9 chips though... its like they went the local chip shop and split a bag of chips between 5+ people
added 50grams of mixed vegetables and a sad looking fish thing with a hand print on it.
I bet most people barely touch them and get a takeaway or something brought in.
Don't know how old this stat is but
The 1297 NHS hospitals and 515 private hospitals produce 12% of the total food waste generated in the UK. That's 1.1 million tonnes of the total of 9.5 million tonnes.
Sounds like a lot of waste, probably cheaper to provide food people will eat?
a lot of the waste could be sandwhiches though, I've been in A&E before and seen nurses walking around with stacks of prepacked sandwhiches asking if anyone wants one.
probably stuff they can't sell or give away
Or, and just maybe, people when ill often don't eat much, and those hospitals are probably one of the very few places that are both serving food that has had to be prepared in advance (no cooking it one or two portions at a time like a restaurant), and actually tracking how much food they've bought in, vs how much is thrown away.
They also normally have extremely strict controls on the food, so no "popping it in the fridge for tomorrow" once it's been out on the trolley to be served and they've found the patient who ordered it at 5pm the day before has left, and they've now got someone who really doesn't like the option chosen.
Hospitals don't have a fraction of the staff, or cooking space required to "provide what people will eat", let alone the budget for it given that everyone has different tastes and preferences and they cannot cook individual meals so they cook from "generally accepted" meal lists that are if anything deliberately generic because it's better to provide a meal that is "bland" than a meal that risks serious cross contamination, or that people won't eat because "the flavour is too strong".
Even your average restaurant doesn't "provide what people will eat", or rather they won't have something that every single person regardless of age, preferences or religious limits will eat and like, it's taken decades to get to the point where restaurants are actually aware of what allergens they have in their food, and that maybe a vegetarian option is a thing, and many still aren't good at it despite there being both legal and financial reasons to be.
And to be honest, the hospital food I've seen at my local one is at least on a par with a lot of the cheaper eateries (and some more expensive ones*), let alone the sort of food budget the hospitals have which is something like £4 per meal, that's barely the price of a Mcdonalds coffee and fries, and my local chippy charges at least £8 for a small fish and chips now, or the last time I had an "all day breakfast" at a pub it was something like a tenner (and i'm not sure they didn't microwave the bacon to heat it before frying it for 30 seconds)
*I had a fish and chips at an expensive one near me, at most there were about 20 chips, but they were presented really nicely which is the main thing.