Eating together nourishes the soul as well as the body

My late neighbour, Joseph, was a Polish soldier who married a British girl and settled in London when the Second World War ended. His wife was long dead by the time I knew him. He lived alone, and was extremely selfsufficient.

One day, he was run over and sustained an injury from which he did not recover. As he could no longer shop or cook for himself, the delivery of frozen ready meals was arranged. He complained that they tasted funny. And, indeed, the unidentifiable dollops of this and that in their microwaveable plastic trays looked a cheerless way to sustain life.

Some of us who lived nearby began taking round a plate of whatever we were making for our own evening meal. One day I took some soup – a very ordinary soup, made of leftover roast chicken. Joseph finished the bowl and said: “This is the best soup I have tasted since the soup my mother used to make.”

The fact that food is as much about emotional wellbeing as nutrition is hardly news. For decades, campaigners such as the restaurateur Jamie Oliver, the television presenter Loyd Grossman and Prue Leith, the Bake Off presenter and ambassador for the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, have argued that the food served in schools and hospitals should not be regarded as separate from the work of learning or healing, but as an integral part of it.

Yet little progress seems to have been made since 2001, when the Better Hospital Food Panel, led by Grossman, was set up (and quietly disbanded, five years later). In 2017, Prue Leith wrote with dismay of the inedible, “foul-smelling sludge” still being served to patients.

But as The Sunday Telegraph reported, an NHS pilot scheme offers a glimmer of hope.In six NHS trusts, elderly patients with hip fractures were offered an additional meal by nutritional advisers, who sat with them while they ate.

Mortality rates among such patients fell from 11 to 5.5 per cent and the average length of hospital stay dropped from 25 to 20 days, representing an average saving to the NHS of some £1,437.

“If you look upon food as a very, very cheap drug, that’s extremely powerful,” said Mr Dominic Inman, the orthopaedic surgeon who devised the scheme.A non-clinician might put it another way: a diet of nasty food, eaten in solitude, makes you lose the will to live. And not just if you are elderly or a hospital patient.

Faced with a disappointing meal, the journalist and gourmand Cyril Connolly used to murmur to himself: “Poor Cyril, poor Cyril.”Most of us take a more stoical view of stodgy pasta or soggy veg. But the pace of our lives makes it easy to fall into habits of treating food as mere fuel until, as Florence Nightingale put it, we are in danger of “starving in the midst of plenty”.

There are many ways to be malnourished, and no surer way to lose one’s appetite than to eat alone, day after day. Yet even those of us who don’t live alone can find the habit of eating together as a family eroded to inanition by outside distractions.

The statistics of the NHS pilot don’t tell us whether it was the extra food, or the fact that it was eaten in the company of another person that caused such positive results.But I think a clue lies in my bowl of ordinary chicken soup, which turned out to offer nourishment for the soul, as well as the body. —Courtesy The Telegraph