I can appreciate hospital food being uninspired since they have so many varied restrictions to deal with. I cannot understand it being so bad.
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Me neither. My mother in law has just spent three weeks in our local hospital. The food has varied from just being vile to totally inedible. Soup has been OK, as have desserts (but then I don’t think the MiL has ever met a dessert she didnt like). But everything else has been awful and she’s been reliant on sandwiches that family has taken in.
I suspect that the problem is multi-faceted - including budget constraints; poor contract procurement and monitoring; and our old friend the profit incentive to cut corners.
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3 weeks? Yikes! I was going crazy after 3 days. Oddly enough, dessert is their forte.
A few years back mom spent a week+ in the hospital. I brought her breakfast and lunch every day . . . sis handled dinner. And that’s saying something as mom is a child of the depression and can generally eat anything (including onion and ketchup on white bread).
And I think you’re probably right about the causes. Although oddly enough the coffee was good and they served name-brand soda with lunch and dinner.
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Mrs Harters is actually not mentioning the food in her complaint to the hospital about her mother’s care. She thinks there’s enough already. It starts with them losing her spectacles within hours of being admitted, through several lost days of treatment (her notes were supposedly to be first reviewed by a specialist team at another hospital but they never replied). It culminated with her being assaulted by another patient - the ward also had dementia patients and the the assault was by one of them. MiL was knocked to the floor, even though she was accompanied by a nrurse and the the other patient by a hospital security officer. Unsurprisingly, her recovery has been hindered by this.
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The poor woman. That stay sounds like an absolute horror show. Lost glasses? Mistakes happen. Lost days of treatment? Inexcusable. An assault while MIL is accompanied by a nurse and dementia patient is accompanied by security?? I may have called the police.
At least other than the lousy food my stay was professional and met a very high standard of care. This was the first time I had been transported to a hospital by ambulance and then transferred to a trauma center via another ambulance. I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived in my room and my bag of belongings contained an itemized accounting of its contents, including the contents of my wallet right down to the pennies. (Who knows, maybe they swiped a few nickels and pennies as I wouldn’t have noticed 
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As my father used to say . . . It beats the alternative.
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I am truly so so sorry to hear about Mrs. Harters ordeal.
All my best wishes for a speedy recovery are being sent to Mrs. H.
Have a nice weekend and take care of yourself too …
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I grew up eating liverwurst that came sliced in rounds that you peeled a plastic covering off. (This was Long Island, NY.) Now what I find is tubes of braunschweiger you cut yourself. It doesn’t really matter though. If I buy it I have to finish it myself as nobody here will go near it.
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That’s how I remember liverwurst. I wouldn’t touch the stuff. But dad and cousin Jimmy loved a good liverwurst on rye with onions and brown mustard. Washed down with a Guinness. Jimmy was a plumber and I swear dad invented problems just to enjoy those lunches.
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@Harters - I am so sorry to hear this about your MIL! I agree, it sounds like a horror story.
Wishing her a speedy recovery, and the best to you and the Mrs. I’m sure it was quite the ordeal for all of you.
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Food of the gods that lunch.
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What hospitals do to make the food horrible is what I’ve been asking myself for the past 3 weeks, since I was released!
Luckily, my first 2-3 days I didn’t have much appetite, so it was easy to not eat. Then I got hungry! Happy for the little containers of applesauce, and when I discovered the raspberry sherbet. I then started ordering stuff I thought they couldn’t screw up…but did anyway! A French Dip that chewed like rubber bands, a piece of cheesecake I’m at a loss to describe both taste and texture wise. A blueberry pancake that looked like a pancake but was truly unlike anything in texture I’ve ever eaten. Yet amazingly this fabulous French Toast and bacon that was great! And yes, outstanding coffee. Oh, and Diet Cokes which appealed to me at the time.
While the food was bad and puzzling, I’m really not complaining, because I’m extremely happy with the care I received from everyone. Plus I lost some weight! I too had my first ambulance ride, but it was because I had a few IV’s going. H offered to bring me food, but he would have had to leave it at the admissions desk. Covid rules, so I told him not to bother. It was a little strange to be in the hospital during Covid. Thrilled to be home and almost completely recovered. A few healing battle scars only…@gaffk. Hopefully your owies will be a distant memory soon.
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Chipped ham is particular to that area. My favorite place in Squirrek Hill was Iz Cohens but that was in the 60s & 70s.
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"what’s the difference between liverwurst and braunsweiger?"was my most responded to thread over at CH, asked because Farmer John’s out west
sells both. And in tubes. We can sometimes get John Morrell out here, and I even found Schaller and Weber once.
I don’t think people grew up eating it west of the Rockies, but I love the stuff.
I don’t know if I would have mentioned John Morrell on this thread. That’s pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel.
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When you’re in a braunsweiger desert, any port in a storm.
Besides, Farmer John’s tells John Morrell “hold my beer 
”
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Braunschweiger on a farm, with beer - Of course, but I’ll hold onto that beer myself, thank you.
Braunschweiger in a storm, with port - Sure, why not? 
We managed to skirt the COVID rules a bit. Since mom’s 92, they allowed sis or BIL to “escort” her to my room, so in effect I had 2 visitors at a time. And they were allowed to bring the food to me directly. Not sure how a person bringing food in, dropping it at the front desk for another person to handle, and that person probably handing it off again to be delivered to your room would cut down on infection dangers 
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We ate…
- Oscar Mayer Boiled ham
- Oscar Mayer Bologna
- Liverwurst - tube loaf, Underwood Spread & sliced stuff you had to pull a thin plastic strip off.
- Underwood Deviled Ham Spread
- Underwood Chicken Spread - I recently bought it for nostalgic sake. Disgusting. I wouldn’t feed it to the cats.
- Lotsa’ Tuna
- Hellman’s Mayonnaise.
- Pepperidge Farms White Bread
This was in the burbs of Connecticut before my mom burned her bra, we moved to an island and started eating avocado cheese sandwiches with alfalfa sprouts on wheatberry bread. We kept the Hellman’s.
P.S. Love your Brooklyn stories @shrinkrap!
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All our best and speedy recovery wishes.
