Theory and practice of free food in hospitals: a guide for the hungry hospitalist.

Anyone who has spent time in an American hospital must have noticed the abundance of free food. Whether breakfast at morning Grand Rounds, a drug representative teaching conference, or a potluck meal in the nursing lounge, free food is ubiquitous. Over the span of 2 decades, much work has been done in the bourgeoning field of hospital medicine, but this subject has been starved of attention. I offer this essay to serve up this neglected topic. Clinicians have long recognized the importance of food in medicine. Hippocrates noted, “It is easier to fill up with drink than with food.”1 Handy advice when considering what to eat. Unfortunately, Hippocrates lived millennia before development of the hospital, and we cannot know how profound his thoughts on free food at seminars, meetings, and nursing stations would have been. Not surprisingly, free food is popular in hospitals, but topical contemporary scholarship is limited. A recent covert surveillance study found that a box of chocolate on a hospital ward was opened within 12 minutes, and the median chocolate survival time was 51 minutes. Physicians were the third largest chocolate consumers after health care assistants and nurses.2 Although popular, the efficacy of supplying free food as an incentive to influence physician behavior is not …