The Power of Food for People with Dementia

After dementia came for my father—after he could no longer read, after he had lost his table manners, after he had started to run his fingers through his hair, as though plagued by an ungraspable thought—I began to consider whether death could sometimes be a mercy. There were so many small moments of grief: when he stuffed his glasses into his mouth, or dismantled his hearing aids, or became too agitated to sit through Thanksgiving dinner. My father was an attorney who’d once won a Supreme Court case, but when I told him, “Dad, you were a lawyer!” he looked impressed and replied, “Really?”

During one period, he would shout “Slivovitz,” the name of a plum schnapps that I can’t recall him ever drinking, and then nearly bust a gut laughing. Sometimes, when we both needed to smile, I would turn to him, poker-faced, and say, “Hey, Dad. Slivovitz!” It worked every time. I imagined the word contained a memory, maybe something about his own father, though he could never say what it was, and, for some reason, I never thought of offering him a shot. A year after his death, I still occasionally holler “Slivovitz” in his honor.

Even as details of my father’s life slipped away from him, and his speech became more garbled or nonsensical, he could always summon every lyric to his favorite old-school tunes—“Bicycle Built for Two,” “Give My Regards to Broadway”—and sing them on pitch. It was like a magic trick: for the duration of “Please don’t take my sunshine away,” he was back—happy, calm, and conversant—and might stay that way for hours.

On a bad day, when he was ninety-five, I watched as he tore paper napkins into ever-tinier shreds, periodically moaning, “I want to go home! I want to go home!” I wasn’t sure where—or when—home was. Those were not questions that he could answer.

That night, feeling despondent, I asked my oldest brother, David, “What kind of quality of life does he have?”

David was quiet for a moment. “I know what you mean,” he finally said. “But then, the other day, I brought him a hot dog and he enjoyed it so much. He kept saying, ‘Mmm-mmm! Boy, this is good!’ He was smiling and laughing and talking. It was like it snapped him back to himself.”

I thought of our conversation when, earlier this summer, I heard that Jake Broder, a playwright and actor who most recently appeared in “The Patient,” was organizing a curious kind of recurring meal with the help of the Global Brain Health Institute, which conducts dementia research. Broder, a fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, campus of the institute, would interview four people with mild to moderate cognitive impairment, drawing out the story of a food that they remembered fondly. He would then work with Gloria Aguirre, the institute’s community-engagement manager, to help them re-create the dishes. Finally, participants would recount their tales to an audience of friends and staff members as they all shared the food. The larger goal of the Dinner Party, as Broder calls the event, was to explore the power of food in triggering memories, improving quality of life, and enhancing neuroplasticity—things that are difficult to achieve with medicines.

On the day before the inaugural Dinner Party, I visited the Adult Day Health Center in the historically Black neighborhood of Bayview, San Francisco, where the gathering would take place. In a nondescript room, twenty-five or so regulars ate nutritious, if uninspired, meals from cardboard trays. In the back kitchen, however, the preparations for tomorrow’s feast had begun. A man named Michael, who wore a Darth Vader baseball cap because he looked a little like the actor James Earl Jones, was holding forth from his wheelchair on the correct way to marinate twenty-six Cornish game hens. (It involved Grand Marnier and lemon juice.) Broder and Aguirre were there, too, squeezing citrus and sprinkling garlic powder between crisp outbursts of “Yes, Chef!”

Like many of the center’s clients, Michael was referred here by his medical team in the hope that it would deepen his connection to others and prevent him from becoming homebound. I was surprised to learn from the staff that, before being tapped to contribute to the Dinner Party, Michael was not especially talkative, sometimes napped in his wheelchair, and had never mentioned a career in restaurants. Now he reeled off stories about his father, a chef for the Southern Pacific Railroad who had taught Michael his trade and “cooked for the President of the United States.” Michael can’t recall which President that might have been, but his father, he said, “was the only one who would cook for him—he wouldn’t let no one else!” The Cornish hens would be tomorrow’s entrée. The rest of the menu included appetizers of potato salad, hot links, and gumbo; and a dessert of lemon-curd pie. (It seems that no one chose vegetables as their Proustian madeleine.)

Research suggests that creative activities, such as drawing or dancing, can reduce anxiety, depression, and agitation in dementia patients; by contributing to the formation of new neural pathways, they may also help slow the progress of Alzheimer’s. Musical memory, in particular, appears to be independent of the regions of the brain that dementia afflicts first—which is probably why my own father could sing even when he struggled to speak. There’s something intuitive about the idea that a beloved food, something as simple as a hot dog, could have a similar animating effect—perhaps activating dormant neurons, or providing a tether of continuity to one’s past.

Broder, who had been stress-chewing a stick of gum as he sous-chefed, excused himself from the kitchen to meet with a slightly built woman with a pixie haircut. Miss Peche, as she introduced herself, had chosen the lemon-curd pie, recalling how her mother would serve her an after-school slice with a tall, cold glass of milk. She never got the recipe but had been working to duplicate it with the sister of one of the center’s staff. “What I loved yesterday,” Broder told her, “was how you talked about that feeling of sweetness—not only the sweetness of the pie but the sweetness of feeling loved when you were eating it.”

“I was!” Miss Peche said. “My parents gave me everything. I was a picky, picky child.”

Broder told Miss Peche that he would summarize her main points on a notecard, the closest that the Dinner Party would have to a script. At first, Miss Peche resisted, wanting to freestyle, but with a little nudging she agreed. “My biggest thing is that I’ll enjoy that pie,” she said. “And I will tell you how it tastes!”

By noon the next day, the center’s main room had been transformed: the laminate tables were covered with silver-speckled paper tablecloths, plastic flatware was rolled in matching napkins, and there were plastic cups with silvery rims. In place of the usual soul-music playlist—Al Green, James Brown, Tower of Power—the instrumental intro of the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” played on repeat, building anticipation. Four volunteers from the institute would wait tables for forty-odd attendees—clients of the center, plus a few researchers and clinicians, who were eager to see patients away from the formality of a medical office.

When the Dinner Party finally began, closer to lunch than supper, Cheryl, who was in her early seventies, stood first, to wild applause. She clutched a notecard and looked resplendent in sequined leggings, turquoise hoop earrings, and fluffy sandals. In the heat of the moment, she forgot to mention what potato salad meant to her—her mom filled sandwiches with it on Sundays, to eat on the way to church—but she reminisced about the barbeque pit that she and her late husband once owned, not far from where we were sitting. Hot links were a house specialty. She’d passed the recipe on to her son, who owns a food truck, and he’d provided today’s batch.

The next course, gumbo, posed a problem: the woman who was supposed to introduce it, Laura, was nowhere to be found. Broder had to stand up and explain that, at the last minute, her brother had taken her to Sacramento to visit a relative. Instead, Broder projected a video of his interviews with her on a screen. Laura, one of the few white women at the center, had salt-and-pepper hair and dark-lined eyes beneath tortoiseshell glasses. In the video, she explained that gumbo was actually a more recent memory: her best friend at the center, whom she called Niecey, had introduced it to her. It was something special that they liked to share, until Niecey grew too sick to eat it. Laura gave it up, too, in a gesture of solidarity.

The gumbo came around, as rich and peppery and earthy as anyone could want. Then Chef Michael, as he was known now, rose to whoops of excitement. He talked for a while about his father’s career and his own.

“A good meal is intimacy and love,” he said. “And I have a lot of love. Oh, my God, I do.”