When Jules Stephenson went into hospital, she thought her recovery might be slow but straightforward. The last thing she expected was that it would be hampered by the food she was offered on the ward.
“I was very surprised at how bad the food was. It wasn’t appetising,” she says. “I tried the jacket potato and it was cold. Then I tried the chicken potato-topped pie but the grease immediately put me off. The fish was undercooked.
“It was the same menu for lunch and dinner every day. Mostly, I had only cheese and crackers unless my family brought me something in.”
Ms Stephenson says that during her hospital stay of nearly eight weeks, she didn’t finish a hot meal.
“Apart from breakfasts, that is, as I didn’t want to sicken myself. I think there were a lot of complaints about the food. Even the nurses said to complain.”
The 50-year-old, from Tyne and Wear, believes her health would have improved sooner with better nutrition. “I didn’t always have an appetite. One nurse even said to me, ‘I feel awful giving you these meals’.”
While in opposition in 2018, Labour promised new laws to tackle bad hospital food with “mandatory minimum standards” after analysis found huge variations in spending on meals.
But eight years on, Ms Stephenson and other patients say poor-quality food is hampering their progress, leading to longer recovery times.
Kitchens often struggle to cater for special diets needed for medical reasons, and many patients rely on family members to take food in.
Meanwhile, rejected meals mean large amounts of food waste, which costs some NHS trusts tens of thousands of pounds each year.
In total, £1.7m worth of food in the NHS in England was thrown away a year, the latest figures show.
The amount that trusts disposed of rose by 8.5 per cent from 9,300 tonnes in 2022-23 to 10,100 tonnes in 2023-24.
Five years ago, NHS chiefs launched the NHS Chef programme to raise food standards through training and competitions for caterers, and the following year, all NHS organisations were issued with a set of food standards to aim for, including actively reducing food waste.
But NHS England statistics show that in the two years after that, the cost of meals uneaten rose by £600,000 – 13.6 per cent – from £1.1m worth in 2021-22 to an estimated £1.5m worth in 2022-23 and £1.7m worth in 2023-24.
Patients have told The Independent the food they had in hospital was stodgy, starchy, mushy or rubbery, with insufficient provision for people with particular needs, especially when meals are not prepared on site.
Writer Laura Abernethy, 33, from London, said the lack of high-quality nutrition had a huge impact on her health when she was in hospital to give birth to her son.
“I ended up eating a lot of very stodgy carbohydrate-heavy food with very little nutritious value and I felt much worse,” she said.
“I have an intolerance to tomatoes and any time I asked if something contained tomatoes, I was told they didn’t know and wouldn’t check because ‘it comes from a central kitchen’.
“A lot of the time, I went for a jacket potato with cheese because it was safe. The food itself was not very nutritious but mostly edible.”
Ms Abernethy said: “You had the choice of fruit or a low-fat yoghurt with each meal but they refused to let me have both. It seemed mad to restrict healthier items when you’re in hospital trying to get better.”
Experts say about half of UK hospitals outsource food preparation, and meals are better when hospitals employ catering staff directly.
Nutrition consultant Kate Arnold, from East Sussex, said: “Food waste is astronomical in the NHS, but is it any wonder when, apart from food safety and calorie content, no thought goes into the quality of food?
“When you serve ultra-processed beige pulp, we cannot expect clean plates. Decent food not only helps with morale but could help save the NHS money with speedier recoveries and faster patient turnarounds.
“In 30 years of being a nutritionist, I’ve seen little change, and it’s madness to continue down this path. Food needs to be consistently good to stop the waste.”
Meals should include more vegetables and soups made from scratch, she said.
When Nikki Knight’s eight-year-old son Toby was in hospital twice with leukaemia, he found the food unappetising and relied on snacks and takeaways his parents took in.
She said lasagne was dry and burnt, minced beef was greasy, mashed potatoes were rubbery, and pork was dry, even though it was in a sauce. On occasion, staff forgot to bring the food trolley to his ward, she claimed.
“Toby was delighted when he was transferred to Bristol Royal Hospital for Children because they have a kitchen on the paediatric oncology ward so children can choose whatever they like,” Ms Knight said.
Groups on social media dedicated to NHS food quality are filled with photographs of mushy, sloppy meals or small portions. One woman posted a photo of a single jacket potato with no filling or garnish that was offered to her daughter.
However, some trusts report a drop in the number of meals uneaten this year.
Claire Hill, a kitchen painter from Somerset, who spent three nights in Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton in October, said her experience was very good. “I was really impressed – there was lots of choice and it was appetising,” she said.
And it’s not just England and Wales. Tina Mur says whenever she is in hospital in Scotland, she loses weight because hospitals don’t provide healthy foods suitable for a stoma patient, so has to build herself back up again when back home.
“I have seen a lot of food being wasted as it’s very bland, rubbery and reheated too much.
“The toast is a standing joke in the wards – either only toasted on one side, or soggy and rubbery as it’s covered in foil and left. It’s standard processed white bread. I don’t eat the desserts as they are processed or ultra-processed corn, and full of sugar.”
She also asks family and friends to bring in food for her.
According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, which says every NHS patient produces half a kilogram of waste food each week, throwing away food wastes water and creates needless greenhouse gases.
NHS England encourages staff to try to avoid food waste, saying that carbon emissions generated through growing, transporting and preparing a meal are wasted when food is thrown away.
“Food that is not eaten also has no nutritional value and is not supporting a patient’s recovery,” it says.
But patients with specific needs say they are often not catered for.
Amy Appleby, who has coeliac disease, went hungry when she was in hospital for skin cancer care because there were no gluten-free options, and other patients were given “rubbery” cheese sandwiches made from white bread.
Ms Appleby, who runs a holistic wellbeing business in London, said fresh, healthy food was acutely important to patients for their recovery mentally and physically.
Overall food waste at NHS England rose from 8,500 tonnes in 2021-22 to an estimated 9,300 tonnes in 2022-23, to 10,100 tonnes in 2023-24.
An NHS spokesperson said: “All patients and staff deserve good quality food from hospitals, and the NHS has been working with partners to ensure food offered is nutritious and varied, while reducing food waste by improving waste monitoring, introducing better systems for patients and staff to order their food, and increasing the quality and standard of meals through the NHS Chef initiative.”
