Hospital Haute Cuisine

The video below was excerpted from the ABC News Video Podcast, so for those of you who subscribe to it (or watch ABC News in the States), you may have seen this:

Now, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m a complete foodie, so at first glance, this would seem to strike me as “Oh, cool!” Except my brain interrupts .5 seconds later and says, “Wait a minute…this is a hosptial!. Even casual visitors and occupants of hospitals can tell you right off the bat that hospitals have a certain…smell. And they have that smell for a reason, namely because the hospital is a place of sickness and disease, which in turn can create unpredictable outgushings of bodily fluids and other nasty things best left untyped.

Picture this as a nurse tends to a random patient:

“Ok, Mr. Smith, we’re here to repack the excavated tunnel created by your necrotic, purulent butt abscess. Oooh, yeah, that’s gonna hurt a bit as we take this gauze out…yeah, we have to let this heal from the inside out, but that pain you feel as the gauze scrapes your butt tunnel is a good sign–it means that you’re healing and making new tissue. Almost done…*knock knock*…and just in time! Your ‘Beef Tips in Mushroom Ragout with Saffron Rice’ just arrived! I’ll hurry up and take these wet, bloody gauze bits out of the way so you can eat while it’s still hot.”

Save the maternity ward and perhaps and some ortho, etc. patients not yet ready to go home for PT or some such non-ambulatory reasons, are there really people in the hospital who could really appreciate the gourmet meals? Because if there are, one should question why they’re still there.

And you’d still have the smells…