Mountain View’s senior nutrition program sees increase in meals served

Mountain View’s senior nutrition program has grown in recent years, staving off hunger and isolation for the city’s older residents. A recent county report revealed that the congregate meal service is the largest of its kind in the county outside San Jose, with a big bump in demand following the pandemic.

Mountain View is typically known for its affluent community, yet one out of every five individuals lives below 200% of the federal poverty level. A UCSF study found that the proportion of people age 65 and older experiencing homelessness is projected to triple between 2017 and 2030, with older adults currently making up nearly half of the homeless population.

In District 5, which includes Mountain View and other North County cities, six senior nutrition programs dispersed across five cities aim to address this need. In the 2024 fiscal year, the Mountain View Senior Center stood out as the highest-performing site, serving over 43,000 meals to over 1,100 unique older adults, according to a county memo published in May.

“The size of the program has consistently gone up,” said Tom Myers, executive director of the Community Services Agency. “Part of it is that our seniors are becoming pinched even more and more. You can’t live in this area on a fixed income. It’s just impossible, so seniors are becoming more and more reliant on us for those kinds of things.”

CSA is the local nonprofit running Mountain View’s senior nutrition program. Along with lunch for seniors, it provides emergency financial assistance, general food and nutrition, senior case management and homeless services for residents of Mountain View, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. These services are seeing a similar increase in demand, Myers said, driven by more seniors falling into poverty.

Before the pandemic, the program steadily served around 30,000 meals per year. Since then, those numbers have undergone a “huge explosion,” according to Myers, reaching 46,261 meals in 2021 and a record-high 57,110 meals in 2022. Total meals served have declined slightly in the recent two years, but remain at around 40,000, a notable increase from pre-pandemic numbers.

The center runs Monday through Friday, equipped with a full kitchen and staff to serve a different, freshly made lunch to roughly 200 seniors every day. The menu is created with cultural inclusion in mind, aiming to celebrate cultural diversity.

“One of the things that we concentrated on, beginning about 15 years ago or so, was making sure that our menu was more culturally appropriate, that it wasn’t just meatloaf,” Myers said. “We made sure that we had stir fries, that we had spiced rice, and things like that. We wanted to make sure that we had enchiladas on the menu every once in a while.”

In addition to providing quality food, the program addresses another vital need: socialization. The senior nutrition program is the only program at CSA that doesn’t perform income verification, enabling any senior to simply come in and enjoy lunch in the presence of others.

“Seniors are a particularly vulnerable population,” Myers said. “We want to make sure that they have access to socialization and access to the other services that we provide. The city of Mountain View likes us being in the Mountain View Senior Center for that reason, it gets seniors into the senior center.”

The importance of such community building became clear to Myers on 9/11. He recalled how the usually sparsely filled hall was packed that morning, with seniors sharing traumatic experiences from their own lives and simply coming together as a community. In another instance, a group of widows expressed their gratitude for the opportunity to have lunch together.

Still, the majority of individuals come from low-income or fixed-income backgrounds.

“We are in an area that’s affluent. We are not in an area that is free of poverty,” Myers said. “Imagine, if you will, that your community suddenly has no low-income people. Does that mean your community no longer has medical assistants? Does that mean your community no longer has receptionists? … There is definitely affluence here, but there’s also a great separation between rich and poor.”

CSA’s Senior Nutrition Program offers meals in the Mountain View Senior Center’s Social Hall. Lunch is served from 11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. and is first come, first served. Call 650-964-6586  for more information.

This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Grace Gao is an intern for Embarcadero Media.