some foods out there while not alienating the audience.
Where were you working prior to St. Luke’s?
Prior to St Luke’s, immediately beforehand, I worked out at Vanguard in Bay View. … They did some really innovative stuff with their sausages. I learned a great deal there. I’m very happy to have had that experience. Before that, I worked at Kitchen Mouse in Highland Park out in California. It’s a vegetarian brunch restaurant. And again, same thing, very innovative foods. They did amazing things with plants there that I would not have thought to do prior to working there. Before that, I did sushi out in LA as well, at a restaurant called Naughty Vegan. That was just really gorgeous food that gave me a skill set. No matter where you are, you will find people who want sushi. I’m super grateful for it.
How is St. Luke’s different from any other place that you’ve worked?
I’m new to the industry. I’ve only been in it for about 4½ years now, and since I am entering a new career here, I have been trying to get as broad a range of experience as possible. Cooking in hospitals is an entirely different animal from catering or restaurants. I kind of wanted to get that experience under my belt, too, and it has been very interesting. It has definitely changed the way I’ve thought about menu and recipe design.
Being in a hospital environment, there are obviously different kinds of emotions that people may be going through. Do you find that affects what people want to eat?
Absolutely … the hospital is an extremely high stress environment. We have people here working very long hours, and then our visitors are very often people who are at some of the most stressful or lowest points in their lives. They’re here for family members who are in trouble, so they want comforting foods. They want foods that they don’t have to think about too much. We try and cater a little bit to that. This isn’t a high-end restaurant. We try and provide elevated flavors for people without putting food out there that they’re going to have to think too much about.
What’s an example of a dish that you serve at the hospital?
Today we have one of our most popular dishes. It’s a shawarma bowl, so we’ve got Mediterranean seasoned chicken served over rice with a range of vegetables, cucumber, tomato, red onions. We have sumac-marinated white onions, and then they get some tzatziki sauce, and then the drizzle of tahini lemon, and then a sprinkle of an Egyptian garnish called dukkah — that is roasted nuts, seeds, herbs and spices.
Where do you see yourself in the future?
I would love to come back here one day and take the fundamentals of the Blue Zone Project and my own training and help to reapply those to make them commonplace here in the Midwest. Food is incredibly important. It is one of the most important factors for health outcomes.
The Blue Zones project was incredibly inspiring to me, and I’d like to take the fundamentals of that project and see about implementing them in as many ways as I can, whether that be change of restaurants, whether that be social programs.
What did cooking look like when you were growing up?
I grew up in a fairly poor household, and neither of my parents really cooked that often, so the bulk of the foods that we got were very cheap and were premade and or prepackaged foods. We ate the same few things every single meal, and I found my health degrading dramatically by the time I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I wanted to try and improve that. I met someone at a local market who kind of became my cooking mentor at the time, and gave me a really old Chinese cookbook, a 1950s Chinese cookbook. I started cooking out of that and my health just improved dramatically.
Since then, cooking, it just ended up being a passion. And the last several years, I decided to take it and make it my career. It’s the one thing I’ve enjoyed doing for most of my adult life. So why not make it the thing that I do?
Do you think a vegan diet is something that could be popular in the Midwest?
Probably not vegan, but plant-forward, yes. This is the heart of dairy country, and you’re not going to change that. But if you change the way people think about plants, you can change diets to be more plant-forward. People don’t have to go vegan to dramatically change. Increasing the amount of fiber you eat, increasing the amount of plants, eating just colorful foods. Trying to get as many different colors of vegetables in their diet as they can, cutting a little bit of meat out, a little bit of dairy out, and replacing it with plants, they’ll see dramatic changes in their health.
