Council on Aging embraces local food producers for its senior meals program.
Some folks simply don’t have the immeasurable luxury of knowing where their next meal is coming from. Others don’t have the simple mobility required to get out and secure the fixings. That’s where Sonoma County’s Meals on Wheels has been a lifesaver for more than four decades, making a daily connection with homebound seniors. It is a heart-wrenching fact that 65 percent of those who receive a daily lunch from the program rely on it for half of their daily nutritional allowance (instead of the normal one-third it’s traditionally expected to fulfill). Worse, more than one-eighth of those served count that meal is their only sustenance of the day.
The local Council on Aging’s Senior Nutrition program supplies approximately 1,000 noontime meals each day in Sonoma County; of that, 750 are delivered to individual homes via Meals on Wheels. And now it does it in a manner that’s, well, so Sonoma County. In January 2011, local restaurateur Josef Keller joined as consulting chef to oversee a revamp of the program’s outdated recipes and reliance on pre-packaged ingredients in favor of enhanced flavor and a focus on local providers.
“We’ve reformatted our approach to our meals,” says chef Charles Linder, who was recently hired by COA as the new head of kitchen operations and business development to supervise the transition. “We used to work from canned foods and pre-packaged items, which was fine up to a point. But we’re now seeking out local producers and doing everything from scratch. The whole point of Meals on Wheels is for people to eat better food that’s more healthy for them.
“The simple fact of the matter is, fresh food is of better quality than packaged or canned food. It’s fresher, it’s better for you, and it tastes better. This change was really a matter of reminding ourselves that we work for ourselves and our neighbors, and not for Del Monte. Nothing against Del Monte, but this is a better way of doing things.”
Part of Linder’s job is to modify old recipes and create new ones for the lunches that are delivered to seniors with limited mobility. “We’re doing a Swiss turkey chili that people really like, along with a ginger pork that’s just spicy enough to engage the taste buds without being overwhelming. We have a vegetarian quiche, and meatloaf is one of those standard comfort foods that pretty much everyone likes. Another favorite is what we call chicken fiesta, a really good enchilada-like, pie-like lunch.”
It helps that he has his own kitchen to work with. “Meals on Wheels used to have to work out of the Senior Center kitchen over by the fairgrounds,” says Linder, a native Californian who grew up in Patterson (near Turlock in Stanislaus County). “But when the Council on Aging decided to expand a few years ago, it built a whole new ‘campus’ here on Kawana Springs Road [near Santa Rosa Avenue, not far from Costco].”
Do what you love
Linder became a chef after quitting high school in frustration. “I asked my math teacher, ‘How do you find pi?’ He either couldn’t or wouldn’t give me an answer, and I really wasn’t learning anything new, so I just walked away [from Patterson High School] as a junior.” He got his GED and headed for the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, where he found satisfaction in kitchen creations.
“When I finished the culinary academy, I worked for a few different restaurants in the Los Angeles area then hopped on a cruise ship: Alaska Sightseeing Cruises West. They weren’t very large ships, and you were stuck in a little room with one window from 4 a.m. until 10 p.m. And I loved it! It’s funny to look back on it now, but you had very little personal time, no place to spend your money and you worked six weeks on, without a day off, then had two weeks off. At 25 years old, it was exactly what I needed. I did the cruise work for three seasons. When I was told I needed more education to advance, I took the money I’d saved and went to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and earned my degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management in three years. I’d earned a lot of the credits I needed from my work experience.”
He returned to the Los Angeles area, where he handled food service at Children’s Hospital for a few years, then took a little time off from kitchen duties to work as a computer programmer for American Income Life. “When I saw the job advertisement, I holed myself up with a dozen computer programming books and faked my way through the interview. I became pretty good at presentation software, which helped agents in the field better sell the product. I went to New York City as an office manager and worked there from January until September 2001.” Ominous pause. “I lost everything. I lived just 28 blocks from the towers; my car was ruined, and everything in the apartment was covered with dust and grime.”
He returned to San Francisco, worked odd jobs for his family, opened a couple of Quizno’s franchises in Union City, then became the corporate food and beverage manager for Century Theaters in San Rafael. “The company had drive-in theaters, parks and markets. It was mostly a numbers-crunching job, with not a lot of time in the kitchen. I missed that.” A job in a corporate setting in Silicon Valley followed, equally unfulfilling.
So Linder was happy to head north and take on the challenge for Meals on Wheels. “My wife—she’s a freelance writer—actually saw the job posting and sent in the application for me. She didn’t want to move to San Jose. When I got a phone call from Marianne McBride, well, it was an easy fit, and I can see myself being here for a long time. It doesn’t hurt that I have regular hours, so I can spend a lot of time with our six-year-old, Sophie, who loves Girl Scouts and gymnastics.”
Having spent his early career preparing meals on a large scale, he was a perfect fit for the program. What’s more, Linder stresses, “it isn’t any more of a problem at all, logistically, to order and prepare food from scratch than it is from canned and pre-packaged sources. The great thing is that you can see the beneficial results in the smiles from our clients.”
Taking care
Marianne McBride is the president and CEO for the Council on Aging (COA). “It’s a critical and a continuing problem—the number of seniors who are homebound and isolated from the community,” she says. “That lack of a support system goes well beyond what can be solved with mere dollars. Through Meals on Wheels, we deliver one meal each day to those citizens who are at least 60 years old and cannot get out on their own.
“I still remember the first ride-along I did with one of our volunteer drivers. We brought a meal to a woman who was 100 years old and hadn’t been beyond her front yard for more than nine years! That really puts an ache in your heart. These are often people who’ve been very productive, but over time have just lost mobility and any support system, be it family or friends. They might have family and friends who love them, but who just don’t live close by.”
McBride has always been pretty close by. She was born in Petaluma, and her family has been in Sonoma County since the middle 1800s (“On my husband’s side as well.”). She attended St. Vincent’s High School, then the University of San Francisco and Sonoma State University in the master’s program for the administration of nonprofits.
“I’ve been involved with nonprofits since 1992,” she says by way of background. “I ran the Boys and Girls Club of Cloverdale for nine years, then went to United Way in 2001 as the vice president for resource development. In 2005, I came to the Council on Aging as developmental director, taking over Shirlee Zane’s position [when she won a seat on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors]. I became responsible for the capital campaign to raise money for our new kitchen and our new offices. Eventually, I became responsible for the entire company.”
The Council on Aging has a broad responsibility to those of us who’ve passed our 60th birthday. The most-known program is Meals on Wheels, a concept that began in Britain in the 1950s, began cropping up in the United States in the middle of that decade and was founded as a national support system for homebound seniors during Lyndon Johnson’s post-Kennedy social programs in 1965 (as part of the Older Americans Act for those over 60). Today, nationwide, Meals on Wheels feeds more than 1 million at-risk seniors every day. Sonoma County’s two-building COA campus, opened in 2007 at 30 Kawana Springs Road in Santa Rosa also offers law referral services as well as social and financial services.
“Our budget,” says McBride, “is more than $4 million per year; we have 75 employees and 350 volunteers, all managed by a full-time staff of eight. That’s to run a total of 16 programs. Our mission, simply stated, is to enhance the quality of life for Sonoma County seniors. The aim is to keep people in their homes for the duration of their lives if they wish it and are capable of doing so.
“Our latest program to enhance the senior experience is the Senior Games, an Olympics-like program that helps our preventive programs (See “Let the Games Begin!” June 2011). The whole aim is for people to be able to age in a healthy and active manner, and prevention is almost always better than reaction. Anything that keeps people socialized and connected is a plus.”
Community support
McBride is a member of Toastmasters in both Cloverdale and Santa Rosa, and she encourages her employees to join as well. “A lot of what we do to support the council has to do with presenting our programs to the public, so it’s very important that we’re all confident and effective in doing so. It’s not so much handling the nerves that go with public speaking but a question of keeping focused, so we know what we’re about and are effective in getting that across. It’s important to be able to adjust, to be compelling and to know what the important points are. It’s all about connecting with people. That’s the sum total of what we’re about.”
One of the people McBride connected with at Toastmaster’s in Cloverdale was Jane Doroff, who’s lived in the county for more than a quarter century and has been the director of Meals on Wheels for COA since 1996. The Minnesota native earned her master’s degree in public administration from the University of San Francisco and her bachelor of science in nutrition from UC Davis.
“The Senior Games are a great arena for us to further connect with the community, for people to know more about what we do and, hopefully, add to our support within the community so that we can bring our services to every person who needs them. It’s a terrific forum,” says Doroff, a big-time Harley-Davidson rider. “The main thing is that these are all health-promoting activities and that they bring people together.”
Also bringing people together is the Day Service Program, where clients can come to one of several centers across the county to spend the day with others, get a warm meal and give their caregiver a bit of a respite from a most demanding task. “We also offer a variety of case management programs, from social and financial assistance to legal and peer support programs. Depression is a common ailment among seniors, and after a 12-week training program, our seniors are better able to help one another through their difficult times.
“Legal services are also pretty important for isolated seniors, and we have lawyers and paralegals available to help with social security issues as well as setting up wills and trusts and the like. We can also act as trustees for those who want to get their trusts and conservatorships out of the family and into a more neutral circumstance.”
But the meals are the real main thing for Doroff. “We deliver 1,000 meals each day, working from a nearly $2 million budget, less than one-third of which comes from the federal government. We rely a lot on client donations and, of course, fund-raising is a constant. Thankfully, we have a whole array of volunteers, including our Meals on Wheels drivers and those who oversaw the design and building of the new kitchen in 2007, who make it all happen.”
Like everyone involved in the program, Doroff is particularly excited about the change she’s overseen in the Meals on Wheels approach to meal preparation. “We live in a most extraordinary place, and it’s particularly satisfying to see the bounty of this county delivered to our clients in its freshest, tastiest and most nutritious form. We’ve expanded the range of foods—we even have catfish and hush puppies on the menu now—so that the meals are as interesting as they are good. What could be better?”
