My uncle has been in the hospital for several weeks. He has something called pancreatitis. I’ll leave out all of the gory details, because I know that no one really finds their ailments all that interesting except for the person who has them, and get to the good part. Over the weekend he was told he could actually start eating again. Now it’s been weeks, weeks I tell you of nothing, not even an ice chip to wet his palate, a little, slippery orb of frozen beverage was even too extreme for his delicate pancreas. Can you imagine? Obviously you can see what a difficult notion this would be for me.

So over the weekend he’s told that he will be trying a semi-restrictive, pureed diet. Hhhmm, a pureed diet, what exactly does the hospital mean, will he receive an entire spaghetti dinner pureed to pinkish hue and stuffed into his IV tube? What he got, only minutes after his new diet was announced was an entire Salisbury steak dinner, complete with peas, mashed potatoes, and some smooth, milky, maybe potato-y, possibly clam chowder-y (New England mind you) we’ll just call it Cream of ? soup. Now this might not seem remarkable to many of you, but remember, this meal was pureed, then pressed, molded, and formed back into its original state.

When I was a child I had entire fake food sets to play with. Heads of lettuce, entire carrots, were split in half, held together with a piece of velcro, just crying out to be sliced in half with my plastic chef’s knife. I then tossed the food together gingerly, the plastic parts clinking against one another, careful to not chip any of the green paint that decorated my stalks of celery. Seeing my uncle’s less than appetizing entree this weekend brought these afternoon playtime activities flooding back.

Perhaps the most peculiar assemblage was the little portion peas. The hospital had pureed a regular portion of greyish-green vegetable until entirely smooth, then poured this globby green mess into a “pea-like mass,” complete with bumps symbolizing the individual, minute veggie. My question is why? Why would the hospital do such a thing, why would they care? You’re eating hospital food, everyone knows you won’t be receiving some gourmet treat. It just struck me as odd, the particular attention that was vested upon this otherwise ordinary vegetable side dish. I think I would actually prefer a globby mess of something green, than a carefully molded, olive green mass, resembling a piping hot mound of peas. And what do you suppose the mold looks like left empty, on its own? I wonder…