Of Soup and Sanitation: A Love Story
I was halfway through chopping carrots when it hit me — the number wasn’t just “a lot” in a catering sense. It was “a lot” in a there’s no pause button on human hunger and I’m on the clock sense.
This isn’t volunteer work. The hospital kitchen is one of my jobs — a regular shift in a place where lunch breaks and coffee refills happen in stolen minutes between service rounds. A place that requires three months of vetting before you are even considered being hired. I punch in like anyone else, except my “office” smells like onions, disinfectant, and boiling stock. The hospital kitchen is its own climate zone. The air hums with the vent fans, smells faintly of bleach from morning sanitation, and has the metallic tang of stainless steel that’s been scrubbed within an inch of its life. Every sound bounces — trays sliding, pots clanging, timers chirping their insistent you’d-better-get-that tones.
Everything here is supersized. The stockpots could double as outdoor fountains. The mixing spoons look like props from a medieval battle scene. Cutting boards are so big you could spread out blueprints on them and still have room to dice celery. But before a single potato gets peeled or a carrot gets sliced, there’s the checklist — the long list of policies and procedures we work under. Gloves on. Hair restrained. Surfaces sanitized before and after use. Anything dropped, discarded immediately. Temperatures checked and logged, not “eyeballed.” And those rules aren’t suggestions — a health inspector could walk in at any moment and expect every one of them followed to the letter.
The menu today is a mix of comfort and constraint: grilled chicken with pinto beans, a vegetarian lentil stew, a mountain of mashed potatoes, and a walnut and cranberry garden salad. Each item is built not just for flavor, but for patient-specific guidelines. Sodium levels, sugar limits, fat percentages — all set by the clinical nutrition team. Every portion is measured, not guessed. Chicken breast sliced to the gram, beans scooped with the correct-size ladle, salad weighed so the walnuts and cranberries stay within their calculated allowance. The lentil stew is ladled in portions exactly right for those who need extra fiber but not extra salt. The potatoes, for once, get a little leniency — but even they’re scooped in measured mounds.
Every patient’s tray is a medical plan in edible form. A cardiac patient might get extra beans for protein and fewer walnuts in the salad. A diabetic might get the same chicken as their neighbor but a different portion of potatoes. The food has to match their chart exactly, because here, the wrong meal isn’t just a bad day — it can be a setback in recovery.
Half the staff here work like they’ve got jet engines under their shoes. Lou has been in this kitchen for twenty-two years and can dice an onion faster than most people can check their phone. Dorian stirs the stew with the same focus you’d use to defuse a bomb. I move between recipes and policy manuals, toggling between a sauté pan and a thermometer probe, because “close enough” doesn’t fly here.
Cooking for two hundred is a constant shuffle between urgency and precision. Timing boiling potatoes against baking bread against simmering stew — all while checking that cold items like the salad stay in their temperature-safe zone until service. You can’t just wing it like at home. You don’t get to throw in an extra handful of walnuts because “it feels right.” You stick to the guidelines. You weigh and measure. Because in here, food is not only comfort; it’s part of someone’s treatment plan.
Multiply every recipe by ten, then cross-reference it with the nutrition database to make sure you haven’t accidentally exceeded someone’s sodium allowance. Switch gloves so often you start wondering if you should just tape a box of them to your apron. Accept that you’ll spill something, but know you’ll immediately sanitize the area like a crime scene.
Once the hot food’s ready, the trays start going out in waves. Each floor has its own run. Each tray is checked twice — once for contents, once for temperature. The same grilled chicken breast that goes to a patient recovering from surgery might also end up with a nurse on her third twelve-hour shift, or a visitor who hasn’t seen the outside world in days. Everyone gets the same care in portion and preparation.
Through the swinging door, I catch a flash of a hermetically sealed metal push cart filled with organized food trays, destined for hungry patients — a relentless tray-passer aide delivering it with steel nerves forged in fire and a heart of endless rainbow love. The patients will never know who cooked their food, and we don’t expect them to. But there’s something about seeing the tray leave your hands and knowing it’ll land in front of someone who needs it, even if they don’t notice the taste.
It turns out, cooking for two hundred people in a hospital isn’t about the recipes or even the food. It’s about precision wrapped in care. Every potato mashed, every scoop of pinto beans, every measured pile of salad is both a dietitian’s requirement and a momentary offering of comfort. You’re feeding bodies, yes — but you’re also upholding trust. That everything they eat here is safe, measured, and part of a bigger plan to get them better.
Side note: whoever invented the industrial potato masher should be knighted, and then made to fill out all our sanitation logs for a week as a test of character.
Service ends, but the day doesn’t. Every surface is sanitized twice, every utensil run through high-temp wash cycles, every leftover stored according to food safety policy or logged for discard. I’m scrubbing a ladle the size of a satellite dish, thinking about how many hands touched the meal before it reached the patient. There’s something grounding about the slow return to readiness — cleaning down to zero, so tomorrow can start fresh.
Some days, the math works out perfectly. Other days, there’s just enough extra for the staff to grab something before clocking out. Nothing is wasted without reason. Walking out of the kitchen, I can still smell bleach, grilled chicken, and bread in my clothes. My legs ache, my hands smell faintly of carrots and sanitizer, and my head is already shifting toward whatever my other job needs from me tomorrow.
Cooking here isn’t about applause or creative freedom. It’s about enough. Enough food, enough safety, enough care to make this meal part of the healing process. And when you do it right, no one notices — they just eat, and that’s the point.
The next morning, I’ll clock in again. Gloves on. Hair restrained. Checklist signed. And we’ll start all over, because two hundred people (plus 50 more that checked in last night) will need to eat again. And that’s the thing about feeding people in a hospital — you never really finish. It’s like a never-ending Broadway show where the main characters are mashed potatoes and grilled salmon, and you’re the understudy for God. You think you’re out, and then a nutritionist walks in with a clipboard and says, “Room 418 needs a low-sodium portion,” and suddenly you’re right back in the plot.
By this point, I’m convinced the kitchen is a living organism that feeds on us while we feed others — a sentient, stainless-steel beast that demands human sacrifice in the form of unpaid overtime and the occasional scalded forearm. When I finally retire from life, I half expect to get a gold-plated ladle and a stern letter from the kitchen itself saying, “Nice try, but you still owe us 300 grilled cheese sandwiches from 2017.”
And honestly? I’d make them. Out of spite. And love…
Mostly spite.
