One of my favorite times each Wednesday is reaching
for the Food Section of the daily newspaper. I always enjoy looking at the
recipes and deciding if this one or that one is one that I want to try soon or
perhaps just add to my collection of recipes for another day. The food editor always has an interesting
column elaborating on the theme of what recipes and/or restaurants are
featured.
This week’s column started out with this: “They say we first eat with our eyes. . . .
The visual appearance of food is part of the experience of eating it. Often the better it looks, the better it tastes.” Just a few days earlier I had seen a short video
addressing the high risks of older adults being malnourished. There are many
factors involved in older adult malnutrition, but let us never underestimate the
role of visual and olfactory stimulus in good nutrition.
With that, let us not neglect the role of what I
call grace in our daily life.
Meals can be a task necessary to assuage hunger
and to maintain bodily health. Or meals
can be a time of grace: an experience of sharing nutritional, attractively
presented food, cooked with purpose and care for those being served.
Meals can be served in an environment that focuses
only on task, or the table and the dining room can be an environment honoring
the reality that our meals are experiences of nurturing body AND spirit.
Meals can be experienced as a continuation of our Eucharistic meal.
Providing an environment that supports this vision
of and experience of food for soul and for the body does not add a single penny
to the operating budget!
What awaits in the dining room for you and those you serve?
A reader sent this comment to me in an email. I post it here with permission.
ReplyDeleteYour words about first eating with our eyes are beautiful and so relevant to our work here at our retirement center. You led me to think more about seeing our dining hours as a continuation of our Eucharistic meal. If we held that sensitivity we would not, as we
are assisting an elder at meal time,forget to make eye contact with her, or have a conversation in another language with a co-worker. We would honor this precious time with our elders and be grateful for the opportunity to connect with them.
Thanks for reminding us, your readers, about the importance of what our elders see as they sit at the dining table and what they feel when we are with them.