Join internal medicine and rheumatology specialist Siobhan Deshauer, MD, and her husband as they tour the food services department in a hospital.
Following is a partial transcript (note that errors are possible):
Deshauer: Hey, guys. I'm Siobhan.
Mark: And I'm Mark.
Deshauer: We're both doctors and today we're trying hospital food for the first time. What are your expectations?
Mark: You know, they're pretty high. The patients have been pretty positive about the food here so I'm excited to check it out.
Deshauer: Okay. He is going with high expectations. I'm going in with low expectations. Like, you always hear hospital food is no good, so let's see where it lands.
Mark: And we're also very picky eaters. So, I don't eat any gluten. She doesn't eat any dairy. And I was really surprised they actually have full menus. This is a full gluten-free menu.
Deshauer: Right?! Like this is already beyond my expectations. This looks great. All right. Let's head over to Food Services. I don't think... I have never been there in the hospital before. Have you?
Mark: No. It's a new adventure.
Deshauer: Okay. Mark has got a little bit of a special request.
Mark: Well, I know the patients sometimes will have thickened coffee if they have problems swallowing, but they still need to get their caffeine in the morning, so I'm going to give that a try. We'll see how it goes.
Deshauer: Oh, I love this. "Mark, YOUTUBE." But before we chow down on this feast, let's first see what happens behind the scenes to feed over 250 people in the hospital every day. I was really surprised to learn that someone actually goes around with an iPad to take meal orders for every patient in the hospital, more like a restaurant. I've never seen that before and they even have a built-in carb tracker to help diabetic patients make healthy choices.
Jennifer: It's just nice to give people options.
Deshauer: It's so personal.
Jennifer: It is.
Deshauer: I don't think I have seen that in other hospitals. Like this seems different to me. I like that a lot.
Jennifer: We get that. Sometimes people will come from Sudbury or Toronto and they're like, "Oh my God. I have more than two options?"
Deshauer: And this is the amount of carbs that they allowed.
Jennifer: Yep. Once we go over, it will turn red, so we're at our max. If I threw another juice on there, then that's telling us he is over his limit for carbs for breakfast or lunch.
Deshauer: Next comes all the food preparation. This is just one of the 28 entree options patients get to choose from. Once the plate has been assembled, it gets sealed and it's kept cold until meal time. And voila! You can see there is a valve on the top to let out the steam when it heats up to prevent the food from getting soggy. So I hear that there is a serious sandwich-making line here. How many sandwiches do you guys think you make in a day?
Amanda: 250.
Deshauer: 250?! Holy mackerel.
Amanda: Yeah. We want to have a bit of variety.
Mark: Wow.
Deshauer: Now, here is the question. Do you ever want to go home and eat a sandwich or...?
Amanda: No.
Deshauer: As you might imagine, there are huge walk-in fridges and freezers to store and organize all this food.
Jennifer: Here we keep all of our plated meals. This is the bottom pile.
Mark: Oh, it's cold in here. I feel like I'm getting cryotherapy.
Jennifer: Yeah. We can go into an even colder room. It's like minus 18.
Deshauer: Ooh.
Mark: You can pay a lot of money to go into these freezers, right?
Jennifer: It's therapy.
Mark: Professional athletes do this, right?
Jennifer: Absolutely.
Deshauer: After you.
Mark: Wow. I wouldn't last in here very long.
Deshauer: Oh my God. Okay. It's freezing. True Canadian style. So much pumpkin. Boom, mandarin. Mandarin oranges. Some serious organization. Now I know where to come if we get hungry. No, just joking. All right, now it's time for breakfast.
Each tray of food is slightly different based on the patient's food preferences and their medical condition. I was surprised to learn that they actually measured the temperature of every single meal before serving it.
Jennifer: It's good. 77/78.
Deshauer: We have spied the gluten-free toaster. Finally, it's time to deliver the food while it's still hot. I thought I walked around the hospital a lot, but it's nothing compared to Jennifer who gets around 20,000 steps per day delivering food and picking up trays after meals.
Jennifer: My favorite.
Mark: Oh yeah. You get to know the patients, right, hopefully? Yeah.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Mark: Good morning. Jennifer from Food Services.
Deshauer: It's so lovely to see how Jennifer has built a relationship with patients, especially those who have been in the hospital for an extended period of time. She knows all their favorite foods.
Jennifer: They become like family to us, so it's really hard when they do leave like whether they go to a retirement home or back home. It's...yeah.
Deshauer: All right. Now that breakfast is done, it's time for cleanup duty. It's actually kind of cool because the hospital is designed so that you have like service hallways so all this happens... we're behind the scenes. You don't run into patients or anything.
Jennifer: Put that up the dish pit.
Deshauer: What's the dish pit?
Jennifer: It's our dish room where we wash our dishes.
Deshauer: Wait.
Jennifer: It's huge.
Mark: Whoa.
Deshauer: This is a dishwasher?
Mark: Wow.
Deshauer: Holy mackerel. This is the dish pit. The team comes together after each meal to clean and sterilize everything from tray carts to reusable dishes and cutlery. This is definitely the biggest dishwasher I have ever seen in my life. You can see how extra food gets washed off and mulched up into the garbage and then the dishes go through the enormous dishwasher. Even with all this equipment, it's a very physical job.
Mark: So guys, being in a hospital we have a lot of multi-drug resistant bugs going around, so it's so important that they're sanitizing everything. It's going to different wards so we prevent cross-contamination.
Jennifer: Okay. I'm going to head out and get some orders from patients.
Deshauer: Now as the team moves on to prepare lunch, it's finally time for Mark and I to start our taste testing. Today we're trying the scrambled eggs, omelette, minced chicken and veggies, chana masala, shepherd's pie, vegetarian chili, tilapia with butternut squash, and some various thickened fluids.
Siobhan Deshauer, MD, is an internal medicine resident in Toronto. Before medicine, she was a violinist, which is why her YouTube channel is called Violin MD.