Mama taught Home Economics for decades, in a school in Catbalogan, and for most of my life I filed that away as a pleasant, slightly quaint fact about her.
Home Ec. The class in between the real ones. Sewing and cooking and how to set a table, the subject that got cut first whenever a budget got tight, taught by women nobody thought to call experts.
It took me until my forties, and a career I never planned, to understand that she had been teaching the only subject that every single one of her students would go on to use every day of their lives.
What the Subject Actually Was
Think about what is actually in that curriculum.
How to feed a family on what you actually have rather than on what a recipe assumes, how to keep a kitchen clean enough that nobody gets sick, how to make a thing last and mend it and get another year out of it, and how to run a household as the small, relentless, unglamorous operation that it is.
Is that a soft subject? It is the entire infrastructure of staying alive with some dignity, and we handed it to teenagers in a room with four sewing machines and called it an elective.
I grew up in a house in Catbalogan with the whole family under one roof, Lola Lupe and Mama and Papa all in it, and the kitchen was not a room in that house so much as the reason the house held together. Everything routed through it. The day started there and ended there and every piece of news, good or bad, arrived at that table.
Nobody in that house would have described what was happening as care work. It was just what you did, three times a day, for the people who were yours.
The Dining Room Is the Tell
Here is what I did not expect when I moved from financial advisory into senior care.
If you walk into an assisted living or memory care home and want to know, honestly, how well the place is run, you do not look at the lobby. The lobby is for you. The lobby has been arranged.
Go and look at a meal.
Watch whether people are eating or whether the plates are going back full. Watch whether anybody is sitting down with the residents or whether the staff are standing around the edges waiting for it to be over, and watch how long a person is given before somebody else decides that they are finished.
A dining room cannot be staged the way a lobby can. It runs three times a day, it involves everybody in the building, and it shows you exactly what the place actually believes about the people living in it.
I learned that from Mama's subject, though I did not know that was where I had learned it.
What Nobody Warns You About
Eating gets hard in dementia, and it gets hard in ways that have almost nothing to do with appetite.
Sometimes the trouble is simply that the person can no longer see the food, because Alzheimer's damages contrast sensitivity, which is the ability to tell one shade from another, and so mashed potato on a white plate is not a meal sitting in front of somebody. It is a white field.
There is a small study I think about often, from Tracy Dunne and colleagues at Boston University, published in Clinical Nutrition in 2004. They took nine men with advanced Alzheimer's and, for thirty days, alternated the tableware they ate from.
With high-contrast red plates and cups instead of the usual white, food intake rose by about twenty-five percent and liquid intake by about eighty-four percent, while pastel dishes did essentially nothing at all, somewhere between zero and five percent.
Now, nine men is nine men, and I am not going to pretend a study that size settles anything. But it points at something I see with my own eyes, which is that a person who "won't eat" is very often a person who cannot find the food.
And what is the fix? A red plate. It costs almost nothing. It requires no medication and no meeting.
That is the sort of thing Home Economics was actually about: noticing the physical, practical, unromantic detail that decides whether a human being gets fed today.
The Foodie Problem
I should be honest here, because I don't want this to read as though I approach food from some serene professional distance.
I am a foodie, and I have no discipline whatsoever around bakeries and pastries. None. If you set a tray of something warm in front of me at three in the afternoon, I will tell you a perfectly good story about how careful I have been all week, and then I will eat it anyway.
If I could keep one food for the rest of my life it would be pizza, and I have thought about this more carefully than the question deserves. Anything ube flavored is a certifiable event in my week, and I did not have to earn that one, which may be the whole appeal.
So the man writing about food as care is also a man who has driven out of his way for a bakery. Both things are true. I suspect they are the same thing wearing different clothes.
The Half Nobody Photographs
My favorite chores, and I know how strange this sounds, are washing dishes and vacuuming.
I have thought about why, and I think it is this. Both of them are the part that comes after. The meal is the photograph; the dishes are what love actually costs, and there is something in me that finds the second part more satisfying than the first.
You can see the whole of care work in that ratio, because anybody can cook a nice dinner once. So who is standing at the sink afterward? And are they standing there resentfully, or as a matter of course?
Mama was at the sink. For decades, in that house and in that classroom, mostly without anybody writing it down.
And nobody hands out awards for the after-part. Nobody live-streams it. But a home where the dishes get done well is a home where the people are actually being taken care of, and the same is true of a memory care house in Troy, Michigan, forty years and eight thousand miles away from the one I grew up in.
Still in Her Class
I run houses now where the meal is the center of the day, and I did not design it that way on purpose. It simply turns out to be the truth of the work.
The dining room is where you find out that somebody is declining, because they stop finishing. It is where a family visiting for the first time either relaxes or doesn't. And it is where a person who has not said a word all morning suddenly says something, because a plate arrived in front of them and some part of the ritual still works.
We spend a great deal of care-industry language on dignity, and most of it is vague. So what does it look like in the concrete? Dignity is being able to see your food. It is being given long enough to finish it. It is somebody sitting down beside you rather than standing over you with somewhere else to be.
That is Home Economics. That was always Home Economics.
Mama spent her working life teaching teenagers to run a household, and she graded them on whether a seam held and whether a dish came out fit to feed somebody. I doubt she thought of it as important work, in the way the world measures importance.
But I have built a business on that curriculum. Every practical thing I know about keeping people alive and comfortable and treated like human beings came out of a kitchen in Catbalogan, from a woman who did not give birth to me and raised me anyway, teaching the subject the world was busy calling soft.
I am still in her class. I am just taking it in a different building now, with a red plate in my hand.
