RIP UK Hospital Food As We Know It (Hopefully)

Ask anyone you know who's been in hospital recently what the food was like and their face will blanche whiter than snow. But could we about to see a major about-turn in the piss-poor food we serve our ill and recovering?

Hospitals in England will now have to meet new, higher standards of food for patients (and staff), enforced by legally-binding NHS contracts for measures announced by health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Hospitals will also, it seems, be ranked on the meals they prepare.

Hunt says hospitals must improve, else they'll be liable to fines. Yes, you'd be forgiven for suggesting that he should be publicly justifying the NHS reforms under his government's leadership—ones that Ed Milliband is advertising as part of the core of his general election campaign—rather than pontificating about the food served in the hospitals. But something has to be done.

How did we get to the point where vulnerable people lying in regulation hospital linen trying to heal are being fed meals like these? Barely-recognisable chicken legs, grout-like instant mashed potato and jacket potatoes that look themselves like malignant growths? Reservoirs of instant gravy with a few floating islands of over-cooked meat and tinned vegetables? "Macaroni cheese" (viewer discretion advised) that looks like the aftermath of a nasty abscess extraction? If anything could grind recovery into a reverse gear, that'll do it.

Under the proposed changes, the BBC says hospitals will be ranked according to quality and choice of food, whether the menu is approved by a dietitian, the availability of fresh fruit and food between meals, the variety of options at breakfast—which should include warm food—and the cost of the food provided. The rankings, it says, will be published on the NHS Choices website.

So what can inpatients expect under the new standards? Servings of fish twice a week, apparently, along with seasonal produce, plenty of tap water available at all times (revolutionary, that one), starches (rice and potatoes) and vegetables cooked without salt, a choice of desserts of which half the options are fruit and at least half of the tea and coffee they drink to be Fair Trade.

Back to the question of how, though. As anyone who has been admitted to hospital recently will attest—myself included—the looming question when you're forced to spoon congealed-alien-sebum- moonlighting-as-vegetarian-lasagne into your mouth because it's outside visiting hours and no one can bring you a Marks & Spencer sandwich, is, how the hell did it get so bad?

According to some reports, our hospital food (which Medieval hospitals did better) failure can be attributed to a litany of ineffective voluntary initiatives and the absence of any legal enforcing of basic mandatory standards. Money is a major problem. Many hospitals will, in order to meet high volume, contract food out to companies who specialise in institutional (prisons, schools, etc.) food—companies who allow ready-packaged and mostly-prepared food to be delivered to hospitals at the lowest possible cost. In January this year it was reported that more than one in three NHS hospitals had cut their patient food budget by up to two thirds, with some hospitals spending as little as 69 pence per meal, per patient.

Dire straights doesn't quite cover it.

There have been decent, passionate and well thought-out schemes, though, like Saturday Kitchen's professional autocue-fluffer James Martin's (who has publicly slammed Hunt's proposed measures) Operation Hospital Food. But depending on the hospital you're in, a wide-scale national roll-out has yet to be seen by many, and it seems like no one has a concrete answer for how appalling things have become.

Save the odd, well-microwaved jacked potato, I've yet to have a meal vaguely resembling anything I know as dinner in an English hospital, which, as someone with more interest in dinner than pretty much anything else in my life, is a sharp blow. My insides are pretty screwed up and I've been an inpatient a couple of times in the last few years, admitted most recently for a bowel obstruction (deal with it) and given a nasogastric tube.

I was on a liquid-only diet and the only way the poor ward staff thought to get around it (I was still told to choose my meals from the menu card, even if I couldn't eat them, "just in case" I was replaced with another patient) was to offer me some instant chicken soup to which words truly cannot do justice. Viscous, Bic highlighter pen-yellow, granulated and salty enough to preserve the entire hospital like a mini Herculaneum, it seemed insane that this was the only option—aside from little cups of Robinson's jelly—for a liquid-only patient. I relied on visitors to bring in miso soup sachets and Innocent smoothies and started to look forward to the little doses of oral morphine because they were sweet.

You can't blame the staff, though—they were working with what they had and fell over themselves to try and make me comfortable. And honestly, by the end, you wind up sort of not giving a shit, which is the saddest thing of all.

Food you eat in hospital shouldn't just be for fuel's sake. The entire day on a ward revolves around mealtimes—they often govern when visitors are allowed in, when doctors do their ward rounds and when you might be wheeled off into different parts of the hospital for X-rays, etc. So for those meals to be a plate of something often entirely unrecognisable, and with about as much nutritional value as the bottle of hand sanitiser at the end of the bed, is like a cruel, desperate punishment for deigning to be ill enough to be admitted for inpatient care.

Communication is an issue, too. Patients should be able to have a conversation with someone who understands the relationship between certain foods and the healing process and not just be left to their devising their own meal plan with a laminate card. It beggars belief that a customer admitted with some sort of bowel disease, for example, who might not know the ins-and-outs of what foods are good for the gut, could up choosing something from the limited beside menu a plate of food that'll make them more ill or uncomfortable. Educating both kitchen and ward staff on these kind of nuances would be imperative, but of course, both are stretched as it is.

We can only hope that Hunt's measures will make even the smallest dent on what is an embarrassing blot on our big, wonderful and inclusive—if slightly precarious these days thanks, in no small way, to Hunt's own party—health system.