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Your mother used to cook for a household. A husband who wanted his rasam a particular way. Children who came home hungry from school. Grandchildren over the weekend, guests on festival days, a kitchen that ran from six in the morning. Cooking was not a chore. It was how she held the family together, three times a day. Now the husband is gone, or unwell. The children are in Toronto and Dubai and Whitefield-but-busy. And one afternoon she stands in a kitchen built for eight, holding a single cup of rice, and thinks: why bother.
There is a name for this in geriatric medicine: the anorexia of aging. Appetite genuinely declines with age. The stomach empties slower, taste and smell dull, medicines suppress hunger, and the body simply asks for less. That much is biology. But the sharpest drop in eating almost never comes from biology. It comes from the empty chair across the table. Widowhood, living alone, and low mood are the three biggest reasons an elderly parent quietly eats less. A parent who cooked for a full table for forty years does not know how to cook for one. So they stop cooking, and start grazing.
The tragedy is that the weight loss is invisible for months. It hides inside a loose sari, a belt pulled one notch tighter, a face you only see on a six-inch screen. By the time someone says "Amma looks thin," a lot of muscle is already gone, and in the elderly, lost muscle is very hard to rebuild. This isn't rare, and it isn't a poverty problem. It happens in comfortable apartments with a full fridge, because the missing ingredient was never money. It was a reason to make the meal.
Food is the one thing an NRI child feels sure about. There's a cook. There's money. The fridge is stocked. Of everything to worry about from abroad, meals feel handled. They often aren't. A cook who comes for one hour makes what's asked, and a parent with no appetite asks for less and less. Stocked shelves say nothing about what actually got eaten. And on the call, "Did you have lunch?" gets a "yes" every single time, because the alternative is a conversation your parent doesn't want to have and doesn't want to worry you with.
So the signal doesn't come through words. It comes through weight, energy, and small changes: clothes hanging loose, tiredness that wasn't there last visit, a fall that shouldn't have happened, a wound that won't heal, an infection that lingers. All of these can trace back to a plate that's been half-empty for months. Poor nutrition is not a separate problem from falls and slow recovery. It is often the thing underneath them.
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