Health chiefs will ask celebrity chefs to help spice up hospital food

The Department of Health is planning to approach celebrity chefs - such as Jamie Oliver - to help improve hospital food.

The Department of Health is planning to approach celebrity chefs - such as Jamie Oliver - to help improve hospital food.

In a further development on the Government's mania for appointing "tsars" and creating taskforces, health officials said they wanted a "culinary tsar".

A spokeswoman for the Health Department said it would appoint one or more celebrity chefs to an NHS taskforce "as soon as possible" to meet plans to draw up tastier new menus by 2001.

It has not yet made any formal approaches but Jamie Oliver, known as the "Naked Chef" to TV viewers, heads the list.

"We hope he will be one of the people we negotiate with because he is obviously one of the country's leading chefs," said the spokeswoman.

Hospital meals are so bad that the British Nutrition Foundation has estimated they delay patients' recovery at a cost of £200 million a year and about £45 million worth of food is thrown away.

The Government has set aside £10m to improve NHS food over the next 10 years and aims to draft in one of the new breed of chefs like Mr Oliver, who has been credited with bringing street credibility to healthy eating.

If Mr Oliver accepted an appointment, relatively robust patients could look forward to enjoying a thick cut bacon sandwich for breakfast.

His menus would be expected to feed more than 1,000 people - about 10 times as many as in a normal West End restaurant - for less than a tenth of the price, at around £1.66 a head per meal.

The job would be a careful balancing act scrutinised by Government-appointed dieticians, hospital inspectors and ward hostesses, to check patients are eating properly.

A typical Jamie Oliver hospital lunch menu might offer baked pork chops with herb potatoes, parsnips and minted bread sauce, while dinner could be mushroom risotto with garlic thyme and parsley, followed by steamed chocolate pudding.

The Department of Health spokeswoman admitted that current poor standards of food not only delay patients' convalescence, but also cause millions of pounds of wastage .

"When people are recovering it is very important they eat, so we will be aiming to make hospital food much more palatable."