Hospital food isn't on your mind until you suddenly end up in the hospital. Since my recent stay was unplanned, I wanted to appreciate the moment and give some insight into how to deal with hospital food.
My first meal was a turkey sandwich on really nice, somewhat healthy bread with a lettuce leaf. This was way after the normal dinner rush so I was glad to get anything. I ate a lot of turkey sandwiches in my stay, all with a basic white bread.
I kept getting coffee during my stay. Worked hard to get tea instead. I didn't need a huge amount of caffeine.
Breakfast
Scrambled eggs were the force du jour during the week. Always got cold cereal with milk. They started me with Cheerios, one of the healthier cereals. Most of the time I got 2% milk but occasionally had whole milk.
Scrambled eggs are easy to do but hard to get right. Hot sauce wasn't an option. A planned hospital stay might require sneaking in some hot sauce. The standard condiments were "healthy" — whipped oils that may not have been margarine but were not butter. The fake whipped butter was surprisingly good on the scrambled eggs. Sometimes I got real butter though that didn't melt on the eggs as well as the whipped oils.
The turkey sausage was really good but didn't get served all that much. Turkey sausage isn't something you think about much. The turkey sausage had some spice but very mild flavor.
One morning I got scrambled eggs with melted cheddar. This would have been out of the playbook of fast food breakfast sandwiches. The cheese didn't have any taste and that was on scrambled eggs.
The hospital had a version of hash browns, long and stringy, that were not edible. The cubed version was edible but very boring. Smuggled good-quality ketchup would have helped.
The weekend brought French toast and then pancakes. The fake syrup was a bad combo of a sugar alcohol and a couple of fake sweeteners (they often travel in pairs). Pancakes sound great in the real world though pancakes with fake butter and truly fake syrup is hard to swallow.
Whole fruit was included in most breakfasts. When I had a choice, I picked bananas over anything. I did have apples and grapes, the latter must have come from far away. Applesauce would have been tempting but only if natural.
Lunch
Dinner would seemingly have the most interesting choices but lunch had some intriguing meals. Garlic pork loin with no garlic taste. Rotisserie chicken pieces, some fried rice, and various vegetable medleys. Fruit came with most lunches. The first soup I ran across was tomato basil soup. Seriously good. The chicken noodle soup was above Campbell's with decent vegetables. Soup was a much better way to get vegetables than the actual medleys.
Most of the vegetables were overcooked and sometimes sitting underneath the dome in my room. Lunch came really early, about 11 am after a 7 am breakfast.
Mashed sweet potatoes were on the menu a couple of times. The tag said "maple" but there was no proof. Nice to see a healthier version with added flavor if you could only taste that flavor.
Dinner
Some patients needed more calories so dessert was pushed. I didn't need dessert unless a lighter choice was offered. I switched out fruit for dessert most dinners. Soup usually came with this meal. I generally did tomato basil for lunch and chicken noodle for dinner.
I could have had a burger or pizza most nights. Didn't want an overcooked burger and my pizza would have included mozzarella cheese, a food where I suffer from an intolerance. This is why I ate a lot of turkey sandwiches.
The biggest complaint I had was not getting enough condiments. I could get mayo but struggled for mustard. The white bread didn't help the sandwich and I needed the mustard to get down the dry turkey sandwiches.
Dinner needed to be savored since the 5 pm dinner was followed by hours of no food before a 7 am breakfast.
Hospital patients, school children both need better focus on nutrition
Overall
I ate as much as I could for most of the meals. I might leave a starch behind, trying to focus on the protein. Broccoli was a vegetable I ate because the broccoli wasn't overcooked.
If/when you are at a point where there is a conversation over food, speak up. Hard to do in a hospital, understandably but worth the effort. You won't get hot sauce or the ketchup you want but you can ask for extras.
The fake butter made a lot of foods easier to consume. They didn't add too much taste but provided needed moisture to make eating the foods much easier.
The nurses were thrilled to get water. You might not be used to drinking water with meals. Water was a blessing with less than interesting food to taste. Hospital food is bland food for a lot of reasons. The turkey sausage stood up for having flavor.
My best-of meal would have the turkey sausage with the tomato basil soup along with a banana, the broccoli, some of that Rotisserie chicken, and the mashed sweet potato with tea and milk.
Your hospital needs are likely different. You may have wanted all the artificial sweeteners and as many calories as you could eat. Some meals were pretty good but I had little energy. Other meals were as boring as a turkey sandwich with no mustard.
This is an anecdotal experiment. I wouldn't mind trying more hospital food but not as a patient. I generally found that hospital food wasn't as bad as commonly feared but does deserve some of the jokes about being bland. You have to put aside some of your expectations and embrace the moment. After 7 days, I was ready for outside food but appreciated what I had eaten for the past week.
photo credit: me
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