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MAY 21, 2006
BLAND MEALS OF
THE DAMNED
Stay out of the hospital if you can, but if you must go,
pack a lunch.
I’ve never had a hospital meal that
deserves kind or even
positive adjectives; it sometimes seems to me that the chefs and
nutritionists
believe they need not adhere to the doctor’s maxim of “First, do no
harm.” My hunch is that hospital food
won’t kill you
(I’m not entirely certain of this, because I’ve tried not to consume
very much
of it in one sitting), and it may even be nutritionally sound. But it tortures the palate and deadens the
spirit, ruining what is in normal life a pleasurable experience.
It’s bad enough that when you get to
the hospital, they take
away your pants, stick you with needles, fry your brain with
painkillers and confine
you to a fluorescent-lit room, where the only diversions to take your
mind off
the sad, pants-less state of your life is a tiny television with bad
reception
(from which you will learn that, indeed, there are hundreds of channels
but
nothing worth watching) and a roommate who seems to be auditioning for
a lead role
in “Moaning, Dying Man — The Musical.”
But then, approximately twenty seconds
before the nurse
comes to take you for more tests, an orderly will deliver a tray full
of
noxious piles of nutrients — “food,” supposedly. At
first sight, the tray makes you salivate,
but as it is set down before you, the smell will hit your nostrils, and
your
mouth will quickly stop watering, and will, in fact, pucker and quiver
in
fear. If you are a Responsible Patient,
you will dutifully and quickly try a few bites of the trembling masses
of
calories and nutrients. With any luck,
the greenish stuff will turn out to be vegetables of some sort, the
brownish
stuff meat, the whitish stuff potatoes. But
they will all taste the same, in the sense that
they will all taste
tasteless. Truly, it is a wonder of
modern science that something that smells so incredibly awful can taste
like
nothing.
If you are me, you will nibble at the
Jell-O (available in Orange,
Lemon or Red flavors) and wait for the nurse to show up for those
additional
tests, which, no matter how much poking they do or x-rays they take,
will
ultimately be less painful and traumatizing than consuming any amount
of that steaming
Play-Doh on the tray. Alas, the tray
will probably still be waiting for you when you return with your
pierced arms
and glowing organs.
The problem is, if you don’t eat what
they give you, you don’t
eat anything. You starve.
And this concerns the doctors. They’re
obviously not going to let you out of
the hospital until you show signs of health and well-being, and any
indication
that you are unable to eat — that you’re nauseated or have abdominal
pain or
other gastrointestinal problems, for example — is essentially a command
to them
to prolong your stay. A half-consumed
meal will lead to a comment on your chart, a demerit that leads not to
study
hall but to extended hospitalization.
I don’t expect them to feed patients chocolate cake or
cheeseburgers, but I don’t think a balanced diet ought to consist only
of
bland, rubbery foodstuffs that look, smell and taste like reheated
leftovers from
airplane meals. They could also put a
few seconds of consideration into who, exactly, is getting a particular
meal, and
why, exactly, this person is in the hospital.
They clearly wouldn’t give a
peanut
butter cookie to someone
allergic to nuts, but they seem to have no qualms about feeding lentil
soup to
someone who has severe gastrointestinal problems. There
is something very wrong with the kitchen’s
decision-making process when a request for a “soft diet” is met with a
meal
that is, texture-wise, soft and yielding. Indeed,
in the strictest sense of the word, lentil
soup is soft. As would be, say, a bowl of
hydrochloric
acid. But let’s think about the
chemistry and the effects of ingestion. If
I were trying to join the Flatulence Club, I
would eat lentils, but
if the goal is to give my gut a break, I really think I’ll pass on
passing gas.
The same goes for Chicken Fried In
Lard and Doused in Gravy,
With More Gravy and a Mound of Butter (with Mashed Potatoes), a
more-accurate
description of something they tried to feed me once (which they
probably called
Chicken Dinner). Great gobs of grease in
the gut: not a good thing for those with healing colons and tender
stomachs.
My worst experience with hospital food was almost
certainly
a watery concoction, ostensibly chicken noodle soup, that smelled
positively
flatulent, and which my doctor told me none of his patients ever ate. Needless to say, I did not, either. My best experience? Toast. Seriously. Toast
and
ice cream
cups, the little kind that you get at a baseball game for four bucks
each. These were what I survived on the
last time I
was in the hospital, last summer. I
would poke at my meals, pushing things around to make it look like I
ate
something, and then I would push the call button and ask the nurse to
make me
some toast. With butter.
And an ice cream cup chaser. Please. Hurry.
Next time:
There’s hope! A recent
New York Times article discusses efforts by
hospitals to serve
food that patients might actually eat and, shockingly, might even enjoy.
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