Demographer David K. Foot, Professor Emeritus of economics at the University of Toronto and author of Boom Bust & Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift, tells us how demographics impacts seniors, boomers and food.
Do you feel that retirement residences are providing healthier meals these days?
Currently there’s a move toward healthier meals…which means a few of the retirement villages are moving in that direction, not the majority. Retirement villages won’t automatically implement these things if they limit the amount of material these villages have to work from. They’re trying to keep costs down. Red Seal chefs—you’re talking about the high-end retirement village which is not the average retirement village. They may be an indicator of future trends because they can afford it but most people can’t afford these kinds of villages.
Is there a misunderstanding that people will avoid a lot of the diseases of old age if they eat better?
No I don’t think so, I really don’t. I don’t have research to answer this. This is more of an opinion than a research-based answer, but the boomers are pretty well-educated. Even the poorly educated are still fairly well-educated and they certainly know that a lot of this is genetic. A lot of it may even turn out more and more to be environmental. If you’ve lived in a polluted city for 60 years of your life, you can’t take that away by simply eating fresh food. I think the boomers are well aware that their past lifestyle and their past location, some of which they had no control over—air pollution or the genes their parents gave them—those are going to have an impact if not a bigger impact than what they eat.
But I think the boomers are well aware that, as we would say in economics—at the margin, on the edges, you can make a difference by your choice of diet, and certainly the things that I’m talking about have more to do I think, with how you feel rather than extending your life or making yourself more healthy. You just feel better if you don’t have stuff tied up inside your body, in your gut, for example. And I will not be at all surprised if something like garlic becomes a major issue. Salt certainly is going to become a major issue. We use far too much salt in all our cooking and things like garlic—the human body simply can’t break it down as easily when it’s 75 or something, as when it’s 55.
Too much garlic? What about the Mediterranean diet? Isn’t it quite healthy?
Well yes, older people in those countries live well, but for example, if I go and eat in Italy or Greece, which I’ve done, I don’t smell or feel any garlic reaction whatsoever. I eat in Toronto and I am tossing and turning for the next two nights. They don’t cook here in North America the same way they cook in the Mediterranean so I think the Mediterranean diet properly brought across, where it’s just a touch of garlic rather than three cloves of garlic—that’s going to be true for a lot of us. Very small quantities to flavour, not big quantities to overpower.
Are the boomers driving the move to healthier foods in retirement residences?
This really has nothing to do with the boomers per se. The only thing different about the boomers is their numbers. The boomers aren’t unique in following a healthy lifestyle. I mean, their parents did the same thing, right? But two things are happening. One, we’re living longer so we’ve got more and more people. Life expectancy has been going up by about two years every decade, so over the last 50 years life expectancy’s gone up by about 10 years. That puts a lot more people in the older age bracket. They have more weight in society and now with the . . . boomers beginning to hit those age brackets, it’s a huge percentage of the population. The weight of that demographic is far more prevalent as you get to the older ages.
There’s nothing unique about the thinking of the boomers. Their parents would have liked to have done the same thing if only they’d lived as long. Boomers are better educated and we all have new research that’s come out over the last 30 to 40 years that helps us make those decisions. The previous generation for example, introduced packaged products. Even the pasteurization of milk in the early 1950s, these are all major advances that were put in by previous generations to make sure we didn’t die of rotting food. This is part of a very long-term trend, and all the boomers are doing is continuing the trend but because we’re living longer and because the boomers—there are so many of them—they leave a greater weight, their presence is more widely felt. It’s not like they’re better. There’s more to it than the boomers are driving this, but they’re driving it more because of their numbers than because of their attitude. Their attitude is just continuing along the trend.
Residents always complain about the food. Does your research reveal any solutions?
No, but as more and more people access these villages, other villages will probably get bigger and that means more high-rises or more windows on a low-rise. So with bigger dining rooms, you’ve got the opportunity of breaking your dining room into two or three different things, like a European dining room, an Asian dining room and for want of a better word, a North American dining room. Each one can be fed out of the same kitchen but they can be in different parts of the establishment, and then, on any particular day, regulars can choose which one they want to go to. That would provide a little bit of variety of food but also in terms of décor and location. I think you’ll begin to see the smarter retirement residences say, “Well look, we’re feeding 600 people tonight or 1,000 people. Why can’t we feed them in two batches of 500 or three batches of 350? Why can’t we do that at the same time in three different locations with three different menus?” And so I think there’s some real opportunity for creativity, and I just put one of the ideas on the table.
How is our multicultural society going to impact retirement communities and dining?
When one talks about diversity and multiculturalism, the people who are in the upper age brackets now are the immigrants of 50 years ago—so someone who’s 70 today came to Canada at age 20, 50 years ago. When you’re talking about multiculturalism, they’re likely to be in your staff. You’re likely to have more Filipino servers or Spanish-speaking chefs and waitresses and waiters. They’re less likely to be in your client group because the diversity in the client group is going to come from the immigration program of 50 years ago, which was groups like Germans, British, Dutch and Ukrainian. So the actual diversity in the client group is going to reflect the diversity of Canada 50 years earlier, and the diversity in the employed staff is going to reflect the diversity of Canada today.
It’s a real problem of communication. The Filipino probably knows nothing about the Ukrainian, and so there’s a real need to do some education—and I mean this in a very positive sense—that you come to serve in a retirement village and you educate your staff about the background of the residents. They’re taught more about Germanic food or British food or Ukrainian food, or Polish food or Dutch food and also the religion associated with them. The role of diversity, you can’t just throw it out . . . without drilling down a level and thinking about the true implications.
Diversity works in terms of staffing but also in terms of understanding—culturally, spiritually as well as gastronomically. I just find that we haven’t drilled down even one level below the surface to understand the role of diversity in both the needs of the client and the staffing.
One of the other things that can be done—it’s a little dangerous—is getting feedback from residents . . . You can put three different menus up next week and say, “For those of you who care, vote on them.” One menu gets delivered because it got the majority vote, and the other people can’t really complain because it reflected the wishes of the majority of the residents. Giving the chance for feedback that allows you to incorporate explicitly the feedback of the residents into the menu while still giving you some control, I think, is going to be part of managing the challenges of the future.
About David K. Foot
