Here’s a program, to get the elderly population reconnected with the world of younger children, food was the link between the generations here, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
The white-haired elderly rustled around the kitchens, getting the foods ready, the soups, cooked up, waited, for the younger generations of guests to come in. Seeing how a young man who’s about the same age as his grandson taking huge bites, and finishing up the meal he’d prepared, the eighty-four year-old Ton said, “So many years since I’d had such a wonderful night.” What gave Ton this long-ago sense of happiness back was the Omas Pop-up Foundation, they’d helped the elderly to use the foods, to express their love, and helped build up this bridge between the generations.
photograph from online…
The elderly years, now with the cooking designs, it can be really different. “Grandma’s Flash Kitchens” a year ago, was set up by the twenty-one year-old Mark Hendriks from the Netherlands a year ago, back then, he was still a student, once after sharing what he’d gotten on a trip with his own grandmother, she’d told him, “It’d been three days since anybody had, talked to me.”, and he’d started thinking of ways, to help reduce that sense of loneliness in the elderly population, and, in his business school sessions, he’d brought up the idea of Grandma’s Flash Kitchen.
Grandma’s Flash Kitchen works with the local community’s elderly activities centers and the nursing homes, recruited the elderly who loved to cook, with the professional chefs by their sides, the elderly worked as head chefs, and shared their best dishes, then, they’d had the members of the younger generations, to pay to dine there, sharing the life experiences with one another. And this sort of cross-generation kitchen had allowed the lonely elderly population to gain more contacts with the community and have more chances to socialize.
At first, the founder of the program worried that the younger and the older generations would have nothing to talk about, but having food as the best connector, “I’d found, that I’d worried in excess.” In less than a year, the program had gotten the sponsorships from the local restaurants and chain supermarkets. He’d believed, that for the elderly generation, the emotional connections are way more important than the physical needs, cooking and eating together helps established that bond.
So, this program stemmed from the needs of the elderly, and this man who’d founded this program is right on the money in his beliefs of helping the elderly population getting reconnected with the world outside, and, what better to share with each other than food???