Robert combines the themes of food and family, in a hospital room setting with a cityscape visible out the window. Meals are daily rituals that help bind families together. Treatments disrupt these rituals. Robert shows a patient with her husband and child, a group who maintain their closeness and sense of solidarity through interactions with food. The artist had strong feelings about nutrition and health, but has refrained from making any overt comment about the state of food served in hospitals.

Feeding a cancer patient a piece of pie is like lighting a cigarette for someone fighting lung cancer. If the patient is a terminal case, that’s an entirely different matter. But for a patient who has a chance to survive cancer, doctors versed in the benefits of nutrition recommend a low carbo-hydrate diet.