Age no barrier to enjoying a good meal
Print Edition
Li Min and her husband, both in their 70s, live with his 90-year-old mother in the Boshi Xinju apartment complex in Jiangchuan Town. The daily chore of feeding three elderly people would be quite an undertaking for Li. But she doesn’t have to do it.
The family’s lunches and dinners are delivered to the door.
Every day, Boshi Xinju community staff arrive with food freshly cooked in the canteen kitchen of nearby Shanghai Jiao Tong University. There’s a menu featuring 40 different dishes to choose from, and a meal costs no more than 20 yuan (US$3) for the whole family.
“It’s a relief,” said Li.
“As we have gotten older it has become harder and harder to get out to the market every day and then come home and cook,” she said.
The neighborhood committee of the apartment complex tried several catering services, but senior residents invariably complained about poor food. The solution was next door, where the Minhang campus of Jiao Tong is located.
“We knew that the campus canteen was noted for its wide selections of well-prepared food,” said Yang Minmin, an official with the neighborhood committee. “We appealed to their sense of community service and asked them to help us.”
The canteen provides menus to the committee once a month, and the “meals-on-wheels” are packaged half an hour before the students’ lunchtime.
The canteen’s efforts are part of a new Minhang District effort to enhance community services to the elderly. A blueprint unveiled last month pledged to have 100 innovative senior services projects up and running by the year 2020, including dining, day care and entertainment activities.
In addition, the number of nursing home beds will be increased to 35 per 1,000 elderly residents by 2020.
Minhang estimates the population of people 60 years and older will top 300,000 by that year.
“We will focus more on the needs of the elderly,” said Zhao Qi, Party leader of the district. “We want seniors and their families to have more choices on retirement years.”
The blueprint also calls for 80 percent of public nursing homes to be co-financed by private funds.
Meanwhile, volunteer services will be stepped up.
This year in the Jiangchuan and Gumei areas, local governments will run trial programs outsourcing some elderly care components to private charitable organizations.
“Because of Chinese traditional cultural values, many seniors who need some level of care don’t want to leave their homes,” Zhao said.
“So we need to find better ways to provide care in the home, and volunteers have a part to play in that.”
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