by the Hospital Senses Collective
Hospital food has long been an important part of the patient experience. For those in recovery on wards, breakfast, lunch and dinner can play important roles in punctuating the boredom of long days in bed. The multi-sensory act of eating has changed significantly in hospitals over time. The rise of plastics has affected the tactile and material dimensions of eating, and even potentially changed the flavour of food, the perception of which is affected by other senses such as sound, smell, and sight as well as the food itself.[1] Hospital menus, and the degree to which patients can choose from them, have evolved over time, in line with shifting ideas about nutrition, food cultures and the patient as ‘consumer’. Here we provide an example of ‘light diets’ from the early NHS as prompts to consider the changing role of hospital food in sensory experiences of the ward.[2]
We wonder to what extent menus really tell us anything about taste, and whether the experience of eating is particularly difficult to capture. As Jennifer Crane argues, one way around this is to follow recipes to try hospital food for ourselves. When the King’s Fund’s ‘tomato and egg jelly’ recipe was reproduced on the television programme Sunday Brunch for guests to try: ‘The assertion by musician Plan B that [it] tasted like Heinz’s tomato soup and was “all right, I’m into it” demonstrated the ways in which actually constructing and tasting this food could challenge our contemporary assumptions, born from its textual descriptors’.[3]
Even seeing this jelly can help to evoke its colour and texture, all part of the eating experience. One of our Hospital Senses Collective also tried the recipe, describing it as ‘tart and sour, a bit like a solid version of aeroplane tomato juice pumped through with way too much gelatine. The egg was, obviously, overcooked and chalky’.
But if the experience of eating hospital food is tied to space, place, illness, health, emotions, and experience, can we ever really understand somebody else’s sensory experience of eating, past or present? Is taste a particularly personal sensory experience, or is there something collective to the sensory experience of eating hospital food?
References
- For example, see L. Biggs, G. Juravle, and C. Spence, ‘Haptic exploration of plateware alters the perceived texture and taste of food’, Food Quality and Preference 50 (2016), 129-134.
- Menu and recipe © Rights Reserved The King’s Fund, reproduced with permission from Memorandum on Light Diets (King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London, 1960).
- J. Crane, ‘“The NHS… should not be condemned to the history books”: public engagement as a method in social histories of medicine’, Social History of Medicine (2020) https://doi.org/10.1093/ shm/hkaa041.