Hospitals’ cross to bear

I saw an interesting article online the other day, from the Vail Daily newspaper in Colorado. It was about Remedies Café at Vail Valley Medical Center. Apparently, the food is pretty good at Remedies, so much so that people come to the hospital just to eat in the cafeteria.

The article was filled with comments from diners about the quality of the food, and especially the prices. The reporter said Remedies was becoming known—unofficially, of course—as “the best lunch deal in town.”

The news piece was also littered with references to the state of non-commercial foodservice, past and present, beginning with the lead: “Move over Jell-O and saltine crackers, it’s lunchtime at Remedies Café.”

One customer was quoted as saying, “I thought it would be a high school cafeteria type thing, but it’s very good food.” Later in the article, the reporter commented, “Another thing you won’t find at the café is the grumpy lunch lady—the servers are friendly and [foodservice manager] Wiens and his fellow cooks care about what they do.”

That’s the line that prompted this blog entry. Call it the last straw, of sorts, or the last item that causes a basket or pot to overflow. A lot of newspaper and magazine articles about non-commercial foodservice land on my desk or in my email, and recently I’ve been seeing one or two of these stories about hospital foodservice a week. (Actually, on Friday, I read three of them.)

They always start with variations on a theme—“This hospital’s food is definitely not the norm. . .”—and the theme almost always includes Jell-O. (Why writers pick on Jell-O is beyond my comprehension. I like Jell-O.) The subjects quoted always express surprise at the quality and the price of the food. The writers will always incorporate the word “bland” somewhere, and they almost never make the leap to put the cafeteria on a par with local restaurants.

This article went a bit beyond that with the reporter’s comment about grumpy lunch ladies, because it suggested that grumpy employees and staff who don’t care are the norm in hospital foodservice. When you do that to people and cultures it’s called “profiling,” and you get taken to task for it.

I know that attitudes are hard to change, especially when those attitudes are born of institutional prejudice, rather than personal experience. Hospital foodservice continues to suffer from an image that was created decades ago, and most people have no reason to believe that it has ever changed.

And, when it comes to hospital food, that’s not so far off base; few hospitals have the budgets to create menus that rival fine dining. But we who cover the industry know that many kitchen staff work wonders with limited funds, and more important, we know that whatever the knock on hospital food may be, it certainly does not come from a lack of caring on the part of hard-working staffs.

That’s the image I find most offensive, that reporters make an assumption that the food is going to bad and it’s going to be served by sour-faced old ladies. Until writers put away their preconceptions and walk into a cafeteria with an open mind, hospitals, schools and other industry segments will never overcome the stigma that has been hung around their necks like an albatross.

That’s a tall order, but we can try, one reporter at a time. I think it’s time for a letter to Ms. Melanie Wong at the Vail Daily. I’ll let you know if she responds.