You kind of expect it from this West Coast crowd - what with their entrepreneurial ways and toasted wheat bread sandwiches with one piece of organic lettuce stuck in the middle.

Oh, wait. I’m from Northern California. And I dig bean curd.

But for a long time, Northern Californians have thought in different ways.

Stanford Hospital & Clinics this week continued this trend by announcing that patients staying there can dine on local, organic food that will largely come from companies within 200 miles of Stanford, Calif.

What caught my attention on the menu: Smoked tofu.

Stanford Hospital has tapped Chef Jesse Cool, who is known for her restaurants and passion for healthy, sustainable food.

Serving fresher, organic food that is easier on the body makes sense.

Why?

Well, many people have equated institutional hospital meals with what you were served at your school cafeteria when you were a kid.

You know: When texture trumped flavor.

Stanford and Cool certainly aim to change all of that with dishes and ingredients that were outlined by the hospital and include:

• Strawberries from Watsonville, Calif.
• Olive oil from Napa Valley
• Grass-fed range beef from Sonoma and Marin
• Range chicken from the same areas
• Whole grain bread from San Francisco

Robert Robbins, a Stanford doctor and chair of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, had dined at one of Cool’s restaurants and returned to the hospital inspired, according to a statement from Stanford Hospital:

Once people are in the hospital, especially when they have major surgeries, their digestive systems do not work quite as well. This kind of food is perfect.

Martha Marsh, hospital chief executive, also offered her thoughts:

Delicious comfort food such as a beautiful basil corn soup can also lift your spirits and that is another way to promote healing. Not only are we feeding people well when they are in our care, we are encouraging them to go home and think of cooking differently. That’s an important message in this program.

I appreciate those thoughts.

While soybean cake shouldn’t be eaten by the truckload daily, the protein-rich, low-fat food has health benefits.

Some experts believe it’s one way to prolong a person’s life – and researchers have long been fascinated with the elderly and their long lives on Okinawa.

If Cool or the hospital officials post the recipe for the smoked tofu, please let me know.

Stanford Cancer Center lists bean curd recipes for tofu fried rice and tofu marsala.

One of the most impressive things about universities and learning is accomplishing what you thought was impossible, strange or different.

As in: A Stanford professor who mapped his genome with two other people for about $50,000 – instead of hundreds of millions of dollars and a much larger staff.

Anyway, back to the point:

Those Northern Californians and their tofu.

Don’t they have anything else better to do?