When your parent stops eating, the food from home matters more than you think

You start noticing it slowly. A plate comes back to the kitchen almost untouched. The yogurt you bought, the one she used to eat every morning, has been in the fridge for a week. She tells you she is not hungry, that she ate earlier, that she will eat later, and later does not come. You buy the kind of nutrition shakes the pharmacy recommends. They sit on the side. You try the meal-delivery service that the GP mentioned. The meals come, the meals go back. You begin to count the meals she has refused like you used to count her medications.

Then, by accident, you make her something from your own childhood. The soup she used to make on Saturdays. The plain dal your father always asked for. The buttered toast cut into triangles. And she eats it. Not a lot. But she eats it.

This pattern is not unusual. The Alzheimer's Society notes that appetite changes are common as dementia progresses, and that familiar tastes, smells and routines around food often help when other approaches do not (https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-support/daily-living/eating-drinking). The NHS guidance for families caring for someone with dementia is similar: stick with food the person has always known, serve at the times of day they have always eaten, and use the cues of home rather than the cues of the care plan (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/dementia/eating-and-drinking/). There is no clinical mystery here. It is the same logic that lets a person who can no longer remember their own grandchildren still hum the chorus of a hymn they sang when they were eight.

The trouble is that most of the care arrangements families fall into make this very hard. Rota-based agencies send a different carer each week. The carer who comes on Monday does not know that your mother only eats the soup if it has been seasoned the way she taught her own mother to season it. The Tuesday carer does not know that your father only drinks the tea if it is made in the pot, not the cup. By the time one carer has worked it out, they have been rotated to a different household and a new face is at the door, asking your parent what they would like for lunch.

The other problem is that families who carry a particular food culture often do not bring this up with the agency at all. It feels presumptuous. It feels like it is asking too much. Carers UK has consistently reported that families from minority ethnic communities are far more likely to provide care themselves at home, in part because the existing way of arranging care rarely places a carer who can cook the food the elder actually wants to eat (https://www.carersuk.org/policy-and-research/research/the-state-of-caring-survey/). So the daughter who works full time becomes the cook as well as the daughter, and the food from home becomes one more thing she is holding up alone.

If you are at the start of arranging care for a parent whose appetite is changing, there are a few practical things worth doing. Write down the five or six dishes your parent has eaten throughout their life, the ones they ask for when they are unwell. Note what they cannot tolerate, the textures and temperatures and smells they have always refused. If there is a particular spice mix, a particular kind of bread, a particular tea, write that down too. This is not a luxury list. It is a clinical document. Give it to whoever cares for your parent before they ever cook for them.

When you speak to a care provider, ask directly whether the same person will be coming each week and whether they can be involved in the meal that matters most, which is usually breakfast or supper. Ask whether the carer has worked with families from your background before, not because background guarantees fit, but because a carer who has cooked a Caribbean stew, or a Polish soup, or a Bengali curry in someone else's kitchen knows that the smell of the food is doing as much work as the nutrition in it. Ask what happens when your parent refuses a meal: is the response noted, raised, adjusted, or quietly written off as the elderly being fussy.

If your parent is approaching a point where they only eat a handful of things and only when they are made a particular way, that is not a sign that care is going wrong. It is a sign that care needs to be built around the food, not around the rota.

Hibant is a small London introductory care agency. We help families find a vetted carer they meet first, before any arrangement begins. When food and culture matter, we look across our roster for carers who already cook in a way the family will recognise, and we let the family choose. You can write to us at hello@hibantcare.com or visit hibantcare.com when you have a quiet half hour. We do not move quickly past the kitchen. We treat it as the room where care is actually decided.

Hibant