Menu

I go to eat at the hospital cafeteria on Friday night and stare at the entree choices, which are lasagna, deep fried shrimp, and deep fried wing dings. Our hospital is kind or sadistic enough to list the nutritional content of them, so, theoretically, we can make healthy choices. The lasagna and shrimp both have pretty high fat contents, with the number of calories from fat hovering in the neighborhood of 50%. The wing dings, though, those fried chicken wings that are mostly fat, skin, and bone, take the cake, so to speak, with nearly 1,000 calories per serving and somewhere around 70% of them from fat. Good grief, why don't they just do a cardiac cath and inject a french fry directly into our coronary arteries?

There's an article in the December Pediatrics journal about fast food in children's hospitals. Interestingly enough, fast food restaurants are found in 29.5% of hospitals with pediatric residency programs. People who went to a hospital with a fast food restaurant in it were more likely to eat fast food, and not surprisingly the article takes a dim view of this, noting the increasing rates of obesity in America and the less than stellar nutritional value of fast food.

My point, though, is this: Who needs fast food restaurants in hospitals when you've got cafeterias like ours? Some days the meals we serve are worse than the choices in fast food restaurants. At least fast food restaurants usually have one healthy choice or so; our cafeteria sometimes has none - witness the above menu. (Somedays, when they don't have wing dings, they list french fried onion rings as an entree. An entree?)

It shouldn't surprise me too much. The cafeteria is just trying to please its customers, to sell those products that sell well, and believe me, those orders of wing dings and fries fly off the shelf like hot cakes. We are a hospital, though, and don't we have some responsibility to keep people within our walls healthy? I guess it's not surprising to me that our cafeteria sells food that's not particularly good for you; that's just life in the U.S.A. What gets me is that it serves food that is so spectacularly bad for you.

In closing, I note that my computer's home page has an article about a restaurant called the Heart Attack Grill. It's menu includes items such as the Quadruple Bypass Burger and Flatliner Fries, and, in the piece de resistance, the waitresses wear "naughty nurse" costumes featuring plenty of leg and cleavage. Nursing groups have complained about the image portrayed. Hmmm...would it offend anyone if I said I wanted to go there for dinner?