Professor Tim Lang backs hospital food campaign

In a foreword to a new report from Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, the City University academic says: "I can think of no other organisations where it is more important to serve healthy, wholesome food than in our hospitals. It is important in so many ways – to the recovery of patients, to staff morale and to the atmosphere that fills the wards. When hospitals serve good food, everyone benefits. "While this is obvious, hospital food also has an important role to play in leading by example to improve the ethical standard of food we consume in the UK and supporting a shift towards a more sustainable diet. "Hospitals are a huge purchaser of food. In total more than 330 million meals are served in the NHS each year. This food has the capacity to change consumer behaviour outside the NHS by demonstrating to hospital patients, staff and visitors what a sustainable diet looks like. "It also has the capacity to support British farmers' move to more environmentally friendly production methods by giving them a market for good food. "At the present time, hospital food does not take account of a number of environmental problems that it contributes to causing. For example, the production of this food is dependent on oil, which is itself in finite supply. "It also relies on 'embedded water' which is contained in food and is subject to global water shortages that are already occurring. "Government must take responsibility for ensuring that the health and ethical hazards of food served in hospitals has been removed before it is served to patients. "The only way it can do this is to introduce legal health and environmental standards for hospital food so that patients throughout the country are assured that it is healthy to eat and has been produced in a way that works in harmony with the planet." The foreword introduces a new report, titled 'Yet More Hospital Food Failure', which claims that the Government was spent £54 million on failed voluntary initiatives to improve hospital food. Sustain launched a campaign on the back of report called 'A Decade of Hospital Food Failure', which it published in December 2009. The campaign is called 'Good Food for Our Money' and it urges the Government to abandon voluntary initiatives in favour of legally binding standards for hospital food. It has since followed up its original report with the updated 'Yet More Hospital Food Failure' report, which was published in March.