Hospital Food Photo Blog

Here's a link to a new tumblog that collects photos of delicious, healing hospital meals from around the world. (Thanks, Reno!).

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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graphicsman

holy man, that looks just like the plastic food that comes with kids’ kitchen playsets
Anonymous

This is for people who can’t eat a solid diet. There are a lot of medical conditions that would cause people to not be able to eat solid foods for a while, hospitals try and make this as appealing as possible by making the food look normal. I guarantee this isn’t a “normal” meal.

Hospitals do have to make special needs meals you know… :)
aeon

UK National Health Service food budget comes to about Â£2.50 (US$3.75) per inpatient per day. I don’t suppose it’s any more in most places, France probably excluded. Not surprising most of it looks like crap, is it?
Halloween Jack

I wonder how representative some of these samples are; yes, a lot of the Japanese meals look very nice, but these are also the people who gave us ramen and canned coffee. Quite a few US hospitals are reforming their food service to incorporate better, restaurant-quality food (and by restaurant, I don’t mean Applebee’s) in order to compete for inpatients.
cubey

Mmm, formed paste for dinner.
Daemon

#1 Probably tastes about the same too.
Anonymous

The food is exactly what it should be: Easy to digest, nutritionally balanced, and.. well, bland.

If you are nauseated, maybe you keep some of it down. If you hurl on your plate, you retain your dignity, as no one will notice.
mutuelle

Seems to be food prepared 2 days before.
Anyway, I’ll never eat that unless I’m really starving to death!
Antinous / Moderator

The hospital that I worked at for fifteen years had quite good food. They had a full-time dessert cook. Apparently not the norm. Some of them just heat up airline style trays.
bishophicks

I am a very capable, non-professional home cook who knows a lot about the basic science behind a lot of cooking techniques. I have no idea what the hell they did to those…peas, I guess.

Sweet, merciful Christ.
Rich Pav

Now that’s some real, honest-to-God mystery meat right there.

That mystery meat has changed my definition of mystery meat.
Gilbert Wham

I’ve had better-looking food than that pic above in jail.

Apropos hospital food, my daughter’s mother was in hospital shortly after the birth, and while I was visiting her, she was being served something called ‘crispy fish fillet’ (the exact nature of the fish was not specified). The actual object on the plate was a piece of microwaved frozen fish, which had what I describe as ‘Prison Cornflakes’ – you know, the suspiciously regular oval-shaped kind, beloved of the servers of institutional breakfasts – sprinkled on the top.
Michael Leung

How dare you categorize this under “Food”?
Simon Bradshaw

Bishophicks @ 5, you’ve evidently never encountered Mushy Peas, a staple of north English cuisine. They are actually meant to look like that, although I’d bet my left kidney that the ones served up in the meal shown taste of wallpaper paste rather than, well, pea.

Aeon @ 15, when I was in the UK military, the Ministry of Defence budget allocation for food was about Â£3 per day per person, and that’s for a diet for active troops rather than sedentary patients. We got three hefty square meals a day for that. The difference was that for military cooks the diners will make their displeasure known far more bluntly if fed crap…
tuktuk

i have eaten fried grasshoppers in five countries, drank wine made from rice and the bile of a snake, and even choked down a (fresh, raw and still beating) cobra heart in vietnam… but this? even i would send back. mostly because all that other stuff was, well, delicious.
Jardine

So is the bottom-right one supposed to be meat or chocolate mousse? If it’s meat, the colour is horrifying. If it’s mousse, why is there gravy on it?
Kieran O’Neill

The first thing I thought on seeing this was “I bet Japanese hospital food is awesome.”

Judging from the pics on that blog, I was right. I’d take this over coloured blobs of mystery matter any day.
legotech

Is that a human TONGUE under jellied coffee?
SamSam

What… what is that??? For the love of God and all that is holy, what is that?!?
schmod

[rimshot]Looks like normal British food to me[/rimshot]
dculberson

It looks delicious, I don’t know what your problem with it is … oh crap I can’t keep that up. I vurped a little just trying to pretend that I found it appetizing.
messmor

I’ve had quite a few meals at the hospital. I remember getting Jello after I got my stomach pumped. The breakfast in the psych ward was not bad. I remember eating corn flakes.
Maybe it has something to do with me liking TV dinners. I like getting my lunch in the hospital cafeteria before I go see my shrink.

My favourite out of the series would have to be the Polish hospital food.
Anonymous

Oh my… there really is something wrong with me, because I very much find that appetizing. :(
Mitch

That picture makes me dry heave a little bit. What is that brown thing? Some kind of restructured liver patty?
Anonymous

why the hell is there gravy on that ice cream!!!
Anonymous

Mmmm…. mushy peas. My fave! Especially with fish and chips and tartare sauce! You can keep the meat mouse and ice-cream scoop of mashed potato though.
adam0694

For everyone here who made a mockery of this you’re about to feel really stupid or at least shameful.

This meal is pureed and put into a mold to look like themselves in an original state.

Who eats these meals? The elderly, accident victims and kids with cancer. My heart goes out to these children and people and something as simple as this meal could bring a home cooked feeling of comfort to an otherwise drab and lonely white room.

You people are making fun of something that a child with cancer could look at as one of the best treats in the world.
adam0694

“best treat in the world” I’m not turning back on that statement, but I’ll try to explain it. Both my wife and I were hospitalized at young ages for totally different medical reasons. That was the big haired 80′s- zoom to the present.
I love food; cooking it, eating it, finding new ethnic cuisine, etc. My wife, who gets “the most boring eater ever” award, could live on plain cornflakes for weeks on end and she’s rail thin to boot. When I was that sick little chubby asthmatic kid in the hospital, I couldn’t wait for the next plate of mechanically processed, formed, food-type product. My wife, on the other hand, wouldn’t eat at all when she was in the hospital. We all take comfort in different things, for me it was the food, for my wife it was being surrounded by friends and family. Now 25 years later, things are the same but complimentary. I’m the chubby guy who cooks alone in the kitchen while she sits out with and talks to our family and guests.

Now, someone mentioned the Lehigh Valley. It’s ironic because I live there and I’ve been to every hospital there. The hospitals in the lehigh valley really do overdo it with the fine cuisine, even for a chubby food critic like myself.

Hey, we all have different perspectives. So all I have to say to you if you don’t want to eat that steaming pile of processed pressed food-like product is- pass it my way. ;)
Joe MommaSan

According to the description, those “peas” are actually pureed broccoli spears molded to look like peas.

Yum – baby food.
rationalist

It’s efficiency at work – serve one patient what you remove from the other (particularly if the other is a giant lobster).
Anonymous

Adam, the hell? That ain’t food, and it ain’t gonna help with any healing. Talk about adding insult to injury.
devophill

@ Adam0694 – “one of the best treats in the world”

Really?
InsertFingerHere

I’m sure if you root around in a cadaver long enough, you’ll find stuff that looks just like this.
Anonymous

Taking a quick look at the first page of that blog I’ve come to a conclusion. If I’m ever hospitalized I hope I’m in France at the time. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the French have hospital food that looks (and probably tastes) delicious.
saint_al

“This meal is pureed and put into a mold to look like themselves in an original state.”
Why? None of it is raw. If they’re *expecting* it to get thrown up, then they’re using the right ammo. Most US hospitals probably serve SYSCO shit.
‘Meat’ in pic IS Silly Putty.
thechicgeek

If anyone is ever hospitalized in the Lehigh Valley, there’s at least one hospital with better food than most restaurants. We have sushi chefs, and stone baked pizza to boot.

It’s a shame most other hospitals don’t put any effort in there food. There’s more to eating than just getting the nutritional content one needs to survive.
Steaming Pile

Ah, SYSCO. The people who make Applebee’s (and hundreds of other cookie-cutter restaurants) what they are. Better to learn to cook and eat well all the time. A whole hell of a lot better, not to mention cheaper, than Applebee’s, that’s for sure.

I was in the hospital a couple of years ago, and while the food there wasn’t quite as disgusting as all that, it certainly didn’t inspire an appetite. Burgers that looked like they came from a vending machine, stuff like that. If you’re just lying there in bed, you don’t want a lot of calories anyway; I gained something like 25-30 pounds while my leg was in a cast, and I am happy to have finally gotten rid of them.

One breakfast in particular stands out above the rest. It was an “omelet” in which you had about three eggs’ worth of whites with just enough of the yolk to change the color of the rubbery result a pale yellow. God only knows what they did with the rest of the egg yolks – probably sold them to Purina for cat food or something. Never ordered eggs in that place again for the rest of my stay.
Talia

Some of the foreign pics looks like they MIGHT be good if you understood the cultural reference behind them.

Interesting how much cultural knowledge affects taste.
Anonymous

@adam0694 “You people are making fun of something that a child with cancer could look at as one of the best treats in the world.”

I get your point. But if I was ill and couldn’t eat solid food, I would much rather eat a delicious soup than a disgusting blob of purÃ©ed meat. I was in hospital for a couple of days with my appendix recently, and the food was enough to make you throw up. I was so relieved to leave hospital and be able to eat something edible again. The awful food just adds to the misery of being in hospital.
dccarles

Adam0694:
“For everyone here who made a mockery of this you’re about to feel really stupid or at least shameful.

This meal is pureed and put into a mold to look like themselves in an original state.”

..You can just feel the evil glee behind every keystroke.

I volunteer in a hospital, and it was pretty obvious at a glance that this meal was for a patient with difficulty chewing.

IT STILL LOOKS GODDAMN AWFUL.

“Who eats these meals? The elderly, accident victims and kids with cancer. My heart goes out to these children and people and something as simple as this meal could bring a home cooked feeling of comfort to an otherwise drab and lonely white room.”

Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? Hell no. The elderly, accident victims and kids with cancer aren’t stupid.

There’s no way to make something pureed into something with an appetizing texture. I spent several months trying when my jaw was wired shut.

–Devin