There was a time when feeding a sick person meant cooking for them.
Broth simmered from bones and meat.
Porridge. Eggs. Stewed fruit. Milk. Custard. Cooked vegetables. Potatoes. Meat or fish. Bread and butter.
Nothing particularly fashionable or labelled a superfood. Just simple food, prepared from recognisable ingredients, with the understanding that a recovering body needed nourishment.

Walk through a modern hospital food service and the contrast can be striking.

Individual tubs of yoghurt (often full of sugar), packaged cereal, portion-controlled butter and spreads, biscuits in plastic wrappers, juice cups, desserts in tubs. Pre-prepared meals, individually packaged condiments, shelf-stable products designed to survive storage, transport and large-scale food service.

Why?

We like to imagine that every decision made inside a hospital is primarily a health decision.

But hospitals have budgets, staffing constraints, food-safety requirements, storage limitations, procurement contracts and thousands of meals to deliver reliably every day.

Centralised and pre-prepared food can mean fewer kitchen staff, less on-site preparation, smaller production kitchens, predictable portion sizes, longer storage, less waste and easier distribution.

And ultimately, convenience and cost win.

It does raise a much bigger question: “When did feeding the sick become primarily a logistics problem?”

Illness and recovery are metabolically demanding. The body needs protein, minerals, vitamins, fats, carbohydrates, fluids and sufficient energy. Digestion itself is part of the equation. Food is not simply a collection of nutrient numbers that can be achieved by assembling enough fortified and portion-controlled products on a tray.

There is something fundamentally different about a bowl of porridge with butter made that morning, vegetables that have actually been cooked, freshly prepared meat, stewed fruit and a simple homemade custard.

And hospitals are really just a magnified version of what has happened in our homes. We are busy, fresh food has become expensive. Cooking creates dishes – that requires time. Children need to get somewhere. So the same forces win: cost + convenience + shelf life.

And gradually packaged food stops being the emergency option and becomes the everyday diet.

We spend enormous amounts of public money trying to intervene after health has deteriorated. What would happen if we invested much further upstream?
Imagine making locally grown vegetables, fruit, eggs, meat, fish and other basic whole foods substantially more affordable. Imagine supporting community kitchens and school cooking.
Imagine hospitals with properly staffed kitchens where preparing fresh food was regarded as part of patient care rather than merely another cost centre.

Imagine making it economically easier for a family to cook dinner from ingredients than to buy an ultra-processed alternative.

Instead of subsidising big pharma!
Subsidise real food.
Subsidise farmers.
Subsidise cooking.
Subsidise nourishment.

I would rather see substantially more public-health money directed toward making fresh food accessible to every Australian family than simply adding another free flu vaccination campaign.

Because health doesn’t begin when someone rolls up their sleeve.

It begins, repeatedly, at the kitchen table.

But wait, it wouldn’t create customers… Our world is one big business model at the moment.