
For a German Chef, Hospital Food Is the Ultimate Challenge - NaOH
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/world/europe/germany-chef-hospital-food.html
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gmueckl
Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a
challenge that few kitchens seem to master. The spectrum is surprisingly wide.
Some fail utterly while others produce decent fare on a comparable scale and
budget. Hospital food and university cafeterias in Germany are pretty
comparable in that each have similar budgets per person.

The worst offender that I encountered was a kitchen that only had a very
limited set of standard dishes and they still predictable failed to prepare
them in exactly the same way each time. Some meals were charred black when
they were supposed to be lightly fried, the pizzas had an inedible crust hard
as concrete, and so on. And that went on for years...

I also wonder how long the increase in quality in Havelhöhe can last before
some beancounter sweeps in and turns the system on its head again based on
some pretext. I hope that this never happens, but reality has a way of
throwing a wrench into the works every time.

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leetcrew
> Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a
> challenge that few kitchens seem to master.

the part that confuses me here is the "on a budget part". i attended two very
different schools for undergrad, but the meal plan pricing and food quality
was very similar. when divided by the total number of swipes, meal plans at
both schools cost about $11-13 per meal. the food was not inedible, but it was
far worse than an $11 meal would be pretty much anywhere else. both schools
offered a la carte cafes run or chains that would take cash and charge about
half that for a filling meal that was much tastier (and was able to
accommodate pretty much any allergy or dietary restriction).

the universities will always say something like it costs extra to be make
enough food to feed everyone without knowing who will dine there on a given
day, but don't all restaurants face that problem to an extent? is there some
genuine reason why it has to be so expensive/bad, or are they all just taking
advantage of the mandatory freshman meal plan to subsidize other parts of
operation?

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analog31
The extra cost may be due to labor if the university is unionized.

The college cafeteria has to deal with, at least, the intention or pretense of
making something nutritious, but also that people will actually eat. K-12
school lunch programs face this problem too: Kids won't eat healthy food.

But yes, even when I was in college 30 years ago, some students figured out
that paying cash at the cafeteria was cheaper than the meal plan, and they
raised a stink about it.

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scythe
Making nutritious food that tastes good on a budget just requires compromise.
Fatty meats are cheap and tasty, but they're not great for you. Legumes are
cheap and healthy, but most people don't find them very exciting. If you use
both, you get something better.

America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route, which results
in many meals which are barely cheap and not good. Of course, my culinary
opinion is based on my personal taste preferences. But I mean, like, burritos.

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thaumasiotes
> America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route

I'm constantly complaining to my family that meat here (in the US... more
precisely, the Bay Area) isn't tough enough. They tell me I'm weird, and meat
in the US is soft because that's how Americans like it.

(Lest the phrasing confuse people, all of us are Americans.)

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clay_the_ripper
This is really cool. I wonder how it could be scaled up to make it easier for
organizations that can’t get a chef like this to do something similar? His
process was pretty custom (parenting with people he knew from his career as an
haute cuisine chef and making gourmet food from scratch) that would be
difficult to replicate, but if he could systematize this in some way that
would be an amazing win for large organizations (dorm cafeterias, hospitals,
schools etc). Given what we know about nutrition and the importance of fresh,
high quality food and it’s role in all aspects of health, it’s high time that
hostpitals (and everyone else) serve better, healthier food.

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surgeryres
Concerned about the decrease in meat, and ultimately protein in the diet. His
meals only serve meat three times a week? For a surgical patient trying to
heal their wounds, a decrease in protein content is the last thing they need.

~~~
distances
Perhaps meat three times a week shouldn't be a decrease to start with?

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kondro
Not to cheapen the work that Wodni's accomplished, but I imagine a very large
part of the reason why this has worked is because a talented, passionate chef
has decided to work in a hospital, rather than achieve notoriety and fortune
running a high-end restaurant.

The average person choosing to work in institutional kitchen is not one that
is looking to make a difference… they're looking to make ends meet.

This is scalable only if they managed to encourage more talented individuals
to choose institutional kitchens over commercial ones.

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solatic
> This is scalable only if they managed to encourage more talented individuals
> to choose institutional kitchens over commercial ones.

I'm not convinced that this is as difficult as you make out. Commercial
kitchens don't usually pay very high salaries, but there is a social status
achieved by working for a top-end restaurant. Large-kitchen institutions may
not be able to compete on either, but their longevity (compared to restaurants
which come and go) allows them to invest in people, taking interested low-
skill candidates and bringing them up through a kitchen's roles in a
predictable way, including possibly financing culinary degrees for people
working their way up.

It's not like Wodni is doing something particularly different (? for lack of a
better word) here. Instead of buying from low-quality suppliers whose prices
were higher for ensuring consistency at wholesale scale, he bought from a
multitude of high-quality suppliers at wholesale market rate. He then, using
experience and education, adapted to the differences in inventory that come
with working with small-scale suppliers, while ensuring that his budget was
efficiently utilized by not wasting anything (e.g. saving fish bones for stock
instead of buying fish stock from a supplier). Yes, that requires education
and experience to do and do well, but I don't see why more institutions
couldn't invest in more people to get that education and experience.

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gaius
Last time I was in hospital I was dreading the food but it was in fact amazing
and came with a pamphlet explaining how they configured each meal specifically
for whatever was wrong with each patient. This was my local NHS.

