Healing Meals
December 1, 2008
My friend Ellie has a son in his 20s who has spent the past couple of years hospitalized for schizophrenia. When he moved from a secure unit to a "house" on the hospital grounds, Ellie and George began to make dinners for his housemates. (There are ten or twelve altogether.) The two of them would go shopping, and then get to work.
"It's good cognitively," she says. "You count out the number of hot dogs, the number of buns."
After the success of the hot dog dinners, they moved on to linguine with sauce, another of George's favorites from home.
Ellie says, "When we started cooking the onions and browning the meat, you could smell it, and people would stand around the kitchen door. Somebody was cooking for them. It was not the prepared food in the truck with steel doors."
There are so many benefits, Ellie says. "You have to figure out, how much do you need. It's something for yourself and also for other people. There's the comfort and smell, the sense of a meal. I think it's a really healing thing to do."
When talking to Ellie, who has had to set aside so many of her hopes for her child, I sense that the healing extends to her as well.
Mealtimes Matter Video
from Miriam Weinstein
About Miriam
Miriam Weinstein is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. As a journalist, she has won several awards from the New England Press Association. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, the Boston Globe magazine, Hope, and ParentSource. A former staff member for North Shore Weeklies and freelancer for Essex County Newspapers, she writes restaurant reviews and food columns as well as features on a wide variety of subjects. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her husband and has two grown children.
The Surprising Power of Family Meals
In her book, The Surprising Power of Family Meals, Miriam Weinstein shows how this basic human institution helps nourish and strengthen our families today. You can buy this book from our friends at Smucker's® Online Store.
