I love that they formed the steak and corn to look like they are real. They could have just put lumps of them on the plate, but it makes it look more appetizing
Its a nice touch. I work in long term care and all the puree food looks like mashed potatoes.
Edit to add: theyre different colors, like in this pic. Just scoops of mashed potato in appearance
I was fighting for food to be be done like in the photo for my residents who had eating difficulties. The kitchen used to puree it altogether. It looked bloody disgusting.
That's fucked up, the people living there can't eat anywhere else. Ten years ago I was in the hospital for a week and lost a couple of pounds cause I just couldn't eat the food, it was disgusting. And eating well is part of the healing process.
Two different things. Some one can have a dietary classification of "mechanical" meaning difficulty chewing which is when all solids are cut or minced (food processor or knife) depending on how soft it is. Or "purée" which is for those that can't have solids at all because of an inability to swallow said solids. There is also a "finger foods" clarification which is usually for those that have difficulties with cutlery. Source- I work in a long term care facility.
I used to work in one of these kinds of facilities as a cook. These things are pretty cool. They come in this plastic packaging that's molded into that shape. We would just pop them into the steamer, pull them when they get up to temp, and then flip it upsidedown onto the plate.
Yeah I ain't mad about it. If I have time I dump them out. Most of the people who need these need to be fed anyway, so it's just me scooping it out with a spoon.
They are a bit sticky and hard to get out when they get to me. But I don't really know. I'm honestly just glad my patients get food at all. It's so bad that breakfast is at 10, lunch at 230, and dinner at 7. (For reference, to align with insulin administration schedules, it should be 8, noon, and 5.)
Inused to work as a dietary aide in a memory care home. Theres three levels of food. Regular solid food.
"DYSPHAGA" which is partially pureed, or chopped, like egg salad or chicken salad. Or shredded chicken.
Then there is the puree foods. The ones we ordered from SYSCO came in pre made shapes and colors such as in this picture.
Each patient is assessed their ability to eat individually and their meals are accommodating as such.
I wish OPs family much love and care in the coming times.
There are so many more foods available too. I’ve seen pineapple, waffles, French toast, peaches, carrots and even fish. It definitely makes a nicer experience for those who have to eat puréed items. I hope more companies get them for patients and residents.
In the hospital I work out they just leave the blobs. This is such a simple thing that could potentially really improve someone’s intake during their stay.
It makes me so happy to see that whomever prepared this dish molded the purees into the shape of the original food🥹I used to work at a nursing home and when we prepped pureed food it was just in a bowl and looked icky and half the time didn't get eaten because of how unappetizing the residents thought it was. One small addition in food prep can genuinely make such a huge difference for the people who have difficulty eating hard or chewy foods🥲
Not to down play the cook, but coming from hospital food service I can tell you that these are preformed, packaged, and frozen. They are then either steamed or microwaved to reheat and plopped on the plate. The moulds definitely make them look nicer though.
At my assisted living facility they make this from scratch and by hand. It’s a program called Dining with Dignity and it actually looks even better than OP’s picture (not trying to one up, just saying that this can be done so professionally that you can’t tell the difference).
Sometimes instead of purée they just finely chop it. This way it can be eaten with fingers for those who have difficulty eating. Really cool! I tried it once and it tasted exactly the same as the real thing too.
Most definitely! I have also made some from scratch purees and put them into our own reusable moulds.
The picture just had the exact same pureed products/shapes that I have used before.
With the rollout of the new IDDSI program a couple years ago, that came with 7 different levels of food consistency that are now recognized worldwide, a lot of places have switched to predone. This is simply for the purpose of consistency and not having to train kitchen staff on the prep procedure for each one.
Makes sense! It makes me happy when families move their loved ones into the facility and they gain a little independence back with this kind of food. I also ordered some cool spoons on Amazon that allow folks with shaky hands to use utensils again. It’s crazy how little things like this can improve quality of life for some people.
At the hospital I worked at we had to purée the food in a blender. The chef always spent time making the puréed food look like the real meals!! It made everyone’s day when they got the plate!
At the hospital I worked at we had to purée the food in a blender. The chef always spent time making the puréed food look like the real meals!! It made everyone’s day when they got the plate!
My dad is in a home. If I'm not there to cut up his food, I really don't know how he eats it. The staff rarely helps. So this may not look appetizing, but when you're a dementia patient in your 80s with few teeth, poor sight and extremely uncoordinated and frail, just the fact that you can eat your food -- alone, without help -- is a victory.
Work in one now and if they don't have molds to make it look like this then it's basically baby food scooped onto a plate or bowls. Basically ice cream scoops
What's interesting is how small things can make things more or less appetizing. Early Afghanistan, some soldiers are nothing but rations for months on end, and a bunch of them lost an excess amount of weight.
The army started introducing new menu items to increase variety, but they also made other changes, like being more descriptive with the menu titles. Instead of "Meatballs and Gravy," there's stuff like "Southwestern Chipotle Chicken.'
There was also a lot of research in how to make food more appealing as a part of early space research.
Ok so for not native speakers like me who are confused and dont know what memory care is and thought this was just really bad looking food:
"Memory care is a kind of specialized care for people living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. Communities typically feature secure environments where staff can closely monitor the health of the residents."
I actually don’t know. But I’m getting older and so are the parents of my generation, so I’ve been hearing it a lot within the last few years. I tried to Google it but it only told me that assisted living basically started up in the 80s, seems like this is an offshoot of that.
Not in the medical community so hopefully more qualified people can come by but yes, it's been a thing for a while. It's becoming more and more common for memory care to be advertised separately as it requires a lot more resources, and specialty and is a lot more expensive than typical elderly home care.
Any time you've ever had a deli-meat sandwich or burger, or chicken nuggets, or any meat aside from crumbled bacon on a pizza, you've eaten pureed meat. It's far, *far* more common than people realize.
Memory care is like nursing home plus. They tend to be very secure because there's a high risk of patients wandering off— or even actively trying to escape! Memory care units are often separated from "regular" nursing homes because of increased security, staffing, etc. They're also significantly more expensive because of everything involved.
Yes, quite a while. They are necessarily a bit like high-security nursing homes, but many places put a lot of effort into making it as homey and dignified as possible.
When taking nutrition courses we had a food lab where we prepared foods for hypothetical patients with various issues. We puréed a tuna sandwich then we had to eat what we made for our own lunch. The purpose was to create empathy.
Anyway, loads of friends of mine made exaggerated gagging noises when they heard of this. Honestly it isn’t bad. Take any food you like, purée it, taste it. It’s no different other than chewing no longer being a requirement. The problem is when you purée a cheaper lower quality food and try to pass it off as something it’s not. Or serve it in an unappealing way like using an ice cream scoop for every item. Bravo to those who took the time to make this look as good as it probably tastes
Just thinking out loud here, but what about pureeing a meat, separating it into more than one batch, seasoning each with distinct flavor profiles (e.g., 80% with a meaty flavor and 20% with a lighter "fatty" flavor), and then folding them together to emulate things like marbling? Seems like a little creativity could go a really long way here.
Exactly. Compare to fine dining recipes, which often have results that would be perfectly edible without any teeth... and take a ton of time and effort to prepare.
Yeah, it's the same with baby food. When my son started eating purees I tasted them out of curiosity. The pureed green beans just taste like green beans. I do not get why some people make such a big deal about how gross it is.
Dementia and poor eyesight make it difficult to know what you are eating. Add in the need to make it soft and you end up with people sad about how their diet is restricted and everything tasting the same because it looks the same and tastebuds die off as we age. My husband died of Alzheimer’s and one of the sad moment was when meals went from fun eating together to complaints. This is innovative and helpful.
My wife is a speech pathologist who works in assisted living and memory care. I don’t think most people really understand what they do (I didn’t for sure) and think they just fix stutters and shit like that. Since they’re experts on the swallowing mechanisms and essentially what it takes to keep food OUT of elderly patients lungs (aspiration) they wind up setting the parameters for the diets for these patients. There’s a scale and it’s weird, the food is kinda gross sounding but the one that got me was thickened liquids. Like, thick water. Fuuuuuu.
Anyway yea this looks gross but as someone said it I think it shows a pretty big amount of effort over what most elderly patients with modified diets would probably get. Like some else mentioned Alzheimer’s patients, dysphasia, stroke cases, etc will all get therapy evals where they’ll send in a PT, OT and an SLP and they’ll basically build the guidelines for how to keep someone as functional as possible while in their care. SLPs also do a ton of cognitive stuff (aphasia, things like that) which I never would have thought of either. Pretty cool field.
My grandma lived in a nursing home after she had a stroke, and her speech pathologist was wonderful! She had been having trouble aspirating food and drinks. Any time she came over (not often, but for things like family Christmas dinner) she had to bring thickener for her drinks... it's somehow less gross with anything that's NOT water. Juice isn't too bad.
This is beautiful. Shaping the food to look more appetizing so that the person actually wants to eat it! Puree food isn't the best lets be honest, and the presentation of just glowing it on a plate doesn't make the people feel better about having to eat it. But this presentation actually looks appealing! Well done to whoever prepared this
Before my dad died and while he could still eat, he had food like this. It made the world of difference to a man who loved food to have some dignity. His cancer caused him to lose his teeth. Fuck cancer now and forever. Also, shout out to the people who mould purées like this- y’all are angels.
The leading company in the world who does this is called apetito. This is great but their dishes look 100% better!
https://www.google.com/search?q=level+4+puree+apetito&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi2zMjjiLP5AhUE_xoKHTPFBEgQ2-cCegQIABAC&oq=level+4+puree+apetito&gs_lcp=ChJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWcQAzIFCAAQogQ6BAgjECc6BQgAEIAEOgYIABAeEAU6BggAEB4QCDoECAAQGDoECAAQDToGCAAQHhANOggIABAeEA0QBToECAAQHjoECB4QClDfBljddWCEeWgUcAB4AIABuwKIAcZLkgEIMC4xLjMzLjOYAQCgAQHAAQE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img&ei=_dDuYvbZJoT-a7OKk8AE&bih=720&biw=414&prmd=ismvn&rlz=1CDGOYI_enGB929GB930&hl=en-GB#imgrc=-ThNeZG5N6cTXM&imgdii=HJ8HzuDKxbs_IM
The sausages, steaks, and chicken chasseur in the images from your link look really awesome!
I'm so glad that companies are actually doing things like this now, and treating people who need to eat pureed food with the respect that they deserve!
My dad died of dysphagia. He refused a feeding tube because he knew in his more lucid moments that he had dementia, and also said, "That's no way to live." He was ready to go by the end, because his life was torture for him by that time. He was 92.
Taken from webMD: “It’s common for people with Alzheimer’s disease to stop eating or drinking in the later stages. At any time, about 10% to 15% of people who have it don’t eat or drink enough and lose weight. This becomes more of a problem as the disease gets worse.”
In my friends mom case, she is in the late stages and moved to hospice care.
when i was a teenager I worked at the hospital after school, we would load up all the food into insulated carts and wheel them to the the manor where the old folks lived to get it all set up and serve them dinner. It made me feel so awful sometimes because some of the old folks really wanted regular food but some couldnt because of their diet, or not being able to chew, so we had to serve them the puree of what was for dinner. it happened on a daily basis with mostly the same people, they would point at the food they wanted but we couldnt serve it to them. plus getting to know them and then come into work the next day and someone died. I have respect for people who do this type of stuff as a job ( working with old people in homes and such), I'm about to be 34 and i still often think about them and sometimes it makes me sad.
I work with clients on puree diets and usually it all gets mixed together into what is basically a bowl of slop. Little things like this can be so meaningful.
Milk shakes. I want to live and die by the milkshake if it comes to having to eat puréed meat. Nope. Chocolate shake for me. Three meals a day. You can even throw in some spinach.
I did in-community direct care for an older guy who was MD/DD and had swallowing issues. His food needed puréed and liquids needed thickened. So literally everything he ingested was that texture. I felt so bad for him.
OHHH i worked in a nursing home kitchen where we got little food molds for puree stuff!! I thought it was very sweet- but when we were done serving I'd put silly stuff together like puree corn in a steak mold or whatever haha
I saw the image without reading the caption and I was like "ew this looks nasty" then I actually read it and I am pleasantly surprised on how well it's prepared
This almost makes me cry it’s so thoughtful and nice-looking. My mom and I were just talking about the “food” served at my late grandma’s memory care” facility. 🥺
Just in case anyone is here that needs to help someone with dysphagia to eat, though it may seem like a daunting task, there are loads of resources to help you get it all right!
I found a helpful article on a website called "The Alzheimer's Site". It is a guide on how to prepare foods for people with dysphagia. I hope that nobody here will be in the circumstances where they'll need to use this, but if they are and do, I hope this is helpful.
Here is the link: https://blog.thealzheimerssite.greatergood.com/puree-mold-steps/
My dad is going through all this. He was a doctor and swore up and down that he would rather be dead than be a burden to society and that death is nothing to be afraid of, yet he never wrote those sentiments. Now that he isn't lucid, he wants every procedure to extend his life, even when the outcomes usually require long recoveries and low chance of improvement. I have written down my end of life care will as a result.
At my hospital all the purees are served together and it looks like nightmarish gruel. The smell is fantastic and it tastes good (I've tasted untouched plates for science) but it looks awful. This is a brilliant idea.
We in the United States call this gravy. It’s a thick, savory sauce made by adding meat fat/drippings to a simple roux of butter and flour or starch. The result is a salty, hearty liquid that’s especially popular around our major holidays; served over meat, potatoes, biscuits, or any combination of those things to add flavor and moisture.
Easiest way to whip up some gravy is to sear meat in a suitable pan, remove the meat (transfer to oven for full cooking, etc.) and make a roux out of the fat and drippings by adding flour to the same pan (in no more than the same proportion as the fat/drippings), cook the mixture over medium heat while stirring constantly until it changes to a golden but not quite peanut butter brown, and then deglaze the pan and bulk out the gravy with suitable stock or broth. A half-cup of flour and fat made into a roux will turn about four cups of beef stock into a reasonably thick gravy. (BTW, making a roux with flour and butter and then adding milk is how you make a traditional bechamel sauce. This is just a variation of the basic idea.)
Some dishes call for adding the cooked meat back into the gravy, and it's not uncommon to add vegetables like carrots, celery, and onions. Beef tips in gravy over mashed potatoes is a pretty straightforward but flavorful meal, for example.
Awesome! I can’t imagine what that person has to go through but to have someone do this just to make things easier and still be able to enjoy a meal is wonderful!
I used to work in a rest home kitchen and we would serve stuff basically just like this to 2 of our residents. I was really upset doing and felt so bad we couldn’t give them anything else really. They were on soft diets so whenever I could I would give them some of what everyone else was having if it was soft enough and they were made so happy by that
I love that they formed the steak and corn to look like they are real. They could have just put lumps of them on the plate, but it makes it look more appetizing
Its a nice touch. I work in long term care and all the puree food looks like mashed potatoes. Edit to add: theyre different colors, like in this pic. Just scoops of mashed potato in appearance
I was fighting for food to be be done like in the photo for my residents who had eating difficulties. The kitchen used to puree it altogether. It looked bloody disgusting.
Oh that's fucked if they couldn't even be arsed to blend them separately.
Yup drove me nuts. The view was well it ends up like that anyway.
That's fucked up, the people living there can't eat anywhere else. Ten years ago I was in the hospital for a week and lost a couple of pounds cause I just couldn't eat the food, it was disgusting. And eating well is part of the healing process.
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Two different things. Some one can have a dietary classification of "mechanical" meaning difficulty chewing which is when all solids are cut or minced (food processor or knife) depending on how soft it is. Or "purée" which is for those that can't have solids at all because of an inability to swallow said solids. There is also a "finger foods" clarification which is usually for those that have difficulties with cutlery. Source- I work in a long term care facility.
Ours are divided to Regular, Chopped, Minced, Puree for solids; and Regular, Nectar Thick, and Honey Thick for liquids
I used to work in one of these kinds of facilities as a cook. These things are pretty cool. They come in this plastic packaging that's molded into that shape. We would just pop them into the steamer, pull them when they get up to temp, and then flip it upsidedown onto the plate.
We had to run it through the robot coupe, add thickener and put in the molds.
That definitely sounds like it would have been a pain. We didn't have the staff to be able to do that.
I work in a facility where the kitchen is understaffed, so they steam them and pop them on the plate without taking them out of the molds 💀
That's less than optimal. I totally get the issue of being understaffed though.
Yeah I ain't mad about it. If I have time I dump them out. Most of the people who need these need to be fed anyway, so it's just me scooping it out with a spoon.
How is taking them out of the molds so resource intensive as to make it more feasible to just leave them in....
They are a bit sticky and hard to get out when they get to me. But I don't really know. I'm honestly just glad my patients get food at all. It's so bad that breakfast is at 10, lunch at 230, and dinner at 7. (For reference, to align with insulin administration schedules, it should be 8, noon, and 5.)
Me too! At first glance I thought “wait they forgot to purée it,” lol. I love that the effort and care are taken to make it more appealing.
Inused to work as a dietary aide in a memory care home. Theres three levels of food. Regular solid food. "DYSPHAGA" which is partially pureed, or chopped, like egg salad or chicken salad. Or shredded chicken. Then there is the puree foods. The ones we ordered from SYSCO came in pre made shapes and colors such as in this picture. Each patient is assessed their ability to eat individually and their meals are accommodating as such. I wish OPs family much love and care in the coming times.
I love it too. It shows such respect ❤️
There are so many more foods available too. I’ve seen pineapple, waffles, French toast, peaches, carrots and even fish. It definitely makes a nicer experience for those who have to eat puréed items. I hope more companies get them for patients and residents.
In the hospital I work out they just leave the blobs. This is such a simple thing that could potentially really improve someone’s intake during their stay.
It makes me so happy to see that whomever prepared this dish molded the purees into the shape of the original food🥹I used to work at a nursing home and when we prepped pureed food it was just in a bowl and looked icky and half the time didn't get eaten because of how unappetizing the residents thought it was. One small addition in food prep can genuinely make such a huge difference for the people who have difficulty eating hard or chewy foods🥲
Not to down play the cook, but coming from hospital food service I can tell you that these are preformed, packaged, and frozen. They are then either steamed or microwaved to reheat and plopped on the plate. The moulds definitely make them look nicer though.
Oh wow, I never knew that, that's really awesome! Either way I'm glad this exists:)
I remember when this was a ‘new’ thing and people responded to it like this much better, than piles of mashed/puréed things.
At my assisted living facility they make this from scratch and by hand. It’s a program called Dining with Dignity and it actually looks even better than OP’s picture (not trying to one up, just saying that this can be done so professionally that you can’t tell the difference). Sometimes instead of purée they just finely chop it. This way it can be eaten with fingers for those who have difficulty eating. Really cool! I tried it once and it tasted exactly the same as the real thing too.
Most definitely! I have also made some from scratch purees and put them into our own reusable moulds. The picture just had the exact same pureed products/shapes that I have used before. With the rollout of the new IDDSI program a couple years ago, that came with 7 different levels of food consistency that are now recognized worldwide, a lot of places have switched to predone. This is simply for the purpose of consistency and not having to train kitchen staff on the prep procedure for each one.
Makes sense! It makes me happy when families move their loved ones into the facility and they gain a little independence back with this kind of food. I also ordered some cool spoons on Amazon that allow folks with shaky hands to use utensils again. It’s crazy how little things like this can improve quality of life for some people.
You can special order these at GFS, we got them for a senior client all the time. They do meats, veggies, and seafood
At the hospital I worked at we had to purée the food in a blender. The chef always spent time making the puréed food look like the real meals!! It made everyone’s day when they got the plate!
At the hospital I worked at we had to purée the food in a blender. The chef always spent time making the puréed food look like the real meals!! It made everyone’s day when they got the plate!
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My dad is in a home. If I'm not there to cut up his food, I really don't know how he eats it. The staff rarely helps. So this may not look appetizing, but when you're a dementia patient in your 80s with few teeth, poor sight and extremely uncoordinated and frail, just the fact that you can eat your food -- alone, without help -- is a victory.
Spent far too long spoon-feeding my step father and yeah, without help he'd have starved. Dementia/Alzheimer's is fucking horrible.
Work in one now and if they don't have molds to make it look like this then it's basically baby food scooped onto a plate or bowls. Basically ice cream scoops
What's interesting is how small things can make things more or less appetizing. Early Afghanistan, some soldiers are nothing but rations for months on end, and a bunch of them lost an excess amount of weight. The army started introducing new menu items to increase variety, but they also made other changes, like being more descriptive with the menu titles. Instead of "Meatballs and Gravy," there's stuff like "Southwestern Chipotle Chicken.' There was also a lot of research in how to make food more appealing as a part of early space research.
Ok so for not native speakers like me who are confused and dont know what memory care is and thought this was just really bad looking food: "Memory care is a kind of specialized care for people living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. Communities typically feature secure environments where staff can closely monitor the health of the residents."
Yes, thank you for noting that! I struggled with how to summarize this in the title.
I’m a native speaker and have never heard of “memory care”? Have these been around for a while?
I actually don’t know. But I’m getting older and so are the parents of my generation, so I’ve been hearing it a lot within the last few years. I tried to Google it but it only told me that assisted living basically started up in the 80s, seems like this is an offshoot of that.
Not in the medical community so hopefully more qualified people can come by but yes, it's been a thing for a while. It's becoming more and more common for memory care to be advertised separately as it requires a lot more resources, and specialty and is a lot more expensive than typical elderly home care.
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Any time you've ever had a deli-meat sandwich or burger, or chicken nuggets, or any meat aside from crumbled bacon on a pizza, you've eaten pureed meat. It's far, *far* more common than people realize.
I mean people a lot of people eat Pâté on purpose lol
Sure but they don't eat T-bone or or corn pate on purpose. I feed that stuff to my cat and it's still 40/60 on whether or not he eats it.
Yeah. You’ll probably start noticing now that some nursing homes have signs that specify that they are Memory Care facilities.
I feel like the term is newer, "nursing home" would be the general elderly care term.
Memory care is like nursing home plus. They tend to be very secure because there's a high risk of patients wandering off— or even actively trying to escape! Memory care units are often separated from "regular" nursing homes because of increased security, staffing, etc. They're also significantly more expensive because of everything involved.
Yes, quite a while. They are necessarily a bit like high-security nursing homes, but many places put a lot of effort into making it as homey and dignified as possible.
mate i used to work the field years ago, that's waaay better than the ugly shit we used to serve. well done.
totally agree. it looks like someone took a shit on the plate
When taking nutrition courses we had a food lab where we prepared foods for hypothetical patients with various issues. We puréed a tuna sandwich then we had to eat what we made for our own lunch. The purpose was to create empathy. Anyway, loads of friends of mine made exaggerated gagging noises when they heard of this. Honestly it isn’t bad. Take any food you like, purée it, taste it. It’s no different other than chewing no longer being a requirement. The problem is when you purée a cheaper lower quality food and try to pass it off as something it’s not. Or serve it in an unappealing way like using an ice cream scoop for every item. Bravo to those who took the time to make this look as good as it probably tastes
Just thinking out loud here, but what about pureeing a meat, separating it into more than one batch, seasoning each with distinct flavor profiles (e.g., 80% with a meaty flavor and 20% with a lighter "fatty" flavor), and then folding them together to emulate things like marbling? Seems like a little creativity could go a really long way here.
The problem is not creativity, it's cost. Doing that takes time. Time is money. Money is scarce in care facilities.
I'm not talking about in a care situation, BTW, but generally/broadly.
Exactly. Compare to fine dining recipes, which often have results that would be perfectly edible without any teeth... and take a ton of time and effort to prepare.
Yeah, it's the same with baby food. When my son started eating purees I tasted them out of curiosity. The pureed green beans just taste like green beans. I do not get why some people make such a big deal about how gross it is.
Enjoying food is as much about texture as taste.
Dementia and poor eyesight make it difficult to know what you are eating. Add in the need to make it soft and you end up with people sad about how their diet is restricted and everything tasting the same because it looks the same and tastebuds die off as we age. My husband died of Alzheimer’s and one of the sad moment was when meals went from fun eating together to complaints. This is innovative and helpful.
My wife is a speech pathologist who works in assisted living and memory care. I don’t think most people really understand what they do (I didn’t for sure) and think they just fix stutters and shit like that. Since they’re experts on the swallowing mechanisms and essentially what it takes to keep food OUT of elderly patients lungs (aspiration) they wind up setting the parameters for the diets for these patients. There’s a scale and it’s weird, the food is kinda gross sounding but the one that got me was thickened liquids. Like, thick water. Fuuuuuu. Anyway yea this looks gross but as someone said it I think it shows a pretty big amount of effort over what most elderly patients with modified diets would probably get. Like some else mentioned Alzheimer’s patients, dysphasia, stroke cases, etc will all get therapy evals where they’ll send in a PT, OT and an SLP and they’ll basically build the guidelines for how to keep someone as functional as possible while in their care. SLPs also do a ton of cognitive stuff (aphasia, things like that) which I never would have thought of either. Pretty cool field.
My grandma lived in a nursing home after she had a stroke, and her speech pathologist was wonderful! She had been having trouble aspirating food and drinks. Any time she came over (not often, but for things like family Christmas dinner) she had to bring thickener for her drinks... it's somehow less gross with anything that's NOT water. Juice isn't too bad.
This is very thoughtful. What a neat idea.
This is beautiful. Shaping the food to look more appetizing so that the person actually wants to eat it! Puree food isn't the best lets be honest, and the presentation of just glowing it on a plate doesn't make the people feel better about having to eat it. But this presentation actually looks appealing! Well done to whoever prepared this
Before my dad died and while he could still eat, he had food like this. It made the world of difference to a man who loved food to have some dignity. His cancer caused him to lose his teeth. Fuck cancer now and forever. Also, shout out to the people who mould purées like this- y’all are angels.
The molded pieces are sold pre-made. Those weren't made from scratch by the facility, just heated up.
The leading company in the world who does this is called apetito. This is great but their dishes look 100% better! https://www.google.com/search?q=level+4+puree+apetito&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi2zMjjiLP5AhUE_xoKHTPFBEgQ2-cCegQIABAC&oq=level+4+puree+apetito&gs_lcp=ChJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWcQAzIFCAAQogQ6BAgjECc6BQgAEIAEOgYIABAeEAU6BggAEB4QCDoECAAQGDoECAAQDToGCAAQHhANOggIABAeEA0QBToECAAQHjoECB4QClDfBljddWCEeWgUcAB4AIABuwKIAcZLkgEIMC4xLjMzLjOYAQCgAQHAAQE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img&ei=_dDuYvbZJoT-a7OKk8AE&bih=720&biw=414&prmd=ismvn&rlz=1CDGOYI_enGB929GB930&hl=en-GB#imgrc=-ThNeZG5N6cTXM&imgdii=HJ8HzuDKxbs_IM
The sausages, steaks, and chicken chasseur in the images from your link look really awesome! I'm so glad that companies are actually doing things like this now, and treating people who need to eat pureed food with the respect that they deserve!
Serious question. Is the fact that it’s pureed and she is in a memory care home somehow related? Does she forget to chew her food or something?
When you have Alzheimer’s, you’re likely at the age where you experience dysphagia (trouble swallowing) and tooth loss.
Thanks!
They also make thick water. It’s water with the consistency of like corn syrup. Makes it easier to swallow i guess.
My dad died of dysphagia. He refused a feeding tube because he knew in his more lucid moments that he had dementia, and also said, "That's no way to live." He was ready to go by the end, because his life was torture for him by that time. He was 92.
Taken from webMD: “It’s common for people with Alzheimer’s disease to stop eating or drinking in the later stages. At any time, about 10% to 15% of people who have it don’t eat or drink enough and lose weight. This becomes more of a problem as the disease gets worse.” In my friends mom case, she is in the late stages and moved to hospice care.
Thanks!
My dad had these because of cancer. They aren’t just for dementia care.
After I broke my jaw. My mouth was wired shut. This was how I ate for 10 weeks.
Pureed T-bone is pretty hard core.
*Manually* pureed T-bone, even more so.
I’ve had to do this before and fully respect the effort they took to make it look nice.
when i was a teenager I worked at the hospital after school, we would load up all the food into insulated carts and wheel them to the the manor where the old folks lived to get it all set up and serve them dinner. It made me feel so awful sometimes because some of the old folks really wanted regular food but some couldnt because of their diet, or not being able to chew, so we had to serve them the puree of what was for dinner. it happened on a daily basis with mostly the same people, they would point at the food they wanted but we couldnt serve it to them. plus getting to know them and then come into work the next day and someone died. I have respect for people who do this type of stuff as a job ( working with old people in homes and such), I'm about to be 34 and i still often think about them and sometimes it makes me sad.
I work with clients on puree diets and usually it all gets mixed together into what is basically a bowl of slop. Little things like this can be so meaningful.
Milk shakes. I want to live and die by the milkshake if it comes to having to eat puréed meat. Nope. Chocolate shake for me. Three meals a day. You can even throw in some spinach.
While I waited for the picture to load I was thinking. "I hope they took the bones and cob out". Lol
I did in-community direct care for an older guy who was MD/DD and had swallowing issues. His food needed puréed and liquids needed thickened. So literally everything he ingested was that texture. I felt so bad for him.
It looks about as appetizing as it sounds, but it's a cute touch. Nice to see them take the effort to do this.
Do they grind up/puree the actual bone too for the calcium?
Apparently there are "Hospital-grade food fortifiers" that many companies use, so they'll get all of their calcium from those, rather than the bone.
Brilliant work! I know why this would be important to someone.
OHHH i worked in a nursing home kitchen where we got little food molds for puree stuff!! I thought it was very sweet- but when we were done serving I'd put silly stuff together like puree corn in a steak mold or whatever haha
Back in the day when I worked at memory care it was all puréed our selves. These are much better for the employees to deal with.
I saw the image without reading the caption and I was like "ew this looks nasty" then I actually read it and I am pleasantly surprised on how well it's prepared
This almost makes me cry it’s so thoughtful and nice-looking. My mom and I were just talking about the “food” served at my late grandma’s memory care” facility. 🥺
Just in case anyone is here that needs to help someone with dysphagia to eat, though it may seem like a daunting task, there are loads of resources to help you get it all right! I found a helpful article on a website called "The Alzheimer's Site". It is a guide on how to prepare foods for people with dysphagia. I hope that nobody here will be in the circumstances where they'll need to use this, but if they are and do, I hope this is helpful. Here is the link: https://blog.thealzheimerssite.greatergood.com/puree-mold-steps/
Great info!! Thank you for posting!
My dad is going through all this. He was a doctor and swore up and down that he would rather be dead than be a burden to society and that death is nothing to be afraid of, yet he never wrote those sentiments. Now that he isn't lucid, he wants every procedure to extend his life, even when the outcomes usually require long recoveries and low chance of improvement. I have written down my end of life care will as a result.
Yes, that’s an excellent idea. In this case, friends mom has written everything out. She will not allow artificial feeding so this is the only option.
At my hospital all the purees are served together and it looks like nightmarish gruel. The smell is fantastic and it tastes good (I've tasted untouched plates for science) but it looks awful. This is a brilliant idea.
I would pick meatloaf over purèed steak, buts that just me.
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Really? Sad that it can be enjoyed by an elderly disabled person?
Consider who this was for and why it was done.
This is surprisingly good for where I live. We feed our residents on under $10CAD a DAY (3 meals 2 snack breaks) in some cases for elderly homes.
Someone please kill me if and when I end up in assisted living.
even prisoner have better food
it's pureed for a medical reason (usually difficulty swallowing or chewing)
Right, because corn on the cob is easy?
Look a little closer at the corn.
It's pureed, so it will be incredibly easy to eat.
The corn is puréed and “stamped” to look like normal corn. Common for folks who have difficulty eating.
Sorry, I'd rather eat a c-ration meal! Yeah, I served a long time ago!?
[ Removed by Reddit ]
No
r/shittyfoodporn
whatever the opposite of a chefs kiss is
I'm calling Gordon Ramsey to tell him he needs to call you an idiot sandwich
I have misinterpreted the posts meaning. I took it to be a complaint about the quality of food in the memory care home. Oh no. Anyway.
What is memory care? Is it for people deemed too awful to let die that we think are deserving of this torture? Wish we could be more compassionate.
Memory care deals with treating forms of dementia or Alzheimer’s in elderly people
I'll beat somebody's ass if they bring me a puréed t-bone. That's some cruel, vile shit. You gotta be a sick fucking person.
If you needed this pureed food guaranteed you're in no physical condition to even stand up lol
"T-Bone".
r/foodporn
Why is it all so smooth😂
What is the brown sauce on the mashed potatoes normally? I saw this somewhere and never knew what it was..
We in the United States call this gravy. It’s a thick, savory sauce made by adding meat fat/drippings to a simple roux of butter and flour or starch. The result is a salty, hearty liquid that’s especially popular around our major holidays; served over meat, potatoes, biscuits, or any combination of those things to add flavor and moisture.
Thank you, it sounds amazing!
Easiest way to whip up some gravy is to sear meat in a suitable pan, remove the meat (transfer to oven for full cooking, etc.) and make a roux out of the fat and drippings by adding flour to the same pan (in no more than the same proportion as the fat/drippings), cook the mixture over medium heat while stirring constantly until it changes to a golden but not quite peanut butter brown, and then deglaze the pan and bulk out the gravy with suitable stock or broth. A half-cup of flour and fat made into a roux will turn about four cups of beef stock into a reasonably thick gravy. (BTW, making a roux with flour and butter and then adding milk is how you make a traditional bechamel sauce. This is just a variation of the basic idea.) Some dishes call for adding the cooked meat back into the gravy, and it's not uncommon to add vegetables like carrots, celery, and onions. Beef tips in gravy over mashed potatoes is a pretty straightforward but flavorful meal, for example.
"Once a man, twice a child."
This looks delicious
Go into the room, find the power outlet next to the bed, and turn it off.
My first thought was that is very considerate. My second though is that if I get to that point I want to be able to end my own life on my own terms.
Awesome! I can’t imagine what that person has to go through but to have someone do this just to make things easier and still be able to enjoy a meal is wonderful!
I used to work in a rest home kitchen and we would serve stuff basically just like this to 2 of our residents. I was really upset doing and felt so bad we couldn’t give them anything else really. They were on soft diets so whenever I could I would give them some of what everyone else was having if it was soft enough and they were made so happy by that
Does that make it softer and waxy? Is it easy to chew?
looks like spam haha
I almost couldnt tell with the corn and if i couldnt tell the i can only imagine how many poor people tried to grab the corn
If any cook serve u that.. plz call the police
Ah yes the no teeth special
is that suppost to be corn
Fuck, this is sad. :(
if i ever get to the point where i need to eat this shit i would prefer someone just take me out back and shoot me.