Bland, soggy and tasteless might be how a food critic would describe the food served in Australia's hospitals, but a patient's ethnic and religious background is now taken into account when planning the meals, offering a more varied menu.
Danka Jovetic has worked in the kitchen of Melbourne's Box Hill Hospital for thirty-five years and now caters for people of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds.
"We provide a lot of food for halal people, for kosher people," said Ms Jovetic.
The hospital's dieticians have acknowledged the need for a more diverse range of food, creating a new menu based on patient feedback.
"What we found from our survey was that Greek patients didn't want us to prepare Greek recipes for them, they wanted bread, feta and olives.
Our patients from a Chinese background told us they wanted things like konji," said dietitian Anna Kyriopoulos.
Recognising English can sometimes be an issue, the hospital has also produced a visual menu showing each dish to help people choose their meals.
Patients like Pang Lim, born in Malaysia, have welcomed the choice.
"In fact I slowly begin to appreciate other cultural food as well, so it's interesting. It's a quite fantastic mix," said Mr Lim.
Catering for patients from such diverse backgrounds is not easy and the kitchen makes around a thousand meals a day for patients from more than 150 countries.
More than 40 per cent of the hospital's patients are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
"If we provide patients with food they are familiar with it gives them comfort in an unfamiliar situation," said Ms Kyriopoulos.
The comforts of home cooking could be coming to a hospital near you soon.
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