Hospital food

Hospital food is, like most things in the NHS, free at the point of service. You will not be presented with an itemised bill at the end of your stay. It is plentiful (usually) and the feat which the staff accomplish with what must be a small budget, getting so many meals delivered throughout a large building, is amazing. Canteen quantities but without a canteen to do it in!

Having spent a long time in two NHS hospitals during 2019 (on 6 different wards altogether), I had plenty of opportunity to try out most of the menu, which runs over a fortnight and starts again (this does begin to pall if many weeks go by). There are variations in how it is presented (whether you get to choose in advance, for instance) even within the same hospital, and some things seem to be more available on some wards than others.

Roughly, what you can expect is breakfast which is not cooked, apart from porridge, except at weekends when there are a couple of cooked options; a supply of tea and coffee throughout the day (sometimes with cake and/or biscuits); full meals at lunchtime and teatime; possibly a later snack or a fruit trolley (depending on the ward!).

I have heard people comment that the food is "like school dinners". All this really tells me is that they are not former pupils of my school, Priory Road County Primary School, the memory of whose tapioca still has the power to make me heave. There is an element of truth in it which I think comes from more general British catering habits, which go back beyond school dinners ca. 1950-1980 to the wartime British Restaurants and perhaps to workplace canteens, now largely gone, but otherwise it is an unfair comparison.

Here's a very quick summary of the things I liked: pork casserole, the vegetables which accompany the many roast dinners (the meat was less appetising - lamb probably the best), omelettes, soup made on the premises, Friday fish and chips, ice cream, a pasta dish, fruit pies and crumbles. The sponge puddings and cakes were also good but about twice the size of anything I would usually eat as a dessert. While I was there they introduced Glamorgan sausage, which was splendid (especially considering that there is not a great choice for vegetarians). Unfortunately none of the staff or other patients seemed to have heard of Glamorgan sausage, so there were some disappointed would-be sausage-eaters. (This is where seeing the menu, with an explanation, would have been useful).

The things I didn't like do, mostly, come back to those school dinner days: ubiquitous mashed potato (which, I know, most people do like, but I think a little goes a long way); sometimes you might get a strange mixture (omelette with gravy, mashed potato and Brussels sprouts, for instance); rather tasteless macaroni cheese; above all, that terrible British habit of drowning the pudding in custard and the meat and veg in gravy. I loathed school custard, but came round to custard eventually. Again, a little is enough for me, and I don't see the point of concealing the pudding so you have to go fishing for it. I never did come round to gravy, which people tip all over your food (not just in hospital) and in my view spoil it all, Asking for "just a little" custard doesn't work, though - you perhaps get it not quite up to the brim of the bowl but still too much. The actual custard and gravy in hospital are vastly superior to anything served at my school, but the memory lingers on.

The debate about funding all this has been raised as another area in which something at present free could be salami-sliced off in an attempt to reduce costs. Elderly people, who grew up before the NHS was born, are often afraid of the potential cost of their hospital stay, and difficult to reassure on the subject. I saw one lady constantly reject food (and be told off about it, as she was losing weight) - and when she had finally understood that there was to be no bill for it, seize the dish with both hands and eat the whole lot very quickly, obviously hungry. If you feel you should be paying for it, there's nothing to stop you making an appropriate quiet donation, surely, without making everyone else afraid by introducing charges.

On the whole, then, a big and grateful thumbs up to NHS hospital food. There are always going to be some things people don't like. The menus are a little old-fashioned (average age of an in-patient is 84, or so a poster on one of the wards told us - that age group certainly seemed quite enthusiastic about the traditional dishes), and occasionally you could see where little corners had been cut (rice pudding and jam on the online example of the menu, but no jam ever in evidence). It is a reasonably healthy balanced diet. All cheerfully served by kind and patient staff. Diolch!

Food nostalgia (or, the strange things that cross your mind when you are old, ill, or both at once)

When you are ill, or old, or incapacitated in a way that leaves you with time on your hands and a need not to think too hard about the present, your thoughts begin to wander in unexpected directions. Memories suddenly appear unbidden: a surprising number of them are about food, perhaps because you no longer have much control over what you are being given to eat. I have had sudden cravings for things which I only occasionally ate before being ill; I have wanted to try both new things and things from the past which I haven't had for a long time (perhaps there's an element of a food bucket list in this!); I have longed for dishes I used to cook a lot but can no longer do, things which were not available in hospital and are not part of the repertoire of the rest of my family; I now look obsessively at food blogs and recipes and I still keep up my recipe notes in the hope that one day, perhaps, I will be able to do some of it again.

One memory which floated back was of my grandfather, who, becoming seriously ill with a degenerative disease in his 60s, badly wanted the tripe and onions of his childhood again. Bleurgh. (My grandmother couldn't locate any in the small southern English town they had moved to - he might have had a better chance in the various cities they had lived in). I have also read somewhere that, along with working more generally on memories with older people (particularly those with dementia), someone has had the idea of researching what food was popular in their childhood and giving them that.

You can't over-generalise, of course. Some people's memories, not just about food, are not good. Tread carefully! Asking an old lady about her deceased husband might produce a lovely romantic story, or it might draw out of her a tale of broken fingers and how he only saw the baby once and pushed off and was never seen again and left her destitute. As for food, if I am ever in a position where somebody thinks it would make my day to return to the cuisine of the 1960s and 1970s, I think I would like the chance to veto some of it!