Monday, January 14, 2008

Food and Place, volume 11 (Hospital Fare)

(Note: This is a something of a warm-up blog entry. I’m just pitching simulated games here in the bullpen while on the DL. The TFIM team doctors say I’m not quite 100%. I tell them I never was.)

Tapioca

The quintessential hospital food is tapioca pudding. I don’t believe I have ever encountered tapioca pudding outside a hospital.* In the latest instance (which I hope will be the last for a very long time) it was hidden beneath a generous heap of whipped cream, so I’d taken a couple of bites before I realized it was the dreaded tapioca.

I have always hated tapioca pudding. It looks like it's staring back at you. Or like it's not quite done yet -- an unbaked cake. I understand why hospital kitchens favor it because it fits into any of a number of enticingly-named special diets: the bland diet, the soft diet, etc. But, please!



* Except perhaps in a prison.

4 comments:

  1. Tapioca
    Crappy Joke ughh.

    (A very, very short poem)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Welcome back!

    When your kids were little and sick, did the doctor ever prescribe the BRAT diet, which one doctor described to me as, "Um, rice, bananas, toast, and, um, applesauce...No, wait..."

    Should you trust a doctor who can't even figure out an acronym?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Welcome back, Jim.
    Why is it that doctors recommend the most unpalatable foods to us when we are sick? A bland pudding made with what appear to be frog eggs is the last thing you want to find under mounds of whipped cream.

    Glad to hear you are on your way back to normal and looking forward to new posts.

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete

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