Vet revamps bid to change VA food

Vet revamps bid to change VA food
by Michael Randall

It’s four years later, and Richard Cortell is still fighting to boot reheated meals from Veterans Affairs hospitals and bring fresh food back to hospitalized vets.

This time he has a Web site, and a plan to take the fight to the national level, to every Senate and House member in Washington, to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, even to President Bush.

While he has a few people helping him this time, he says ultimately the public at large will decide–by how many heed his call to phone or write their representatives or sign petitions– whether anything changes.

“It’s nothing one person or even a group of people can do,” said Cortell, a Purple Heart recipient and Army combat engineer in the Vietnam War.

Cortell began making noise in 2002 about a practice he considered an insult to veterans…

Instead of preparing meals fresh on-site, the VA had begun preparing them at a few central locations, shipping them to the hospitals and reheating them. They said it was to save money. Cortell said they should cut expenses elsewhere.

“These people are being served what is essentially frozen food,” said Cortell.

Cortell hasn’t been able to taste the food himself. Neither has Eugene Watkins, president of the Newburgh chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. But Watkins said he and other vets support Cortell’s efforts. Watkins said other vets have complained to him that the food isn’t always heated all the way through.

“I don’t think I’d be comfortable with something precooked,” Watkins said.

Nancy Winter, spokeswoman for the Hudson Valley Veterans Affairs hospitals at Castle Point and Montrose, said there’s no plan to change the food program. But she said many improvements have been made in the past four years.

For one thing, unpopular foods have been removed from the menu, and popular ones – like creamed chipped beef on toast – are served more often. There also are more special event meals, and a daily taste panel checks each day’s meals and removes anything unsatisfactory before it gets to the vets.

Winter said special requests are accommodated if they meet a patient’s dietary regulations. And in the most recent quarterly patient satisfaction survey, the food got an 87 percent approval rating, she said.

During the past four years, the few elected officials who followed up on Cortell’s complaint said they found no merit to it and didn’t pursue it. His effort began the same year he ran against state Sen. William Larkin, R-C-Cornwall-on-Hudson, but he insists the food issue, then and now, has been completely nonpartisan. He says he’s not running for anything this year.

“This has nothing to do with politics, it never, ever was about politics,” said Cortell. “The only gain I will get out of this (succeeding) is, God forbid, if I ever end up in a VA hospital at the end of my life, I’ll have good food.”