Diners at the Seneca in Rockville.
In a culture as food items-obsessed as ours, the incapability to take pleasure in a delectable meal can be just one of the cruelest indignities of growing older. Which is why, about a ten years in the past, a pair of chefs in Atlanta named Sarah Gorham and Stone Morris devised a cooking process particularly for aged folks navigating neuromuscular, actual physical, and cognitive issues, this sort of as Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia, which can make it tough each to swallow and to sit continue to by means of mealtime.
They’d been questioned by a senior-residing facility there to arrive up with foods that could restore some independence to memory-treatment residents. “Like any other innovation, it is demo-and-mistake,” claims Gorham. “We experienced a really ahead-contemplating business that was seeking to do the right issue for their people.”
The strategy they came up with, called “grind dining,” can take favored food items and reinterprets them in an easier-to-digest, handheld kind, although retaining familiar textures and flavors. The benefits are frequently beautiful—nothing like puréeing, in which every little thing turns into blended-up mush. Choose steak and potatoes: Immediately after the meat is floor, it is mixed with gravy, then topped with duchess potatoes. The finish solution appears to be like like a extravagant, cupcake-shaped canapé that can be eaten in two bites, no fork or knife essential.
The pilot plan was so thriving that the two women of all ages turned it into a company. Their strategy has because been deployed at assisted-living services across the region, which includes three Washington-location ones managed by Watermark, in Fairfax, Alexandria, and Rockville. Watermark launched the plan in 2015 and now trains all of its culinary personnel in it. The facilities’ cooks take part in an immersive, 10-7 days application stuffed with cooking demonstrations and trainings on how to use exclusive products. Gorham and Morris attend, also.
One benefit, claims Jonathan Garber, government director of Rockville’s the Seneca, is that the handheld portions let residents to stroll around the dining space even though they try to eat. “It’s permitted our users to thrive, to come to feel the socialization,” he suggests, “and not to be shy about eating.”
The Seneca’s dining director, Jason Really like, claims there’s one thing in it for the staff, far too: “We can actually embrace our imaginative culinary facet and not be so rigid. In change, our associates conclude up truly blossoming.”
This article appears in the March 2022 difficulty of Washingtonian.
