This TEDx Talk presents insights into the epidemic of isolation and loneliness afflicting our seniors citizens – how it occurs and what the effects are.

Author and food blogger Elissa Altman explains the importance sharing time at the dinner table with senior citizens. Sharing food and stories with our senior citizens nourishes not only their bodies, but also their whole hearts, spirits, and souls. 

Award-winning memoirist Elissa Altman first began to speak publicly about the moral imperative to “close the circle” — to bring senior citizens to the public table and discourse about food — in her 2011 Huffington Post column, Beyond The Schoolyard. Altman writes the monthly Washington Post column, Feeding My Mother, and is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir, Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, based on her James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name. A five-time selectee for inclusion in the annual Best Food Writing, Altman focuses much of her writing on issues of moral, spiritual, gustatory, and creative sustenance; her next memoir, Treyf: A Story of Family, Food, and the Forbidden, will be published in 2016 by Berkley Books. Her work has appeared everywhere from the New York Times and Oprah Magazine to Tin House, Dame Magazine, and Saveur. She lives in Newtown, Connecticut with her family.