I have had 3 stays in hospital as an adult. The first was when I was diagnosed with Type 1, and the food could have been better but could have been a lot worse.
The 2nd and 3rd stays were at the maternity hospital, where I had my 2 children. This hospital was attached to a children's hospital, where there was a diet kitchen, and my food came from that kitchen. The girls in my ward used to look at my meal and their own plates and said that they wished they were diabetic! When I saw what they were expected to eat, I was glad that I was getting decent food.
Several years later, I was talking to a lady at the diabetic clinic who'd just spent time as an in-patient in the first hospital. I asked what the food was like now, and she said it was like meals you get on a plane. I asked if this was from the diet kitchen and she said they no longer had one. All meals were the pre-packed ones.
A very large hospital has been built in our city (Glasgow). I'm hoping it's not true, but I was told that it doesn't have a cooking kitchen, as they only heat up meals there.
A friend told me that she was talking to a driver who collects sandwiches from Ayrshire, from the Irish ferry, and delivers them to the hospitals in Glasgow. How can it be cheaper to have sandwiches made in Ireland, transported across the Irish sea to Scotland and then delivered to all Glasgow hospitals, rather than make them in-house?
I dread the thought of having to stay in hospital again. I am now coeliac and know that for the first 24 hours, I would be lucky to get a gluten free meal. I was talking to another coeliac who said that she was offered breaded fish for her lunch. She knew better than to accept it, but if she had, they'd probably have said she had norovirus, when her intestines reacted to the gluten!