Alberta Council on Aging (ACA) region 2 President Edith Read took aim at the provincial 21-day menu at the annual general meeting at the St. Paul Centennial Senior Citizens Club on Friday.
The province piloted the menu in November 2009, in a few southern Albertan communities, Read recalled. The menu plan called for frozen and packaged food to be shipped from a central distribution point to hospitals and nursing homes, she said, where it is reheated by steaming.
When the menu hit Elk Point, that's when the phones started ring, said Read. The menu is terrible and awful, she said. "It was really impacting seniors more than anyone else, and the food was just not great.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) rolled it out to the rest of the province last year. The 20-day-menu comes to every publicly-owned hospital or nursing home of 125 beds or less. The menu does not go to St. Paul Extendicare because it is privately owned, she said.
After complaints from around the province, the menu was reviewed last August. "The work that we did here had a major impact on them doing a review of the program," she said. "We probably are the largest organized group in the province that complained about the food." She also credited seniors acting independently for communicating with the government and several newspapers for picking up on the food issue.
"And Ed Stelmach did go out and taste the food and he did agree with us it was terrible," Read told the audience of 30.
The government of Alberta hired a consulting group from Ontario, which made suggestions to improve the program. In an appendix to the external review of the provincial menu program by AHS, 10 options are provided for staff to accommodate local food preferences.
"It's not coming down to the kitchen level, so there's somebody in the middle that's blocking it," said Read.
The first option is for product sampling for new and replacement items, which Read said is being done. A soup and sandwich option as an alternate to a hot meal are also listed but is not happening, according to Read. While staff can make homemade soup during weekdays, it's not happening.
"Somebody, somewhere is not getting that message down to the kitchen and they're blocking it." Soups are either from a can or a dry-powder mix, she said. "They're really not soups."
One options states items which receive poor feedback can be replaced with sliced meat and potatoes or another site specific favourite, and that the choice to roast meat at the site level was confirmed by AHS in July 2010.
Roast beef or pork that is served has instead been roasted, sliced, and packaged at the central distribution centre in Calgary and is trucked around the province before being steamed and served, said Read.
The lack of fresh fruit and fresh root vegetables remains a constant complaint, Read said. The option to use fresh eggs has been used across the province, said Read, although the start of the program produced the hard-boiled eggs centrally. "People have told me you don't have to worry if they fall off the plate because they bounce back up again."
Pancakes and waffles also come frozen and are steamed, she said, leaving a "gob of goo ... So these were the 10 things that things that were supposed to happen, and I would say that if they were happening, maybe we could learn to live with this menu … As it is, it is not a good situation."
Read praised the previous system of on-site food preparation and said the provincial menu was like taking a car in for a new muffler and getting a new engine instead. "They fixed something that was not wrong. The food that was served in hospitals and nursing homes, there wasn't a thing wrong with it. People were happy with it."
She called on ACA members to continue to communicate the issue to government.
