For a German Chef, Hospital Food Is the Ultimate Challenge
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
I would not expect much bean counting here besides scientific studies and their results:
The hospital is part of Charite[1] and as such has the status of a research/university hospital and an anthroposophic[2] orientation in which food arguably plays a role beyond what is scientifically proven.
I also have to say that I did spend quite some time in German hospitals and my rule of thumb: The bigger the hospital, the better the food. Never was it as a bad as the regular in-flight meals in cattle class.
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?
If memory serves, $11 dollars is roughly twice what a single meal is allowed to cost at a German university cafeteria. This is considerably cheaper than a typical restaurant meal.
That being said, I think you did point out something interesting - the pricing and food quality doesnt vary much between different schools in similar situations (markets/locations). In what I've seen, this is because most of these are run by the same big corporate chains - Sodexo or similar.
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.
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.
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.)
I knew the chef at a previous employer, he used to like to make bets with people, “I bet you can’t eat £1 worth of food”.
He always won because at catering rates an egg was 2p and a rasher of bacon 1p. The money goes on labour and facilities, the cost of the actual food is a rounding error.
I was riveted by an interview with a 5-star chef that decided to fix public school lunches. She's as much an engineer and accountant and diplomat and project manager as a chef. How she repeatedly figured out how to make healthy, fresh meals that kids loved is testament to humanity ingenuity and can-do attitude.
For instance, to stretch their food budget, they'd buy apples in season and store them in leased fridges.
Sorry, I can't quickly refind the interview. IRCC, it was on Chow food network (?) and the chef moved from NYC to Portland OR.
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.
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.