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“Our management team has recently eaten hospital food for a week and agrees with your observation that we need to improve the presentation and taste.”

Concerns about hospital food are not new or unique to The Ottawa Hospital. It has long been a kind of punchline of the food world, renowned for its blandness and, at times, its sheer awfulness.

Gillian Wallace, who wrote to Kitts asking him to do something about the food, said a friend recently referred to the eggs her husband was served in the hospital as “the yellow puck of sadness.”

Photo by Errol McGihon / Postmedia

That comment, she said, brought back to her all of her own experiences with hospital food, both as a patient and as a friend and supporter of patients.

Once, after surgery, she was visited by a doctor who asked how her appetite was. “Very bad,” she said, lifting the dome to reveal the meal on her bedside tray. “Don’t eat that sh–,” she says he replied. “Get your husband to bring you some food.”

Kevin Peters, director of Food Services, said The Ottawa Hospital is in the midst of a major shift in its patient food services to make it more modern.

Getting food managers to eat three meals of hospital food a day for a week, he said, brought the point home that much of the food being served was bland, institutional and not what people would normally eat.

All the feedback wasn’t negative though, he said. “We had some great things that I still think are good. The lasagna is actually pretty good.”

But the future of hospital food, he said, will be different, although change won’t happen overnight. The hospital makes one million meals a year for 1,000 patients a day, many of whom are on special diets. Hospital food can be complicated.