Hospitality within hospital meals—Socio-material assemblages

Abstract

ABSTRACTHospital meals and their role in nutritional care have been studied primarily from a life and natural science perspective. This article takes a different approach and explores the idea of hospitality inspired by Jacques Derrida’s work on the ontology of hospitality. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish hospital, hospitality practices were studied using a socio-material assemblage approach. The study showed that rethinking the meal event could change the wards into temporary “pop-up-restaurants,” transcending the hospital context and providing a scene for shifting host–guest interactions and creating temporary meal communities. However, asymmetrical host–guest relations bound to health and efficiency rationales typical for public meal production-systems contested the hospitality space. Findings indicate that hospitality thinking can be a valuable guiding principle to enable staff and management involved in hospital food service and in nutritional care to work more systematically with the environment for improved hospital meal experiences in the future.