Care home food

The food that my late mother's care home provided was lovely.

Breakfasts - a huge choice of cereals, porridge, bread/toast, yogurt, fruit and juices

Lunch - freshly cooked with vegetables and a pudding

Dinner - a buffet that my mother absolutely loved with traditional tea items such as sandwiches, scones, sweet and savoury pastries, cakes, always a fruit bowl or platter and hot dishes such as quiche, hot vol au vents or macaroni cheese etc

Since most people are choosing to go/being put into care homes very late on, it's unsurprising if some like stodgy or comfort food. I think it'll change as the current 50-70 year olds go in with a wider knowledge of food cooked at home or experienced at restaurants here and abroad. And the fact we know more now about nutrition and love our salads. Doesn't mean to say a good rice pudding or steamed something isn't welcome - but not as daily fare.

Who on Earth thinks that constipation can't be affected through diet is sorely mistaken. Yes of course pain relief can cause it too, but so can too much fatty stodgy foods, it literally stodges up in your guts, especially if its a drastic change! x

Hope you get the food situation sorted. I'm very fussy, not through choice, but because I also get severe migraines with heavy fatty foods. x

I once worked as a cook in a nursing home. It was difficult to say the least because of financial restraints, but I spoke to all the residents and found out what they liked.
Almost unanimously they wanted traditional British stodge!
They wouldn’t look at fresh fruit, so I made smoothies which they loved.
Vegetables were preferred over-cooked, but puréed lightly-cooked veg seemed acceptable. I suppose that badly fitting dentures and swallowing problems were the cause of these difficulties.
Every week there were complaints if we didn’t have shepherds pie followed by rice pudding, but surprisingly, a good curry was popular.
The main thing was cake. Cake every day was essential, or there would have been mutiny! It was also a good opportunity to sneak in some dried fruit and AllBran. .
I really enjoyed my time as a cook - I’m a trained nurse, but cooking has always been the second string to my bow when I felt an attack of ‘burn-out’ threatening.
Bijou I’m so sorry that you have drawn the short straw as regards the food you are being offered. Please do complain and insist that you are fed meals which are at least reasonably appetising. The money the owners charge, the least they can do is feed their patients properly!

Glad you know your own body Bijou so you recognise problems .The trouble with the NHS /Care homes is one size fits all which is true and once you are over a certain age they do not listen to you .My late mother was in hospital and went back to her superb care home in a worse state than she went in .She was partly sited so could not see to get her food and needed help to cut it up .Also did not drink enough could not pour the water ..When she was dying we were asked did we want her to go to hospital and no we did not the care she got in the care home was brilliant to the end ..Mind you we were brought up to eat stoge to fill us up as fruit was expensive and there is so much choice now Hope you get home soon and be active again

I like 'stodge* but try not to eat it!
, puddings - lovely.
But I can't remember the last time I ate any.

sodapop...I didn't say all elderly people prefer stodge. I said elderly people USUALLY prefer cakes etc. As someone who has worked in the care sector for many years (and now I run a day centre), I have found that to be the case (in most cases, not all)

It is also because big companies like Carillion, competing for these out sourced functions. The prices they bid meant the average daily food spend is pennies rather than £s and all they could afford were over processed denatured foods made from corn starch.

In care homes it is local authorities reducing the fees they will pay to care homes to such a low level they are only cover half of the actual cost of the care supplied. So cheap food and tiny portions.

In hospital in France my biggest shock was the food. It was disgusting.
The surgeon said that I had to be eating normally before I would be allowed home. I put him straight in no uncertain manner and told him to try one of the meals himself.
He just laughed and turned his nose up.

I don't accept the economy argument. I think it's more to do with poorly skilled and paid catering staff and lack of imagination. I eat a mostly plant-based diet and try to eat what's in season. Vegetables are cheap and delicious.

Most of the household-named chefs have published a vegetarian recipe book at some point. There are thousands of delicious meals to be made with a few veg and some herbs and spices. That a hospital or care home can't whip up a hearty and nutritious soup or stew is incredible.

I had a short hospital stay recently and was served a tiny dry cheese sandwich for lunch, a small plain jacket potato for supper and toast for breakfast. Not a piece of fruit or vegetable other than the spud, not even a salad garnish. As I had had to fast before the operation I was starving. Had I had to stay longer I would have been sending out for Deliveroo.

I think that was the company who supplied the food that I was offered, sweetcakes. I know hospitals are not hotels, and they can't offer haute cuisine, but it can't be too difficult to arrange decently cooked vegetables and food that looks appetising to encourage recovery. School meals when I was a child were wonderful - everything produced in the kitchen from scratch, and consequently fresh and tasty. I worked at a school before retiring and the same situation applied there; the food was extremely good. It can be done - but sadly market forces come into play and it's a case of get the cheapest ingredients that you can and to hell with the end result.

When I was in hospital before I left a woman knocked asked if I would do a survey on the food that I had that week ? so pleased to have helped after I had finished she was under no illusion that I was disgusted with it I think the firm was called appertito or something like that! They provided the meals.

Irishlady's story is what most terrifies me about being in care.

Before I retired I was a checkout operator in a large supermarket. Every Friday two men would come in to do their shopping. They each had a large trolley filled to the brim. One day they came through my checkout. Nearly every item in the trolleys was from the stores Value range, this included, value frozen mince, value sausages, value white bread, value margarine etc. I would guess that about 70% of the food was frozen. I never saw any fresh fruit or veg. They paid with a company cheque which had the name of a care home on the front. It made me wonder how many times that was replicated throughout the country.

I agree with grannyactivist. You should be getting your pain medication as ordered, and certainly not have to ask for it as if you are being difficult! Have a talk with the Sister in charge.

I am not remotely fussy with food and will eat almost anything put in front of me. When I was in hospital for 10 days last year the food was so diabolical I could only eat jelly (no added sugar so chemical flavoured), soup, served in a small pot, less than a cupful with no bread, and something called ice cream on the pot but was more like Tesco value mousse. I tried the fish and chips but could not even get the knife into the fish and the chips were so dry I had to drink water to moisten it enough to swallow. I know they are having difficulty making ends meet but there was no excuse for this. I would have loved some well cooked stodgy pudd and custard at the time.

annifrance - maybe it depends what part of France you live in.
When in hospital for a few days last Oct. I asked for no meat meals.
Most days I was given veg soup, fried fish (not too bad) with a large pile of some kind of pasta. But always a good fresh vegetable side dish and a piece of fruit for dessert. Plus a yoghurt.
I had a wonderful rest there, and it was great not to have to plan shop for and cook all the meals.

Complain...refuse to eat the rubbish they are serving... wishing you a speedy recovery x

I thought NHS food was the pits, until I tried the French!!! It's absolutely awful and inedible. This from the country famous for its cuisine. I now insist OH brings in meals!

I was recently in hospital for 8 weeks after two ops. The food was typical stodgy, and as I was in a London hospital ( and no family could visit regularly due to distance) I had no choice but to eat the offerings!
In the end one of the reasons I was discharged (although still not really well) was that I stopped eating?
like Bijou I cook healthy veg based food at home. I am a vegetarian and my diet is varied, and vegetable and tofu based. the hospital had very little that I could eat?

Many old people can't chew or swallow well hence the rather soppy type of food. And a lot off the menus are geared to what they would have enjoyed in their younger days. Friends have a joke that for us it will be pizza, spag bol, lasagne, choc brownies, profiteroles. Speedy recovery.

Perhaps some of the residents need stodge to build them up.

I wonder if they think that many of their older residents are traditional in their tastes? Perhaps it's a battle to get some of them to actually eat anything at all, let alone anything unfamiliar. My parents never ate what they called 'foreign muck' and didn't know what they were missing.

Presumably they have a lot of older people, and they think that's what they want, old-fashioned food.

In hospital recently I was handed an illustrated menu; the food looked so appetising and I asked the nurse if it was as good as it looked. She paused and said 'Sometimes'.

Mine was just an overnight stay, luckily, as the vegetable quiche was pretty inedible and it all seemed to follow the usual route, as described by the OP, of mass catering. Had I been ill I would have asked the family to bring healthy eats in. What a pity - you must need good food to help recovery, Bijou. all the best for your quick return to health, and I would certainly speak up .