Eat up - it's good for you

A chap known only as ‘Traction Man’ has been blogging about NHS food for some time now.

http://hospitalnotes.blogspot.com/

The blog is funny and also makes one wonder about ones own morality as the posts when he’s faced with something that should be disposed of in the sluice room are more compelling than when he actually gets decent grub.

In terms of visitors and comments, he actually draws some abuse! Astonishing as I don’t think any of his posts are malicious or even complain that much about the atrocious stuff he’s served.

It makes me wonder how, after years of telly being dominated by chefs telling us how to cook decent food and how to have fun with it, institutions can still regard decent food as a luxury.

Food should be a positive and sensual experience. Eating food that somebody else has prepared for you should be pleasurable. This is probably not something we consider on a conscious level very often, partly because we don’t want a sensual connection to the pimpled troll shoving our burger across the counter at us, and partly because for some people such a thought has unpleasant connotations because many years ago a stranger putting something sensual in their mouth led to them having to leave scout camp early.

Advertisers however are acutely aware that over the last few years, ‘food porn’ (that is, making food sexy for an advert, rather than doing something vile with a cucumber) has come more and more into the mainstream, the most perfect example being those M&S food ads where a woman’s voice purrs about cake while said cake is drenched in cream.

Those M&S ads were the equivalent of one of those high-budget dirty movies where the ‘actors’ are buff, well lit and all their tattoos are spelled right – classy!

Traction man’s food photographs show something that is the equivalent of armature porn filmed in a Croydon bus shelter on a mobile camera, while a pensioner sits on adjacent seat and pretends not to notice anything; in short, horrific, disturbing and after seeing it you wonder if you can get some sort of therapy or drug that will remove the memory. Failing that, there’s always booze.

A couple of years ago I was oop north and happened to stop at a KFC for a coffee. This KFC was just outside the grounds of a hospital and I was amazed to see somebody in what looked like a hospital gown trundle in there on one of those mobility chariot things. At the time I put it down to some sort of Northern thing where the bloke pitched a fit if he didn’t get a fist full of junk food every few days and I watched with unmasked distress as a frail old chap effectively demolished a family bucket of mechanically recovered chicken.

Now I realise why. Bustin’ out of the hospital in that mobility chariot to get those bits o’ fowl must have made him feel like Steve McQueen jumping the wire in The Great Escape and actually making it to Swizerland.