Hospital catering reforms are 'hopelessly weak', says Prue Leith

The quality of hospital meals, such as tired, plastic-wrapped sandwiches and grey, mushy ready meals, has been described as a scandal by the food writer Prue Leith in an article for the Guardian, denouncing the government’s reform proposals as feeble and worth less than “a row of over-processed beans”.

Minimum food standards are to be introduced to NHS catering contracts from next month, but Leith accuses the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, of ducking the issue, and says that the hospital food standards panel established by the department has been undermined by inviting food manufacturers, including one of the biggest suppliers of hospital food, on to the panel.

“Food manufacturers of course have one aim only and that is to sell their products. Asking them to advise on a healthy diet is like asking a fox to lock the chicken run,” Leith says.

She predicts that the proposed standards, already “hopelessly weak”, would be buried in pages of small print that hospital administrators will be too busy ever to check for compliance after they are signed.

“Without monitoring and enforcement, the contracts’ only purpose will be to cover the backs of NHS trusts should they ever need someone to blame for some disaster.”

Under the present system, which leads to wastage of 70% of all food in some hospitals, few hospital kitchens actually cooked anything.

“All the kitchen staff now do is reheat frozen meals and add the inevitable difficult-to-undo packages: of cutlery, sweaty squares of cheese, cheap biscuits, dabs of marge. The meals themselves are made miles away in a ­factory from the cheapest available ingredients, delivered frozen, regenerated in the hospital and kept warm in a trolley. No wonder it’s disgusting. ”

The Guardian
2 March 2015