FORGET ALL THE shots and the pills and the vitamins. The next time you feel as if some bug is seriously getting to you, sit back for a bit and ponder an immediate future filled with hospital food.

If the mere horror of that thought doesn't get you back perpendicular to the floor in about 32 seconds flat, check in with your local funeral parlor, because it's self-evident you really are in dire shape.

Medical science has made great strides in recent years. Lop a foot off chopping logs for the fireplace, and they can sew it back on in a few hours. Need a new hip? Give them a few weeks, and they can make one for you from a few stainless steel and titanium bits off the shelf.

How about a heart replumbing? Simple. Supply them with a few feet of blood vein from your left leg, and medics these days can mend all the major vessels in your ticker and you can be back down at the pub in a week, knocking back the large whiskies.

But like eradicating the cockroach, building a couch impervious to cat claws and manufacturing an umbrella that doesn't get lost, the wizardry of science remains baffled as to how to turn hospital food into something edible.

This is not simply an American phenomenon, nor British. It is a global malady, rather like fleas, shock jocks and French cooking, and I speak as a veteran of extended hospital stays on three continents.

I fail to comprehend how hospital cooks can turn mashed potatoes into something that tastes only marginally better than cow turds even if they don't look it, or turn out beefsteaks with the texture of hockey pucks, or produce desserts that make being a diabetic almost pleasurable simply to avoid them.

One year, after finding myself wounded, I did time in four military hospitals in Vietnam, an experience that left me longing for G.I. C-rations stewing over a small but reassuring blaze generated by putting a match to a chuck of C-4 plastique explosive.

Actually, except for the inevitable and equally inedible ham and lima beans, I could whomp up a pretty decent meal from C-rats. The baked beans, for instance, became a veritable feast when laced with the Vienna sausages and liberal dollops of Tabasco sauce that occupied pride of place in my backpack (never leave these things to anyone involved in the government).

I could make a fairly good steamed bun from the canned bread rolls, and a tasty tin of coffee could be produced so long as you remembered that military-issue coffee tastes like bat guano and needed a savory boost from the packs of cocoa that came with the C-rats to make the stuff reasonably, well, swallowable.

But I digress. What I was about to say was that when they stretchered me from the field and dumped me in the hospital, my pleasure at mealtime took an immediate, and sharp, downturn.

The diet was medical ward predictable - scrambled eggs that tasted like they hadn't come within 110 light-years of a chicken, something called Salisbury steak that I'm certain doubled in duty as replacement soles on combat boots, and spaghetti that would have been reason enough for a Mafia hit on the chef.

But there was one thing about the army hospital cooks - at least they had access to, and used (at least occasionally) the salt shaker. The absence of salt marks civilian hospital chow elsewhere, no matter where in the world you find yourself landed on your back, and that goes a long way toward rendering it unfit even for the pig trough.

On my list of awful hospitals for food, a five-star rating goes to the Hammersmith Hospital in London, where the triple bypass heart operation I had just undergone was immediately turned into only my second worst experience of the day when dinner arrived.

In the interest of sparing stomachs, I'll omit the less than salubrious details. Suffice it to say that after three days of near-starvation, I hiked up my hospital nightie, grabbed a cane and, dragging my glucose bottle on its roller rack behind me, made it five floors down the elevator to the snack shop in the hospital lobby.

For the next four days, I dined heartily on the snack shop's egg mayonnaise and cheese with cress sandwiches, chocolate mousse and bottled cokes. It marked the first time in my checkered medical history that I ever gained weight in a hospital.

It's not as if, in Britain, they haven't tossed money at the problem. They have - about 60 million bucks' worth of government cash, in fact, hiring on celebrity chefs to revamp hospital menus to make mealtime something more than an occasion in which to hide out in the bathroom for a couple of hours.

Along came one cookery expert, a Boston-born transplant named Loyd Grossman, with one of the worst accents that's ever grated my ears. He promptly started turning out for the hapless patients dishes such as navarin of lamb with couscous and parmesan fried chicken escalopes milanese.

So how's it going down? Says nursing research fellow Samantha Politt: "So far, the nurses' opinion is that the menu isn't working." And that means?

"It's slop," says Samantha.

For his part, Loyd Grossman says: "We are consistently re-evaluating the menu from the feedback we get."

I would have thought "feedback" to be a rather unfortunate choice of a word in the circumstances, but there you are.

Meanwhile, scientists may be closing in on everything from a cure for terminal halitosis to the meaning of life, but as far as hospital fare goes, it's a case of, as the French say in one of their more enlightened comments: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."

Which means, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Indeed.

Thought for the Week: It's not hard to meet expenses - they're everywhere./P>

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