Food Is So Much More Than the Nutrition It Contains: Alison Smith on Judging Nutrition in a Competition Kitchen
What does the nutrition judge actually look for when a care chef's dish lands in front of her? In this episode, Rob Spence sits down with Alison Smith, dietitian and nutritional judge for the NACC Care Chef of the Year. Alison pulls back the curtain on the judging process — what gets competitors marked down, what makes a dish genuinely stand out, and why the dessert might be the most nutritionally important element on the plate.
Alison Smith never set out to be a dietitian. At eleven she wanted to be a vet, and she held onto that plan right up until her A-level grades made it impossible. What followed was a biology degree, a postgraduate diploma in dietetics, and a career spent almost entirely in the community rather than in hospitals — much of it focused on the nutritional needs of older adults living in care homes. It's an area that most dietitians, she admits, would run away from rather than towards. Alison ran towards it. It shows.
In this episode, host Rob Spence asks Alison to answer a question she's never been asked before: how do you make nutrition sexy? Her answer gets to the heart of what she believes — that food isn't just fuel, it's memory, comfort, celebration and identity, and that enjoyment is not a guilty indulgence but an essential component of good nutrition. \"You can be terribly worthy and eat all the right things, but not enjoy it at all,\" she says. \"Our psychological health is just as important as our physical health.\" In a care setting, where a resident might eat only a few mouthfuls of main course but clear their dessert, that philosophy has very real consequences for how a chef designs a dish.
On the judging side, Alison is refreshingly direct about what she's looking for — and what competitors get wrong. She's not scanning for individual micronutrients; she's looking at the whole picture. Are all the food groups represented? Is the protein actually there — not just assumed to be there? She recounts more than one occasion where a chef has cited vegan cheese as their protein source, only for the packet to reveal almost none. She's also watching for whether chefs are aware of the BDA's Care Home Digest, the first national food-based guidelines for care home caterers, produced jointly with NACC in 2024, and how they've used it.
What she finds encouraging is the direction of travel. The old advice — add butter and cream to boost nutrition — is giving way to a more nuanced understanding of nutrient density. Skimmed milk powder, Greek yogurt, eggs, nuts, cheese: ingredients that add multiple nutrients, not just calories. And increasingly, chefs who genuinely think about modified texture — not as an afterthought, but as something that can still be beautiful, still be flavourful, still mean something to the person eating it.
Her advice to anyone wavering about entering is to come with an open mind and ask for the feedback. \"It's very rare to find people who only come once,\" she says. \"Mostly chefs get the bug.\" The ones who eventually win have usually been through it two or three times — and you can see the difference each time they return.
Subscribe wherever you listen — and share with anyone who thinks nutrition is the dull bit of cooking. Alison will change your mind.
To learn about The National Association of Care Catering, please visit: https://www.thenacc.co.uk/
A massive thank you to the Sponsors of the Care Chef of the Year:
The Worshipful Company of Cooks
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