A few weeks back, I posted an article called "Can We Help Elders Recapture Their Taste for Food?" This article from the Utne Reader -- Remembrance of Foods Past -- discusses this topic from a slightly different, but articulate, view.
"Thriving in old age isn’t simply a matter of nutrition—it’s a matter of taste," says Darra Goldstein, the editor of Gastronomica, an exquisite quarterly journal of food-focused scholarship, fiction, and poetry.
...Last spring my mother had to enter long-term care. She is someone who always cared passionately about food... Even in her diminished state she discerns what tastes good and what does not, and she responds accordingly. This experience is shared by many people who find themselves in institutional care at the end of their lives. Yet hardly anyone is speaking about better food for the elderly. Their eating habits are not a public health issue, like type 2 diabetes or childhood obesity. But providing pleasure through food is not frivolous; what and how we eat are crucial to the quality of our lives....
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