By Jack Cumming

One of the benefits of living in a CCRC is that one no longer has to prepare meals. The everyday rituals of shopping for groceries, planning menus, preparing the food, and then cooking the meal become onerous with the years. It’s a welcome joy to arrive in a CCRC with carefree living and the freedom to pursue other interests.

For now, the emphasis is on dining in a food hall or bistro. Takeout is a lesser option. Dining programs might be enhanced, though, if they gave equality, or even primacy, to making dining at home in the more intimate setting of residential units an option on  par with mass dining.

Aging in Residence

After eighteen years of CCRC residency, I have begun to see a pattern emerge. At first, new residents love the dining hall, where they can easily meet new friends. That experience changes, though, with the aging of the population collectively and with the effects of aging individually. The consequence is that the dining hall no longer seems as attractive as it once did.

We can look at several reasons why this is so. First, with time, the dining experience, which is central to the fill-up period for a new community, tends to degrade toward food service. This is to be expected as the initial residents age. In our time, COVID and inflationary financial pressures have accelerated that degradation. Thus, CCRC dining today is generally not what it once was.

The second factor affecting dining is residents’ adaptation to the challenges they individually experience as they age. In my case, the loss of hearing acuity makes it difficult to enjoy dining in a large hall. Conversation is easier in a more intimate setting, like a resident’s home or a restaurant booth. For others, walking to a distant central dining hall may become an ordeal, or the stigma of having a walker or scooter is off-putting.

Home with Friends

The effect of these factors is that many residents prefer to dine in the quiet intimacy of their residence rather than in the collective dining hall. They may have a spouse, dine with friends, or enjoy the solitude of dining alone. Staff may think that residents should dine communally to benefit from “socialization.” That’s social engineering, i.e., deciding what’s best for other people and then manipulating them to follow the governing belief. Most people prefer to decide for themselves rather than to conform to others’ directions.

There’s a better way. It’s the “which came first, chicken or egg” dilemma. Should takeout meals be seen as an additive cost to meals served by waitstaff in a large dining hall? Or should takeout be seen as the default, and that heavily staffed dining hall be the additive?

If takeout were the only choice, there could be savings in serving costs for providers and time savings for residents who wouldn’t have to wait for their food to be served. That might lead to an upcharge for dining hall service or even a structure in which residents could opt out of dining and rely on meal delivery services or self-preparation instead.

Are You Defensive?

If such radical thinking provokes an emotionally defensive response after your many years in senior living, consider an unrelated example from book publishing. At one time, all books were published in print runs. Publishers manufactured books like any other industrial product, and readers had to buy the physical book. Then came electronic books and comfortable reading platforms like Amazon’s Kindle.

Electronic publishing is less costly than book manufacturing. That’s a threat to the traditional publishing industry, not to mention the possibility that an author like Stephen King might be able to bypass publishing altogether and go directly to readers’ electronic devices.

Many publishers, though, still consider the printed book their primary product, so they treat the costs of electronic publishing as additive. This is particularly prevalent among university publishers who, paradoxically, might be expected to benefit the most from electronic publishing.

Electronic publishing is to books as takeout meals are to dining. Traditionalists see takeout as an added cost. Some forward thinkers reverse that and see restaurant dining as the costlier choice.

Senior Living

How does this apply to senior living? That may begin to be obvious. Senior housing often starts with the retention of an architect who then designs kitchen and dining facilities into a building. The bundling of dining with residences is the core of today’s senior living.

At one time, the core of CCRC living was the commitment of lifelong care at an affordable level of cost, i.e., a Type A contract. The industry has long been moving away from that model, but still, almost universally, requires residents to pay for dining, whether they use it or not. The only option for residents is to have takeout. Takeout allows them some flexibility to improve or manage their dining at home.

Reversing Convention

Let’s say that the industry were to reverse the food-service-style dining model, and make takeout the default choice with dining venues a fallback. Those dining venues might then attract fewer takers, so they could be smaller, more intimate, and more inviting, with formats less evocative of mass feeding.

Making takeout primary could also help marketing by making dining at home more attractive. Takeout portions and options would no longer be less than those in the dining hall. Dining at home could not only be popular, but it could also be attractive.

Outside of senior living, some restaurants have adopted this model, especially since the pandemic. The pandemic elevated home life and a more integrated work/play/life balance. While some CEOs like to mandate a return to the office, those people who are lucky enough to work freelance retain life-enhancing options. Ordering dinner in is one of them.

In the restaurant business, such enterprises that put takeout first are called “casual.” Some who cling to the status quo call it “fast casual,” trying to imply that you get a better meal with “fine dining,” but obviously, takeout can also be high quality, attractive, and tasty. It doesn’t take a hovering waitperson to make dining joyful. Sometimes the intimacy of a home allows relaxation and conviviality.