Extra Diet Tips For The Elderly

Extra Diet Tips For The Elderly

Food should taste good.
Eating is a fundamental pleasure of living. In old age there is
no other pleasure that can equal enjoyment of food. It is a time
when we long for the foods of our own childhood, too. Ethnic
foods often had to be given up when children were raised
(switched to hot dogs and pizza) but with this diversion gone, a
return to family food would be most welcome and most healthful.
Ethnic foods were made from scratch. And they certainly were
made at home where cleanliness and “persnickitiness” are at
their finest! A speck in the batter gets noticed. Not so in a

commercial mixing vat. Pots and pans are sanitized with hot
water, not chemicals.
Good advice is to return to old fashioned home cooking: with
its flour and butter, lard and cream, homemade pasta, olive oil
and soup, coarse cereal grains and plain fruit. Gone are the fruit
juices, flour mixes, crackers and sweets that fill grocery shelves.
What about convenience? Old fashioned cooking took most of the
day. It does take 3 or 4 hours to make a soup from scratch. But
you then get 3 days off! Each day you reboil it, it is sterile again.
Or freeze half of it (take the potatoes out first). It does take a
whole morning to make pasta or some ethnic dish. Freeze it in
plastic sealed containers so the delicate flavor isn't spoiled.
Baking homemade bread is automated now. Do at least this much
to get away from the mold-ridden grocery store loaves. Make
your own ice cream and nut butters. They last many days and free
your schedule.
Time is the great inhibitor but if you have the means or the
help, the best advice, nutritionally, is a return to old-fashioned
cooking and recipes. Use your new insights to improve them
where you can. Don't use your mother's aluminum ware; use her
enamel ware or the new glass and ceramic ware. Don't use her
copper-bottomed tea kettle or gold-rimmed cups or “silver”. Use
her wooden spoons, glass glasses, and plain dishes, her wooden
and straw bowls and enamel pots and pans.