MSKCC's main campus hospital menu says on its front something like "gourmet selections created by our chefs for your meals."
As a foodie, I kept wondering where *those* meals were going.
MSKCC offers vegetarian, certified Kosher, certified Halal (Muslim), and the standard array of low residue, cardiac healthy, low salt/low sugar and other menus from which to choose. Certain things are on all of them - the clears (broths, lemon/orange/cherry ices - the real things from Brooklyn!, jello, coffee, tea, juices); the soft/semi-soft (scrambled eggs - I'd have killed for a poached egg!, mashed potatoes, cream of wheat, cottage cheese, fruit purees like applesauce, pudding); and a couple basic entrees like fish (yes, real fish!), chicken in various forms, spaghetti with meat sauce, a hamburger.
I expect that the people who were on less restricted diets got wider choices - for most of my 27 days in hospital during April, 2008, I was on either NPO (nothing by mouth, not even ice chips), clears, soft foods or low-residue. For part of my stay I was allowed to choose my own low-residue items from the full menu, but I had it for such a short time I didn't have time to memorize it.
I do remember being able to get grilled salmon with lemon butter that was decent if overcooked, and that the spaghetti with meat sauce tasted really good. The mashed potatoes were liveable as was the cream of wheat - but I learned that I could doctor both of those up with extra butter and half and half to make them taste like something...anything.
I would always order eggs and bacon for breakfast but quickly went to hardboiled eggs because everything else was the pasteurized liquid eggs that, to me, taste funny. The fruit purees - especially things like peach-apple, were refreshing, and ordering at least one or two ices a day so that I could stockpile them for snacks in the floor freezer was a given. The hamburger I ordered once was a hockey puck (they did, btw, offer boca burgers, too.) But the salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy and stewed tomatoes with green chiles on the side was good, really good.
You ordered meals every morning for the next day - so if you were admitted up to the floor during the day, for that day you got the "standard menu choice." One day that *was* a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, and it smelled great - but my brother ate it because I was on high-dose pain meds and antibiotics and slept right through lunch. I think for dinner he brought me in some matzoh ball soup from the diner around the corner on 1st and 69th.
MSKCC is a lot different from our upstate hospitals, Eric. For one thing, they are far more culturally diverse - and the hospital staff recognizes that bringing in food and having family in the room all the time is culturally appropriate behavior. Unless you were on NPO dietary restrictions, there wasn't much fuss if people brought stuff in for you...thus, the matzoh ball soup (which my brother brough me regularly because the hospital chicken soup was yucky.) I had one roommate whose church brough her in their Friday night curried goat dinner. Seriously. You can't make that kind of stuff up.
But FWIW - the times I've been in Crouse in Syracuse, the food has been fine. Of course, I wasn't in there for gastro issues, so I wasn't on any kind of restricted diet. Again with the salmon, and the salisbury steak was fine, and there, I actually could get poached eggs. They also had a pretty good vegetable lasagne...come to think of it, it was probably Stouffers. My single memory of food in Crouse was of being NPO for about 28 hours to have various tests, including an esophageal echo, and my PCP walked into my room eating a donut. I haven't ever really let him forget that - he's a serious junk food junkie, rail thin, and deserves all the kidding about that that I can find.
I don't even try to be pescatarian in the hospital unless I think asking for a special diet menu will get me fresher or more personally prepared food. In MSKCC, that's not the case because even their kosher kitchen turns out something like 8000 meals every day. So if it's bacon that will get me up and out of there, bring it on.