Let’s Talk About Breakfast
By Paul Ladewig, RD
One of our primary roles as dietitians is to make sure that the food delivered to our residents is nutritious and delicious. The nutritious part is obvious but why the delicious? According to many residents that isn’t the focus. The food needs to be delicious because if the resident doesn’t eat it, it doesn’t matter how nutritious it is. What are the reasons why the food may not be appealing? First off, in the kitchens defense, most of the diets require the kitchen to use much less salt in the cooking which is usually an abrupt change to most residents. In addition to that, many residents are also on an NAS diet which means they don’t get salt to add to the food. What exactly can we do?
Over the next few newsletters, we will be addressing techniques and tricks for cooking that can improve flavor and palatability in the facility food while not going against therapeutic diets. These lessons are a summary of the lessons that our culinary department addresses when we visit the facilities.
The topic for today is breakfast. Have you noticed that although your lunch and dinner show a great variety that seems to change even with the seasons, your breakfast always seems to stay the same? It is always a mix of the same things with only slight variations. In fact, some of the meals look horrible when delivered even with the best kitchens just because of regulations. For instance, we aren’t supposed to put cold items and hot items on the same plate. But what do we do when we have a breakfast that consists of cold cereal with a sausage patty and toast with a fruit cup? This means that the resident will receive a hot plate with a lonely sausage and toast and then a bowl with cereal and another bowl with fruit, likely smaller. This meal technically meets the needs for breakfast, I guess. But does it make a person excited for eating? There are many things we can do to change that but the issue we are going to address in this article is: What is breakfast?
It’s an odd thing really. Every building seems to offer the same breakfast but if you were to ask the residents what they eat at home it’s rarely what they are receiving. It is also very rarely being eaten at 7 in the morning. Now the issue of timing for breakfast is a much more difficult thing to change but maybe we can alter the choices. If you were to ask a group of residents that don’t seem to like breakfast, why they don’t like it you would get a large portion agreeing on one point: they don’t like breakfast food. But once again we must ask, what is breakfast food? Does it have to be some form of egg, pancake, waffle, French toast, hashbrown combination? The short answer is that the menus of today were based originally on a primarily western population and were just never changed. What changes could we make? Well, during an interview with about 20 different residents I found a few things. Some ate scrambled tofu at home with leftover chicken from the night before. Some ate stir fry with a little bowl of rice porridge. Some just ate beans and toast. Some ate a variation of ramen that was packed with protein. One group ate sauerkraut with sausage and egg. There was more variation with this group than was reflected in the menu, so how can we implement this when they are under our care? One way is to speak with menu companies and have them assemble menus to reflect this concept. However, if you have a computerized menu system, you can exchange the breakfast item with something that is from a lunch menu and then change its portion to something more reflective of a breakfast portion. I would do this one item at a time perhaps once a week since too much change all at once can be overwhelming for both the buildings and the residents. But at least you will have taken a step in trying to improve the lives of your residents. That is a great start, because after all food is love.
