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Seniors
give frozen meals chilly reception
By
Kathy Mellott
Tribune
–Democrat, August 21, 2003
 BEDFORD
– Ora Smith shuffles around her tiny kitchen taking soup from the
cupboard and tuna from the fridge.
Yesterday, this was her lunch – and dinner.
She paused to recall the way her noon meal used to be before Bedford
County Area Agency on Aging switched from hot meals, delivered daily, to
frozen meals delivered once a week to last for seven days.
Now, she will have no fresh fruit, no vegetables, cooked or raw, no fruit
juice. Dessert will be some canned applesauce stashed in the refrigerator.
Frozen meals have been used in Somerset County for the past several years.
But Cambria County has been able to maintain its daily hot meal delivery,
said Commissioner Kathy Holtzman.
“Those meals when they served them, they were good. You got fresh
fruit,” Smith said in an interview at her tiny home off Milk and Water
Road, Everett.
“Those frozen meals didn’t taste right, but then I miss the drivers
that brought them too,” she said.
Smith, 76, childless and widowed for 24 years, laments a June change that
replaced the meals cooked and delivered daily to her and other seniors.
Delivered meals go to those in the county who meet income guidelines and
can’t cook for themselves.
The change is saving the cash-strapped aging agency more than $70,000
annually, largely in gasoline. That’s little comfort to Smith, who tried
the frozen meals the first week before dropping out.
Volunteers are the key to daily deliveries.
“When they are being brought into the home, you get a lot of volunteers
involved,” Holtzman said in a telephone interview from her Ebensburg
office.
“Many times that person delivering the meal is the only person these
people see.”
Smith mustered her courage and reregistered a few weeks ago in the program
designed for the homebound.
Again Smith canceled the meals, which are delivered without charge to
qualifying seniors.
The ideal way to prepare the frozen meals is in a microwave, but the
wiring in Smith’s house, a one-time hunting cabin, is so antiquated it
can’t handle the load, she said.
Heating the meal in a conventional oven results in noodles and other parts
of the meal that are rendered inedible, she said.
But many people who have a microwave are finding the frozen meals
similarly unacceptable, said Edna Showalter, Everett Senior Center
director.
Prior to the change to frozen, 32 seniors in the Everett area received the
meals. That figure has plummeted to 11, Showalter said at an interview at
the center.
The more than 40 who took the home-delivered meals in Bedford has been cut
in half, officials at that center said.
The dropout figures in Everett and Bedford do not reflect on the new
meals, said R. Alan Smith, executive director of the aging agency, which
also covers Huntingdon and Fulton counties. He’s no relation to Ora
Smith.
“It’s gone down and it’s going back up,” Mr. Smith said of the
5,059 meals delivered to seniors in the three counties during December,
and the 4,514 reported in July.
“We’re asking people to remain active in a small part. We’re saying,
‘Put this in the microwave,’ ” he said in a telephone interview from
his office.
Few complaints have been voiced about the frozen meal program in the
southern end of Bedford County, said Del Biller, mayor of Hyndman and a
member of the agency’s Citizens Advisory Council.
“One of the complaints is that the delivery guys had fellowship with the
people when they delivered the meals and they don’t have that now,”
Biller said in a telephone interview from his home.
Some of the homebound also have complained about the lack of fresh fruit
in the daily frozen meals, Biller said.
The clamor from seniors in Bedford and Everett prompted Commissioner Dick
Rice to get involved.
His analysis this week after preparing and eating one of the frozen meals
is that it was “not that bad.”
In a written critique to the agency, Rice, 72, an advocate for county
seniors, said his biggest concern is with instructions that call for a
heating time of four to six minutes. Rice said it took nine minutes to get
his meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and corn to a suitable
temperature.
He also thinks the frozen meals do not contain as much food as the hot
meals.
Steps are being taken to provide instructions that are easier for seniors
to understand, Mr. Smith said.
Regardless of what’s done, change was necessary to reduce costs, Biller
said.
“The budget has been cut, something has to give and this is one way of
keeping the budget in line,” he said.
In a county with few volunteers, the cost of delivering the meals runs
$1.10 per mile. The switch to the frozen meals reduced the mileage by
6,000 miles per month, Mr. Smith said.
The cost of the frozen meals, prepared under contract by Pittsburgh
Companies Inc. of Butler, is slightly higher at $2.79 each as compared to
$2.65 for a hot meal, but the few extra pennies is well worth the net
savings, officials said.
That $70,000 goes a long way toward making up funding cuts including a
loss of $42,000 from the state’s Human Services Development Fund, Mr.
Smith said.
The money the agency received from the state’s share of national tobacco
settlement was used for two years to fund the home-delivered meals
program, he said. The money has been used up.
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© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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