Institutional food

I have eaten food in several institutions (not including a loony bin or prison), and I have never seen such awful chow as that served up in hospitals. It's understandable - hospital budgets depend on people being sick, so serving up horrible food is a great way to keep people in longer with stomach disorders and the like.

Or it's a way to free up beds by making people desperate to go home as soon as possible. If it was me, I'd tell them to wheel me straight from surgery out to the car park, and they could just lay me out in the back of the Disco for the drive home. Bugger hanging around to get all the tubes and stitches taken out - that's why we have pliers at home.

One place at RPA that gets lots of custom is the McCafe just next door. It's not a full blown McDonalds, so there is no scent of frying chips as you walk out of the Emergency dept, but it does sandwiches and proper coffee and food that is reasonably healthy and half tasty. Whenever I have been passed it, it has been chockers full of nurses, doctors, patients and anyone else who has been able to walk, hobble, crutch or wheel themselves out in order to get fed.

The other thing is that they sold out of food by around 1pm. It's not often that you walk into a McDonalds and find no food, but this place was stripped bare by early afternoon every day.

Toast is a good indicator of whether a place can cook and serve food properly or not. When I was at school, they had a succession of big, industrial toasters that toasted about a loaf of bread at a time. You'd get your food on a tray, then walk past the toaster and grab a few hot slices as they popped out of the machine. Given that it was serving 200 hungry boys, it couldn't produce toast fast enough. The biggest problem was the "dark toast" crowd arguing with the "lightly toasted" group about what setting the toaster should be set on.

RPA can't make toast to save its life. Which is bloody ridiculous. I presume that all the food is prepared in kitchens in the basement, or worse, prepared in one of those airline catering businesses out at the airport and then trucked over for distribution. Wherever they make the toast, it is a cold, soggy inedible lump by the time it reaches the patient. What is so ridiculous is that each ward has a small kitchen with a fridge, microwave and toaster, so it is not beyond the impossible to actually heat the toast within 20 walking seconds of the furthest bed in the ward.

I guess the hospital doesn't want the OH&S risk of some old duck burning her mouth on fresh toast. Better to serve a congealed lump of bread that was toasted 6 suburbs away sometime before midnight.

If they did that in prisons, there'd be a riot. You really have to wonder about an institution that can't make toast - do you really want the same clowns organising your brain surgery?