ANTIBIOTICS and enemas are quite useful, chemotherapy does a pretty good job and even the prospect of helping your family quack pay his annual bill at the golf club helps, but for getting folks out of their sick bed medical science has a far more efficient system - a terror weapon that is almost awe-inspiring in its malign simplicity.

I refer, of course, to hospital food.

Your ailment may range from a ruptured toenail to terminal hemorrhoids with a stop at strangulated uvula on the way, but be guaranteed that at least once a day your agony will be subsumed in a nightmare where oatmeal tastes like glue, meatloaf tastes like glue that brushed against a gravy cube, and eggs taste like glue with huge, orange polka dots.

This is traditional hospital food, or hospital fare or even, if you like - or, more likely, totally dislike - hospital cuisine. A pile of dog barf by any other name, etc., etc. Whatever, any court in the land would rule the very use of the word "food" in this instance to be a gross violation of the Trades Description Act.

I base these observations on a largely involuntary personal survey of sundry hospitals around the globe over the past 45 years or so. In nearly every instance, the driving force to get out of the hospital was not so much a desire to get well as it was a desire to get well away from the dreaded roach-coach food trolley that paid its satanic visits thrice daily.

(An exception was my three-day tour of the Ben Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, back in the 1950s. My motivation for hurriedly departing those premises was the chap in the bed opposite who, after three days comatose in his oxygen tent, suddenly pushed the plastic cover back, sat up and, with oxygen still hissing, lit up a cigarette. Smoking was allowed in hospitals in those days, and being this was in North Carolina, it may still be.)

Hammersmith Hospital in London may well have the best cardiac unit in the world and should win every prize from the Nobel on down for its work in heart research and surgery. Hammersmith Hospital's kitchen should be burned to the ground, its ashes buried in an unmarked grave and the charred land sprinkled with holy water.

I was in about my 22nd hour of recovery from triple-bypass heart surgery some years ago when I discovered the Jekyll of Hammersmith's heart section had a Hyde counterpart lurking in the bowels of its kitchen. That was when either the vegetable soup arrived or someone mistakenly left a potful of bodily waste on my tray.

For the next two days I alternately faked sleep, attacks of cramp and incoherent mumbles to avoid the attentions of the Brunnehilde amazon moonlighting from the Nibelungenlied as a green-uniformed SS guard serving up dog turds, rabbit pellets, charred hockey pucks and marinated golf balls under the guise of frankfurters, peas, minute steak and potatoes.

In the race between starvation and recovery, panic stormed to the front. On Day 4, when Brunnehilde was on her poison run down on the fourth floor, I grabbed my rack on rollers with its bag of intravenous fluids and whatnot and made what amounted to a very slow-motion dash for the fifth-floor elevator.

In the hospital lobby, we (bag rack and I) sauntered as nonchalantly as possible into the newsstand shop. I stocked up on all the Mars bars, bags of potato chips and Cokes I could carry. And this is how I survived until I was well enough to get my stitched-up carcass down to the Bridge pub and three large whiskies three days later.

If Hammersmith Hospital's kitchen was the Devil's work, the one at Queen Mary's Hospital was at least worthy of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. The specialty there, as I discovered during a five-month off-and-on stay with pancreatitis, was a rice and gravy dish that looked like stacks of comatose maggots under a ratty brown blanket.

Fortunately, a fair portion of my confinement was spent being fed through a tube - a Hickman line, they called it. I couldn't taste anything, of course, but a peek at the food bag with its grayish gloop of what looked like liquefied corn meal suggested that I really didn't want to. I just lay back, closed my eyes and imagined it was cornmeal mash en route to becoming proper booze. No middleman, no taxes.

This whole train of thought was prompted by a report from writer A.N. Wilson that in a new bid to make its food actually edible, Britain's National Health Service (of which the Hammersmith and Queen Mary's are a part) intended to hire on a TV chef, one Jamie Oliver.

I don't know much about young (at least he looks it) Jamie, except that he seems to be known on the Box here as "The Naked Chef," which suggests that perhaps the franks and new potatoes bear a bit of watching when the Brunnehilde wagons start rolling. He also seems to specialize in chili pepper dishes, which will really delight the stomach ulcer set.

A.N. Wilson is cheering Jamie on. "Home cooking brought to the bedside," he avows, "would be far more cheering and restorative than the warmed-up, tasteless pap most hospital patients are forced to endure."

Wilson misses the point. It is precisely that "warmed-up, tasteless pap" that is needed - and the more the better - because it is cheap (you don't use a lot of gas or volts undercooking oatmeal) and because patients will certainly realize they cannot endure it and will conclude right smartly that the only way to escape is to get better, out and home.

It worked to drive me out of Hammersmith and Queen Mary's (after they removed the Hickman line and I had to go back to the comatose maggots and blanket), and back to my wife Elizabeth's culinary excellence.

A footnote: A.N. Wilson noted that in China, families were expected to drop into hospitals and cook for the patients. In my Knoxville youth, my mother couldn't boil water without burning it and my father was to cooking what "Plan 9 from Outer Space" was to cinematic excellence. I might just as well have booked a table at Rose's Funeral Home.

Thought for the Week: The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it.

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