Hospital Food

[AspieOtaku]

Hospital food, jail food, high school cafeteria food its all the same, its not too horrible neither is it great or amazing, its cheap and fills your belly.

 

[Lena_C]

This is a really tricky question to me, it depends...
When I was underage, I love the food because I was treated like a VIP in the pediatric ward.
Then now I'm adult, not around by babies and toddler anymore, but literally disturbed by noisy elderly.
Where is my bun? Where is my milk?
Sorry madam, but this is not pediatric ward.
Ok then I need to get out of here, discharge me please.
So meh, food is so-so, hospital life for adult is just another abuse to me.

 

[Meistersinger]

Depends on the hospital.

Here in my neck of the woods (York County, PA) Memorial Osteopathic Hospital, before they were bought up by The University of Pittsburgh Medical Centers (and this area is Penn State territory (with Penn State’s School of Medicine being located at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA), Memorial contracted with the Altland House Inn and Restaurant in Abbottstown. The Altland house is very much fine dining around York and Adams Counties (aka Gettysburg). Last time I was admitted to Memorial hospital, meals, even when I was in ICU, were delicious, as compared to the county-run hospital, which their food looked, smelled and tasted like pig slop.

 

[s3_gunzel]

Last time I ate in a hospital was when I had an oesophagal ulcer. Food was pureed. It wasn't toooooo bad. The mashed potato (well, pureed, and made into a mash of sorts) was awesome. Can't get it right at home.

 

[cfleischmann]

Last time I ate in a hospital was when I had an oesophagal ulcer. Food was pureed. It wasn't toooooo bad. The mashed potato (well, pureed, and made into a mash of sorts) was awesome. Can't get it right at home.

Well, I managed to have my team call around to a lot of the hospitals and get hold of their recipes from one of them who complied with my team's request and so now I can have the food prep team make the hospital food at home. Have you considered calling the hospital's nutrition / dietary department and asking for them to mail you the recipes of it all?

Jail food is about the same as hospital food preserved fruit in high fructose corn syrup in a plastic container, box of milk to drink, about the same as high school cafeteria food.

So I rate all food in a spectrum that looks like this from best to worst:
[----------------------|-----------------------------------|---------------------------------------]
[Prison Food*------------School Cafeteria---------------|------------------------Hospital Food]

* disclaimer: I have never been to prison or jail but one hospital I was a psych ward didn't have their own chefs or cooking facilities so they got their food from a local jail which is the exact same as a prison just run by the county and for those who are either awaiting court or have a small sentence. This is my experience with prison food.

Note that prison food is the worst on my scale and the highest any food even home-cooked food can achieve is the status of "hospital food"

It's been a long time since I've been in the hospital, thank goodness, but it depends. If I was recovering from surgery I didn't usually have much of an appetite anyway. When I was put in the mental health ward I could barely swallow food because of side effects from what drug of the month they put me on, like this one kind that made my mouth dry out completely and no amount of water or ice chips moistened it. It was torture. I'd often lose weight after being in the hospital, which in itself wasn't such a bad thing. But being in the mental ward was pure torture. I felt trapped and like I was really going to die.

Yimes! I prefer the that's psychiatry for you.

 

[AspieOtaku]

Bright side, mac n cheese at psyche ward is amazing! Very creamy with elbow mac noodles.After getting out i think i got the recipe down, get some elbow mac noodles at grocery store, some cheddar, milk, butter and creamy cheese sauce, boil the noodles till they are soft, strain em and mix the cheddar allow to melt and cheese sauce as well as butter and milk and voila! Ya got psyche ward mac and cheese at home.

 

[cfleischmann]

Bright side, mac n cheese at psyche ward is amazing! Very creamy with elbow mac noodles.After getting out i think i got the recipe down, get some elbow mac noodles at grocery store, some cheddar, milk, butter and creamy cheese sauce, boil the noodles till they are soft, strain em and mix the cheddar allow to melt and cheese sauce as well as butter and milk and voila! Ya got psyche ward mac and cheese at home.

Thanks so very much for this one! I'll be sure to archive it and get the supplies when my food stamps refresh in about a week thus awesomeness

 

[GrownupGirl]

I hope I never have to eat entire meals that have been blended into a mush or fed to me through a tube stuck in my body. That sounds worse than death.

 

[s3_gunzel]

I hope I never have to eat entire meals that have been blended into a mush

I had an ulcer in my oesophagus - I assure you, by the time I presented at the ED, I had tried all sorts of solids and couldn’t get them down.

Had to take lidocaine liquid by mouth and then eat. It really wasn’t that bad.

 

[dragonfire42]

I’m somewhere between options one and two, I like hospital food in general (having somewhat recently been in three different hospitals in the course of a year and another one more recently where I wasn’t in-patient but was there for a long treatment that ran over lunchtime, so they’d ask if I wanted lunch while I was there), but I wouldn’t say I love it. I’ve never had any complaints about it and would say that I neither love it nor just put up with it because I have to, but somewhere in between. There really doesn’t seem to be any such thing as “too bland” for me, though, because my sense of taste is enhanced so everything has a stronger taste to me than to most people. Also I’m an extremely picky eater, but at the hospital they’d give me a menu and I’d circle what I wanted, and I could usually find something at least halfway decent there.