Some bright spark at Mater Dei has decided that the time’s up for normal food. Full-fat cheese, sweet and savoury pastries, chocolate, sweets, fruit juices, and all manner of creamy stuff will be banned under a new regime that includes both patients and visitors, and both the hospital kitchens and the private food shops on site. Pastizzi in particular have been singled out for public vilification and exile.
In their place will swan in couscous, bulgur wheat, quinoa, wholegrain cereals, low-salt frozen vegetables and salads made from at least three different vegetables. I’d say this was nuts, except nuts too will be banned.
There is so much more to food than nutritional content and health-risk indexes. To value, say, pastizzi in terms of the fat and salt they contain, and the Omega-3 they don’t contain, is to miss the point entirely.
By which I mean the point of life, not of pastizzi. Pastizzi, and doughnuts, and cream cakes, and all the things on the list of prohibited foods at Mater Dei, were invented for a reason: they taste good to some. Unlike houseflies, which throw up saliva on their meal and lap it back up plus the nutrients, people have a way with food. Unless they’re exceptionally philistine, they tend to derive pleasure from eating. The reason why, say, supermarkets stock more than one type of cheese, is that different people derive pleasure from different foods. If cheese counters all just sold cheddar, we’d end up with happy cheddar-lovers and unhappy all the rest. The point, and it is hardly astonishing, is that there is a strong aesthetic side to food.
READ: Mater Dei to ban pastizzi and junk food
Some will say that hospital is no place for food aesthetics, and that gourmands might consider going to a restaurant instead. The truth is the exact opposite. In hospital, food that gives pleasure is also therapeutic. It is actually part of the process of recovery.
I have some (thankfully) limited personal experience of this. Last August, I found myself at Mater Dei for a minor knee operation. Anaesthetic being what it is, I came round feeling swollen, bloodied and miserable. Two things came to my rescue. The first was the exceptional bedside manner of the nurses and doctors, the second a mirage of a slice of pizza on the food trolley.
Greasy and freakishly iridescent, it probably hadn’t been flown in from Naples. Nor did it appear to be bursting with nutritional bounty. But no pizza had ever tasted so good. It lifted my spirits to the extent that I soon found the strength to limp downstairs and buy myself two bags of choc chip cookies. The surgeon, a first-rate doctor by all accounts, found no traces of malnutrition when he visited the next day. On the contrary, he told me to pack my bags and hobble home.
Hospital should respect the fact that patients are adults
Now I’m aware that other people will have preferred the therapeutic effect of bulgur wheat, and others still that of lettuce salad with low-salt dressing. Fine by me, which is exactly why, the wider the choice, the better. Except the new food regime, in restricting that choice, does exactly the opposite.
Which brings me to the second argument, that from freedom of choice. I only gorged myself on cookies because I knew I was soon going back home to a more varied diet. Had I been in hospital for the long haul, I might have chosen the whole-grain pasta and unseasoned chicken. I’m an adult, you see, and I can choose what’s best for me.
I’m saying two things. First, that it makes perfect sense for the Mater Dei kitchens to offer healthy options. The last thing a hospital would wish to do is ruin the health of its long-term residents. Second, that hospital should respect the fact that patients and visitors are adults who are entitled to make choices as to what they want to eat. Increasingly, and on matters like divorce and abortion, people tend to argue that no one should be entitled to make choices on behalf of others. Funnily enough, that reasoning doesn’t seem to apply to hospital patients who might crave the occasional pastizz or cookie.
The one exception I can think of is that of child patients. When I was 10, I’d happily have subsisted on biscuits and sweets. Luckily for me, my mum was around to prevent that. I did get biscuits and sweets (and I hope child patients do, by some means or other), but I also had to eat other things. My mum’s reasoning was that I was a child and therefore in no position to be free to choose at all times. It’s that reasoning which strengthens my case for freedom of choice for adults.
There’s a third reason why the new regime is bananas (they’re kosher if low-salt, I’ve checked.) One of the things that hospitals try to avoid is what they call ‘over-medicalisation’. Put simply, it means that it helps the recovery process if hospitals do not feel more hospital-like than they need to. That’s why wards are hung with pretty pictures, religious images and such. It’s also why good staff will spend time talking to patients about things other than catheters and internal bleeding.
As far as possible, it benefits patients not to feel that they’ve been transported to a gigantic life-support machine. Healing is also about gentle transitions from and back to everyday life.
Most people do not eat chocolate and pastizzi for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Rather, they do so to individual routines. It makes sense for a good hospital to respect those routines, as opposed to imposing a regime that feels alien and disconnected from them.
Not least because the results are likely to be counter-productive. We’ve all heard about ‘l-ikel tal-isptar’ (hospital food), and about how discharged patients rush to the salt cellar to make up for days of privation. Chances are they’ll now be rushing to the chocolate, and the chips, and the fruit yoghurt, and the full-fat cheeses. I know I’d have sprinted to the pastizzeria, but for that miracle of a pizza.
There’s another thing, unsavoury even by the standards of quinoa salad. Many of us will have occasion to die in hospital. With the new regime in place, it’ll be a double death – biologically, and for a last piece of chocolate.
mafalzon@hotmail.com