A 16 January 2011 NY Times article entitled ‘Tiniest patients discover meals made to order‘ underscores several points made in Social Role Valorization and the PASSING manual. The article describes recent efforts at improving hospital food: hiring highly trained chefs, offering room service-type flexibility, duplicating patients’ favorite recipes, and so on.
Meals and food are so important to us for a variety of reasons, and even more so when we are sick. Meals of course fill a biological need for food (cf. PASSING manual, R231 service address of recipient needs) but can do so much more: help to make us happy and more comfortable (cf. PASSING manual, R213 physical comfort of setting); bring back memories of good times, family and holidays; bring us together with our family and friends; and so on.
We all have favorite foods and preferences. The article describes efforts to bend over backward to accommodate patient meal preferences (cf. conservatism corollary of SRV; see also PASSING manual, R224 service support for recipient individualization and R133 promotion of recipient autonomy and rights):
• “So Pnina Peled, the executive chef at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, makes Julien his beloved shrimp scampi with Promise, a butter substitute, and eggplant Parmesan using egg whites, whole-wheat bread crumbs and soy cheese … After he rejected the hospital’s whole-wheat ravioli, she hauled her pasta maker on the subway from Brooklyn to roll out a handmade version. ‘She came in on her day off with a stack of cookbooks and sat with us to come up with a menu for him,’ Julien’s mother, Jacqueline Collot, said …”
• ” ‘There’s no substitute for a good diet, and appetizing food can make all the difference,’ said Dr. Susan Prockop, a pediatric oncologist at Sloan-Kettering, noting that eating well can speed recovery and keep patients off intravenous nutrition.”
• “Enter Chef Peled or one of her three sous-chefs, who spend an hour each afternoon meeting with pediatric patients and their parents to discuss food preferences. (Adult patients at Sloan-Kettering can also make personalized requests …”