Halloween Horror....Hospital food dressing up as....REAL FOOD

This semester has gotten away from me and the frequency of my blogging has consequently suffered...well, luckily, a recent stint in the hospital has given me the undercover opportunity to report on everybody's favorite, hospital food.  Who makes it? Why is it so gosh darn awful? And most importantly, for "at risk" populations who are forced to consume this subsect of (dare we call it) food, why is it so nutritionally bereft?

My first hospital meal (pictured) consisted of that good old American standby, meat and potatoes.  Cubes of tough beef were stewed with chunks of potatoes, accompanied by "whipped" potatoes (which tasted suspiciously like the freeze dried, just-add-water variety) and ambiguous greens (perhaps some form of frozen spinach?).  As someone who prides myself on my culinary skills and general healthful diet I was appalled and could barely stomach what I am sure was the unhappiest of factory-raised cows, let alone synthetic potatoes.

Breakfast left more to be desired, rubber pancakes and questionable sausage sticks with a sickly sweet cherry syrup.  The lunch (right) that followed was a bologna sandwich--thin slice of bologna (the most processed of meats made from all the leftover bits they don't use, squeezed into a square with preservatives and then sliced to deli perfection) between two buttered slices of white bread accompanied by a packaged piece of wheat bread, a boxed salad with french dressing (and a loving dose of high fructose corn syrup), fruit salad (the only edible portion of the meal) and a cup of highly salted lentil/vegetable soup.

While farmers markets have been popping up near and around hospitals for a few years, there is a still a big gap between fresh fruits and vegetables outside the hospital and the food that is prepared within hospital walls.  Understandably proteins and carbohydrates are an essential part of maintaining healthy weight and energy in sick patients, but this doesn't mean the food must a) taste like rubber or b) lack any other nutritive benefit.  Our society (and hospitals) are suffering from a categorical distinction between food and nutrition.  When we think of nutrition implies fats, sugars, carbs, calories, nutrients, vitamins and minerals....science.  Whereas food symbolizes restaurant eating, the food network, cooking, pleasure, locavorism....an aesthetic.  We won't be able to treat hospital patients with good food until we realize that nutritional and pleasureful eating can be one and the same.  If positivity plays a major factor in healing, shouldn't appealing, good food be a factor in nutrition, most especially in a hospital environment?
photo courtesy of my new favorite blog: cutestfood