Guest blog post by Robert Egger with the L.A. Kitchen
I am both fearful and fascinated by nutrition and aging. I have to be. I feed the poor.
But what really tipped the scales for me was reading my friend Ted Fishman’s book, “Shock of Gray.”
Here are some eye-openers from the book:
- By 2025, there will be 66 million Americans above the age of 65.
- By the year 2030, one billion people on the planet will be over the age of 65.
- Over the next four decades, the number of centenarians around the world will increase sevenfold from 450,000 today to 3.2 million in 2050.
- Ancient Romans expected to live an average of 25 years. Today, thanks to advanced medicine and nutrition, the worldwide average is 64. In all, we will enjoy 250 billion more years of life than if we had been born a century ago.
On face value, those or some serious “say what” stats. But if you really ponder the issue, you can understand why those of us who have opened our eyes to the limits of traditional charity are working double overtime to help the world wrestle free of the notion that we can “good-deed” our way forward. To get there, we’ll have to be open to bold new ideas about food, health, medicine, vegetarian and vegan foods and new ways of valuing and including our elders.
That’s the reason that I’ve moved on from the DC Central Kitchen which I founded in 1989, and moved to Los Angeles to launch the L.A. Kitchen this year.
I believe that a new generation of health conscious seniors will be wildly open to, and even demand plant-based meals. The federal government currently reimburses agencies almost $5.00 per meal for a senior. Imagine how many small farmers we could empower by providing locally sourced meals that actually strengthen the recipients. This connection will be critical, because not only has senior hunger spiked in the last decade, but so have malnutrition and diabetes. We cannot allow these trends to continue as the Baby Boomers begin to enter their 70's.
Our goals at the L.A. Kitchen are to utilize the abundance of healthy food that is produced in California to develop exciting new menus and promote healthy diets, exercise programs and inter-generational volunteerism...in short, anything we can to help usher in this new era, as soon as possible.
There will be very, very tough times ahead. But as a futurist, and a nonprofit pro who’s ideas are solidly based on day-to-day work, I can’t wait to begin to make these potential ideas reality.
I believe there are three kinds of people. The first are those who go to work and then roll out. Then there are those who see the future, but put their heads back down, or wait for the future to come to them. Me, I aspire to be the kind of person who see's the future, and marches out to meet it with audacity and purpose. I hope you’ll join me, and others, who want to make the future happen, today.
