Hospital food isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal

One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well ask for gravadlax and dill. On the hospital menu, baked potatoes only come with baked beans.

I asked one of the Thai ladies who deliver the food if he could possibly have a plain spud. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘all with beans.’ She said she would go and ask someone, but who that might be I don’t know: I have never seen anyone in charge of food.

‘It’s hopeless,’ he told me. ‘I’ve asked them before, they won’t do it.’ The only alternative in the potato department is a wet grey mush, and people quickly learn to avoid the fish pie with its slimy contents and topping of grey cumulus blobs.