‘We have learned to have low expectations’: why can’t British hospitals serve better food?

After spending years in and out of hospital with my daughter, I know the patients’ food isn’t usually very good. But does it have to be this way?

• The best and worst of hospital food around the world – in pictures

‘We tend to think of this as a nutritional holiday,” said the dietician, as we looked down at the blue plastic tray on my four-year-old daughter Vida’s overbed table. Vida was about to start a long-awaited bone marrow transplant at a major London hospital, a process requiring an intensive chemotherapy programme that would affect her appetite and ability to eat. We needed to prioritise her weight over healthy eating, said the dietitian. It was mission Calories Over Carrot Sticks. In normal times, this would worry me profoundly.

Looking at that tray, it struck me that the food here would probably force anyone to take a nutritional holiday, bone marrow transplant or not. There was a plate of soggy battered fish and some cardboard-looking chips, long‑life apple juice, a bag of Quavers, Ambrosia custard, a KitKat and a token easy peeler. Vida wasn’t due to start chemo until the following day, but the fish and chips went untouched. For her first few weeks as an inpatient, I would order her the most basic offerings available in the hospital – an anaemic-looking omelette, overcooked pasta that collapsed on your tongue, a chicken breast so tough that it could have taken down a man – but Vida never tried more than a mouthful before pushing the food away.

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