A dinner party involving cherished family recipes is being used by one senior living service and care organization to connect with their residents with dementia and memory impairment.
The San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living is launching a project led by Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health that is using favorite family recipes to uncover memories and foster social connections for older adults facing memory loss. The fellows program is housed in the Global Brain Health Institute, founded by the University of California, San Francisco, and Trinity College Dublin.
Over two weeks this month, the project worked with five residents chosen by the community’s life enrichment directors, using food to unlock personal stories and memories surrounding family recipes. Fellows Jake Broder, a playwright, actor and screenwriter, and Zach Bandler, a film director and screenwriter, engaging residents in conversations about food-related memories and experiences.
An SFCJL spokeswoman told McKnight’s Senior Living that the community sees this program as an “innovative opportunity” for the future. For caregivers, using food to evoke memories is an easy, cost-free approach anyone can incorporate without much effort.
“The challenges of living with dementia are immense, but through innovative approaches like these, we can bring hope and enhance quality of life,” Broder said in a news release, adding that smell and taste, linked to memory, can trigger strong recollections and emotions with simple acts like preparing a family recipe.
Tuesday, all five residents and their loved ones will gather for a special dinner party to sample all of the recreated dishes and share their stories around them. The campus chef will prepare the items according to how the participants remembered the recipes. SFCJL said the approach “provides moments of joy and connection, offering an alternative or complement to traditional memory loss treatments.”
Growing the reach
The dinner party is an expansion of a program Broder launched in 2023 at Bayview Adult Day Health Center in San Francisco. He interviewed four individuals with mild to moderate cognitive impairment about foods they fondly remembered. With the help of the Global Brain Health Institute, he arranged a dinner party where participants recounted their stories to an audience of friends and staff members.
The success of that endeavor was featured in The New Yorker and inspired Broder and Bandler to expand the initiative to SFCJL. Broder told The Jewish News of Northern California that a conversation with Bruce Miller, MD, co-director of the Global Institute for Brain Health, got him thinking about how food and taste were sensory experiences that, like music, could reach people. He said he and Bandler are planning similar events around the country.
The dinner party program is part of a broader series from SFCJL to bring experts into its communities to reimagine aging. The initiative will be featured in SFCJL’s upcoming “Food for Thought” event, part of a speaker series offering insights from leading experts on reimagining the aging process.
Wednesday, Broder will discuss the dinner party project with Virginia Sturm, PhD, head of the Clinical Affective Neuroscience Lab at the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in a free online event.
An SFCJL spokeswoman told McKnight’s Senior Living that there is potential to gain additional knowledge from this experience and apply it moving forward, including potentially involving residents in developing future dishes or menus.
SFCJL provides the continuum of care for older adults, including the Frank Residences, which provides assisted living and memory care services; the Jewish Home and Rehabilitation Center, which provides long-term skill nursing, short-term rehabilitation and an acute psychiatric unit specializing in mental health for older adults; and the Jewish Home and Senior Living Foundation.
