Healthy eating in hospitals? It's no joke

Suck in your paunch and wrap your dentures round this little nugget: Matron is taking steps. You choke on your Diet Meths and ask: "Steps, what steps?" Steps, m'laddie, to provide healthy food in hospitals.

Yup, it's that revolutionary. Who'd have seen the link between health and diet? Not our hospitals evidently.

Before we get carried away on a trolley we should stress that the high heid yins at Holyrood are only consulting on whether nutritional standards in hospitals should become a legal requirement.

As it stands, the law merely says: "Eat crisps." Or it might as well do. To be fair, you'd think healthy food in hospital would be something you didn't have to enshrine in law. You'd think it'd be a given. But common sense seems so 19th-century now.

The Scottish Government is also spending £300,000 to help health boards improve nutritional care. Fine. Big, round numbers. Whoo-hoo. But if it isn't spent on actual food, you wonder what it's for. Leaflets probably. Reports. Commemorative ties with matching lapel badge (optional).

Some of this might have something to do with The Herald's revelations last year that patients were being fed for little more than £4 a day, or the price of a black pudding supper (health warning: "Patrons having a pickled egg with this dish are advised to stay away from naked flame").

Defenders of the service say things have changed since the days of ulcer sufferers being given fry-ups. But you get the impression there's still some way to go. Besides, it isn't just the food pushed down the throats of the punters we're talking about here.

Trolleys, vending machines and shops on the wards or corridors offer every sugary, fatty delight in Christendom, though I'm told that if you want a deep- fried Mars Bar you have to supply your own lard.

You say: "But it's what the mob wants to eat, ken?" That is a good point well made. And I'm not having it. Here's your new inspected and approved moral guideline: you should have to up your game when going into a hospital. You're just going to have to man up and eat your edamame bean salad.

Already, if sentenced to hospital for any length of time, you will have purchased a suave dressing gown, something you wouldn't be seen dead in at home. But hospital is a place to be seen dead in.

You've bought your new Lidl pyjamas, so now prepare to spill prune juice down your bib. Hospitals are going to be transformed into places in which to get well, and that means healthy eating.

How odd it all is. Most of us dread hospitals. They're full of people with diseases and malfunctioning bits. And the patients aren't much better.

As soon as you arrive, you see vast throngs of the undead (at the time of going to press) smoking fags and coughing in crow-like choruses near the entrances.

You pass cafes full of people eating pastries, before you embark along a maze of corridors, hoping with increasing desperation to find a sign with your disease or injury on it. Signage: it's a dying art, or at least one that's not very well.

You just have the feeling that nothing is co-ordinated, probably because of all the co-ordinators. Perhaps they lack a co-ordinator. If hospitals can't give you healthy food - or, worse, they encourage you to eat unhealthy snacks and drinks - what else are they mucking up?

Of all places, how can it be in hospitals that people spread diseases by not washing their hands? It really puts you off going. And they're always so hot and stuffy. Could they not save money by bringing the temperature down to tropical?

Still, mustn't grumble too much. Obviously, a lot of good work is done in hospitals. They're not just death traps picketed by Weight Watchers.

At any event, the Scottish Government is watching over us all, with Nurse Alex Neil bunging a stethoscope into our roly-poly puddings. It's all most reassuring. Sorry, almost reassuring.