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My mom is getting Mom's Meals, they are refrigerated home delivered meals that come out of Iowa. UPS delivers a styrofoam lined cardboard box containing 10 meals every other Wednesday. Her Medicaid Waiver pays for the meals.


My mom absolutely hates these meals and wants to throw them all in the garbage. She's had 4 or 5 deliveries now and there is nothing in any of them she likes. I tried contacting her caseworker but she's not returning my calls or responding to my emails all week this past week.


Mostly I was just curious if anyone else has any experience with them and if anyone thought they were good or not.


She likes most anything I cook and she'll eat fairly well. I've made homemade potato soup, meatloaf, beef roast, ham etc and she eats all of it. Frozen dinners she'll eat all day long, she'll eat almost any hamburger helper and she loves my homemade pizza. One reason I hate to send her to a nursing home is because she eats well at home and she may not eat nursing home food.


I was told by her caseworker I was not to eat any of her meals, so what she doesn't want, I just let her toss in the garbage. Having separate food for her like that don't work because when I have to make a grilled cheese, bowl of soup or hamburger helper for myself, that's what she'll want.

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I have seen them recommended here on the forum, so some people do like them. I imagine they are like any pre packaged meal, they can't compare to home cooking and they don't take into account regional and seasonal foods, plus even with the best of them it gets tedious to be presented with the same identical meals over and over again.
I get the admonishment not to eat the food yourself because that is not why it was ordered and technically that is stealing, but I can't stomach waste - what they don't know can't hurt them 😉
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It wouldn’t surprise me that the meals may not be appealing. My dad had Meals On Wheels for a while, it’s a highly regarded program and enjoyed by many. His experience wasn’t good though, the meals dropped off very speedily, not good tasting to him at all (a man who’d eat most anything) and repetitious. Other places I’ve heard the person who drops off the food actually checks in on the senior, my dad never saw them, food was left at the door. He often gave away much of the meal and soon cancelled. He preferred a frozen dinner
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The problem is they probably don't have any spices, salt or pepper in them. Same with meals on wheels, Because of the different diets of clients no salt, especially is not added. They are probably very bland. Is there a way you can "spice" up the meals? Take what is there and be creative?

Her caseworker maybe working p/t or from home. If Mom is not going to eat the meals, then not worth getting. Call the company and see if you can stop deliveries. Refuse them on delivery. This will have the company contacting the caseworker.
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SG, perhaps you can split the meals with mom and determine how they taste to you.

I am just seething at your SW. Spoken like a good little government employee, why share when it can be wasted. Why give choices when we have all the power. Grrrrr!!!!

I would ignore her and share the meals with mom. Doctoring them up as needed, deciding what should go in the garbage and be removed from the menu altogether and stop wasting so much food.

I know this is supposed to help take some of the load off of you and it has only added more stress, so keep your own counsel on it and figure out how to utilize the food being sent.

Can the veggies be combined and make a soup, will any of the meat make a nice addition to a casserole, can it be chopped for tacos, shepherd's pie?

Have you tried putting them on a plate and freezing them so she thinks she is eating a homemade frozen food?

Time to get creative or stop the deliveries, wasting the food really isn't an option.

I hope you find a good solution that utilizes the food for both of you and does help your work load some.
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Very good advice from Isthisrealyreal. I second for not wasting food. I hired a personal chef to make pureed food for my mother and she liked the food at first, but then after awhile she would not finish it and preferred my homemade meals. I learned a few tips from the chef. I bought twelve freezer dinner containers and set aside an afternoon to make meals for my mother for most of the week. The meals came in quite handy when we had appointments, just heat and serve. A few days per week she ate what the rest of the family ate and I pureed it for that particular dinner. Works out well for us and mom gets to eat foods she likes and used to eating. I spent quite some time looking for high quality prepared meals,but found too much sodium in the ingredients and not high quality. Just a thought, you do not need to tell the caseworker about consuming food that your mother would not eat. Waste is not cool.
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I've just been over on their website looking at the sample menu😐

Yeah...... if it were for me I don't think I'd keep with that very long, the "favourites" probably make it on that list only because they are at least somewhat edible.
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Most pre-made meal services don’t give you useful choices. My Parents in Law had Meals on Wheels here, but they didn’t want the deserts. Without the deserts, the total meal wasn’t enough. People from other migrant groups didn’t want ‘meat and 2 veg’, which seemed to be pretty common. My FIL (an ex WWII POW) had made a life-long principle never to eat rice, and that wasn’t helpful either. Perhaps the worst bit was that they didn’t deliver on the weekends, so that people with no other options saved bits from the Thursday and Friday meals to tide them over the hungry gap.

I had to attend a Meals on Wheels volunteer annual meeting, where I had to present a talk. I was shocked to hear a staff member tell us all that the organisation was under threat from supermarket frozen meals, now so much better than the old ‘TV Dinners’. I thought that better easy options were great for the target group, and considerably more important than the organisation!
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