Why does the medical world — brilliant at curing our ills, repairing and replacing our failing body parts and keeping us alive when we should be dead — fail miserably when it comes to the most essential step in getting well? I speak of the food it serves hospital patients.
Hospitals are where we spend the most critical days of our lives. Where we go for repair. But getting fixed goes far beyond what happens in the operating room.
When doctors and nurses exit the picture, patients should be getting the very best and most inviting and nutritious food they will ever eat, as part of the continuation of healing. Instead, they invariably get some of the most awful, uninviting, inedible food imaginable.
Bluntly, American hospital food is a disaster.
For much of my career in journalism, I was a restaurant reviewer. I spent years immersed in the world of food and wine, writing about the aesthetics of food, its quality and occasionally the lack of it.
I learned what makes the best dishes in all sorts of cuisines. And I have appreciated, written about and applauded the skill of cooks who can turn simple vegetables, meats and grains into great gifts to be savored at levels that sometimes approach a religious experience.
I’ve also watched the curative power of food at work in American homes, where children’s comfort foods repaired little bodies. And our not-so-little adult bodies, thanks to the wizardry of memorable dishes our mothers, aunts and grandmothers served up. Foods that now stay with us as culinary highway markers along our road through life.
The food that tops my list as the best all-time curative is soup.
If you are European, that’s likely chicken noodle soup or minestrone. For Latin Americans, it’s pozole or sopa de tortilla in Mexico, or sopa de rabo in Venezuela. For Middle Easterners, it’s turmeric broth, lentil soups or harissa in Morocco. Pho in Vietnam. In Japan it’s miso. In Asia, lemon grass soup and ramen. And the list goes on. All of them curatives.
Recently, my wife, Kathy, was holed up for a week in our local hospital, where she complained mightily that she just could not eat their food because it was so badly prepared. She’s not usually a complainer.
But take just one meal delivered to her by tray: the rice in a soup was so crunchy that clearly it wasn’t even halfway cooked. Other soups were so thin and water-diluted from their original base that they were utterly impossible to identify from what they were made. Was this one chicken stock? Vegetable soup? Ah! A carrot! And that one has celery! But identifiable only by sight. By taste, there was nothing.
This is not simply a hospital problem. It’s much the same with institutional food elsewhere. But it is hospital food in particular that is so utterly appalling. And it certainly shouldn’t be. Nor does it have to be.
Hospitals seem to be telling us: You have failed your body. That’s why you are here. We have fixed it for you. And now you’re going to do penance. Your punishment: You will eat almost inedible junk for your failures.
Why have hospitals abandoned patients when it comes to food? Wouldn’t it actually enhance their reputations if they also nourished patients’ souls at the same high levels that they cure their bodies?
More questions exist than definitive answers.
Clearly, there is a problem when it comes to addressing the likes and dislikes of individual patients because tastes in food vary widely. Some of it is cultural. Some is ethnic. Some might be religious. Some is age-related. Younger patients may like fried chicken nuggets. For older people, it’s more likely to be chicken soup.
So whose tastes do you use to establish a standard and address the problem?
Hospitals have chosen to make food taste neutral, as bland as possible. Thereby they avoid the basic question entirely. But in the process, they also created the problem.
One answer may be to design a program that addresses individual patients’ backgrounds. Most hospitals already ask incoming patients about their religion and ethnicity, and other matters. By broadening out the scope to a wider-ranging questionnaire that targets a patient’s food preferences, hospitals could start to close this yawning gap.
A little background research shows that the mainstay guidelines for hospital menus are federal guidelines, the bible for which is a series of manuals written by a woman named Ruby Puckett in the 1960s.
And that is where hospitals appear to have become hamstrung to their current menus.
For example, under the Puckett guidelines, the use of salt in hospital food is utterly banished. The same with butter, which is replaced by “spread.”
Buttered food is not medically desirable. Therefore, not considered curative. But it certainly raises the pleasure of whatever it touches, and moves ingredients toward a curative level by enhancing pleasure.
My point is not simply to bring back butter or salt to all hospital food, but rather to accept that certain outcast and negatively viewed ingredients can actually also play a curative role.
Then why not move in their natural direction and make exceptions where there is not harm to patients? You can still remove butter and salt from the food of patients who shouldn’t have them. But why must the majority of patients — and the hospital staff — suffer such extensive and overarching rationing of pleasure by discarding wider choices?
Every day during our recent time at the hospital, we saw one family after another arriving with Thermos containers of home cooking, or Wendy’s and McDonald’s golden arches bags, and boxes of fried chicken. Mostly food I rarely eat.
The main reason those bags of junk food wandered the hallowed medical halls had everything to do with the unappealing nature of hospital food.
Flip that around, and just maybe therein lies an opportunity for a hospital to open a window, and to form an exploratory committee that would examine the pleasurable aspect of food and how it fits into recovery.
How do we actually move toward recovery and healing once the operating room is dark, the instruments are sanitized and stored, and the sound of gurneys no longer roll the hallways?
How do you take hospital food out of its current restricted straitjacket? Loosen it up, open and expand what it might be?
Let’s cast a wider eye to that secondary but ever-so-important role of sensory appreciation: How we eat. How we taste. And to the pleasure we know we get from good, well-prepared food and consequently the nutritional value of eating well.
And in the process, just maybe we can help patients take a much bigger and broader next step back into a better life.
Christopher Cook is a former San Diego Union writer and editor. His career in newspapers, magazines and television included 22 years as a restaurant critic and wine writer, and wine competition judge. His awards include 17 regional Emmys and a share of a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
