Stuff You Should Know - How Meals on Wheels Works

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Meals on Wheels is one of the great charitable organizations in the world, providing much-needed nutrition for elderly people in need. It also has a pretty interesting backstory, starting in multiple places in different countries almost simultaneously. Learn all about this great group of folks in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

It's just the two of us today. We had guest producer Tyler in here for a second. He pressed record and left. And it's just us. Yeah, that's cool. One of us needs to get our index finger working so we can do that. Well, remember, we used to say

we were gonna replace Jerry with one of those. Dipping bird? Yeah. Is that what they're called, dipping birds? I don't know, I just remember my grandmother had one where the bird would dip its beak in the water. All we have to do is arrange it so it can press the space bar.

Well, you should be better than this, Chuck, because this is a very nice, wonderful, humane episode. Humane and human, even. And humanities. Yeah, this is one of our, what we like to do a little awareness shows every now and then. And Meals on Wheels, which by the way,

for the past two days in my head, I've been going, Meals on Wheels. What is that? Remember, it may have been a local thing. When I was a kid, there was a, I think it was called World of Wheels. It was like, I don't know if it was a car show or like one of those monster truck things.

Okay. But it was, that's what they used to do, is World of Wheels. I gotcha. That's funny, you say that, because I've had my own thing in my head. There was a thrill-kill cult song that was in the movie Cool World called Sex on Wheels.

Whoa. So I've been going Meals on Wheels, Meals on Wheels. That's weird though, that we each have just kind of had some weird loop in our heads. Maybe that helps us research. Maybe, and maybe Meals on Wheels,

and we'll get to the funding part of it at the end, but maybe they would have better chances getting federal funding if they had a cool theme song. Yeah, like by the thrill-kill cult. Sure. That would surprise everybody. I think so. So we are talking Meals on Wheels today,

just to do our due diligence up front. We just wanna tell everybody, in case you don't know what that is, but I'm sure most people do. Meals on Wheels is a meal delivery program here in the States, in Canada, Australia. I think it's all over the place. Yeah.

Where if you are, usually, if you're a senior citizen, senior adult, not quite sure what they go by these days, and you are homebound, basically, where you're able to care for yourself in your home, but you're getting up there in years, and you haven't gone into an assisted care facility, but you're still, you don't have a lot of contact,

you might not have family around. What Meals on Wheels does is they bring you a meal once a day, five days a week, should leave lunch, and say, hey, how you doing? Feeling good? Good, okay, well, we'll see you tomorrow. Enjoy your meal. And just that little simple act of doing that,

just apparently, and research bears this out, completely changes the life and extends the life expectancy of people in that situation. Yeah, and it's not just, I mean, we'll get to some of the other things they do, but the main three-prong reason for the home visit is the meal, like you said, the visit, and then the final thing is the safety check component,

which is, geez, Mr. Muldoon, you have a wire hanging out of your wall and it's sparking. So let me see if I can get some help with you, get some help for you on that, sir. Right, exactly, that could turn bad on you. Exactly. So there's this whole idea that just by showing up at somebody's house with a meal,

you can just really vastly help improve their lives. And when I think about Meals on Wheels or when I research this stuff, it's like there's no, like if you've lost faith in humanity, just look into Meals on Wheels. Yeah. Like it cancels out so much bad in the world, you know?

And it takes like this population that here in the West, like it's very easy to become disconnected from your family. Because your offspring, your kids, as some people call them, they grow up, they get their own jobs, they move around where a highly mobile culture, Western civilization is. And you can find yourself basically alone. Like if you're friends with your neighbor

and your neighbor dies or moves away, you don't know the new younger neighbors. Maybe they don't care about you. You can find yourself isolated and being socially isolated is a huge problem. So the idea that there's people out there who are strangers to you, who will come to your house and bring you a meal

to make sure you're taken care of, that's, there's humanity right there in a nutshell. Yeah, we had, she's moved away now, but our older, and geez, I had no idea how old she was. She was one of those ladies, Miss Jessie, our neighbor who could have been 70 or 106. I have no idea. Is she the one with the goats?

No, no, no. Okay. We fed the goats again this morning, by the way. Good. No, Miss Jessie and Mr. Otis lived next door. Mr. Otis had daily dialysis passed away, which was very sad, because he was just great. But Miss Jessie was really nice.

It took us a little while to earn her trust, but she had her daughter, Connie, he would come by and get her what she needs and bring her groceries. But we would always offer, we're going to the store, Miss Jessie, you need anything. And she would never take us up on it, but I think just us talking to her on a daily basis,

because she was one of these that would like, she would open the blinds every time she heard a noise in the neighborhood. She was very on it, which was great for when we went out of town, because Miss Jessie was the best watch dog you could ask for. Did she give you a list of teenagers

that she spotted while you were going, whenever you returned home? No, she just said that, that near-dwell, that guy's up to no good. Anyway, she's a very sweet lady. And I think eventually we earned her trust. And I really got the sense that just us having a conversation with her for five minutes,

getting out of the car meant a lot to her. Yeah, that's apparently what research shows. Yes. That that kind of thing has a pronounced impact on the life of somebody who has become socially isolated. But she moved away. Oh yeah? She's like nuts to those two.

Yeah, someone bought her house. But she's doing great. That's the good end to that story. She did not pass away, she moved away. Right, gotcha. So where did she move? Did she move to an assisted care facility? Did she move into another house?

Did she move in with her daughter? I think she may have moved in with her daughter, but it was funny, like she meant a lot to us, but it was sort of like so long suckers. We didn't, it was not like a tearful goodbye. All of a sudden we're like, you're moving? She's like, yep, sold my house and she was out of there. Right.

So. Shuts the U-Haul, gets in, flips you the bird on the way out. Yeah. So, well then this one's for Miss Jessie. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so well let's talk a little bit of history about Meals on Wheels, because despite how utterly human it is.

It was started by robots. It was. Robots who were trying to win us over before they take over. Yeah, it's very strange. The, it hasn't been around for as long as you'd think, although I think that it came about right around the time when the need first arose. Cause I was doing some research and it seems like

with industrialization and the rise of like factory work, that is where a lot of the, the schism between our traditional society, that was usually agrarian based, and this new modern society we live in really began. And around that time is probably when you would have started to have found some isolated seniors as like a growing population.

Yeah, that makes sense because I found it interesting that, and we'll dig into the history here, but I found it interesting that it seemed to pop up within about a 15 year period in many countries around the world. And not because they had heard of it, you know, it's not like they read on the internet in 1954, that hey, someone in England is doing this.

So it, I think that has a lot of merit to it that the need was there kind of all at the same time. Yeah, it all, yeah. And it also kind of underscores just how basically human an idea this is, you know. All right, so World War II, raging, England being bombed, neighborhoods and regions being devastated, it became clear that people, you know,

like literally just their home or kitchen were destroyed, so they couldn't do simple things like cook the meals they're used to providing for their family. The women's volunteer service for civil defense came around and they said, you know what, we're gonna start delivering some meals, some home cooked meals to people that whose houses have been devastated,

who can't cook for themselves right now. They deliver them at first in baby carriages, which is where that's the wheels, that's where it came from. Yeah, that's what everybody around town called it. They called it Meals on Wheels. Pretty neat. It was just the, it was not capitalized

or anything like that. It was just kind of like the slang term. What the cool kids called it. About 10 years later or so in Philly, in Pennsylvania, a woman named Margaret Toy, who became the first director of Meals on Wheels in the United States, she organized something called the Platter Angels.

And just by coincidence, there were some British students in Philly doing some social work at a community center where Mrs. Toy volunteered and they said, hey, this is a lot like what we've got going on in England with the Meals on Wheels. Ditch that platter angles, angles, angles. They're thinking of Joseph Angles.

Ditch the Platter Angels' name and call it Meals on Wheels. And I don't think they said ditch that name, but maybe so this is. Doesn't be some pushy exchange students. You know, those pushy British exchange students, they're the worst. They surrounded poor Mrs. Toy

and like poked her in the shoulder and like blew cigarette smoke in her face. Hey, Platter Angel. Yeah, they did smack the mule right out of her hand. So that's how it became Meals on Wheels in the United States. And then over the next like 20 and 30 years in the US, they started popping up all over the place.

They did. And here's what you were kind of referring to earlier. So that was 1954. That same year in September in South Australia, which is where Adelaide is, shout out to Adelaide where the Somerton man is from, right? Mm-hmm, a woman named Doris Taylor came up with the same exact thing.

And from what I understand, called it Meals on Wheels as well. Is that correct? Yeah, she was something else, man. Yes, she was. She was disabled. The best I can discern is she had a fall when she was seven, which gave her a limp.

Right. And then another fall when she was 11 that paralyzed her from the waist down. Permanently, like that was it. That was it. She was wheelchair-bound from that point on. Yep, from that point on. And despite the fact that as an 11-year-old

in a wheelchair for life, she had a big heart and realized that there was a need to provide for people in her community, just like was going on in America and Britain, and said, hey, what about bringing a meal to people? And then in September of 1954, like you said, Meals on Wheels of South Australia, which I had to look upon a map.

I figured it was in the South. Yeah, and in Australia. It is, but it's a big chunk. A big chunk of land, at least. I don't know how populated it is. Well, if Adelaide's there, it's great. Well, yeah, of course it is. But that has grown.

She actually lived long enough to see that grow into a huge organization. And I know they have these all over the world and all over the country here in America, but we just wanted to shout her out, specifically for being disabled herself and going on to do like just this amazing thing. It's pretty remarkable.

Yeah, and so you think like, oh, okay, big deal. She's wheelchair bound. She can use her arms. She can juggle, that kind of stuff. Nope, she had rheumatoid arthritis, crippling rheumatoid arthritis on top of all of this. And so she was just basically, she had no use of any of her limbs

and she still was out there raising, like she used her mind to get other people to get off their duffs and help people less fortunate. Yeah. She was an amazing person. It's pretty great. 5,000 clients in South Australia now, 90 branches. And this is all because of Doris Taylor.

And then Chuck, so speaking of South Australia, you were onto something, huge chunk land, not very populated. Adelaide is the capital with just under one and a half million people, and that's 75% of the population of South Australia as a whole. Well, there you have it. There's a lot of unused land there.

Should we take a break? Oh, sure. All right, let's do it. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so Meals on Wheels starts springing up as like these community programs all over the world, right? Yes.

Just because there's a few spiritually aligned do-gooders out there who have this good idea, and it just spreads and spreads and spreads. But the thing that they have in common, aside from the basic, we bring a meal once a day to someone who can't get out of their house, they also had in common that they were community grassroots organizations. That's how they operated. That's how they were funded. That was it.

And that was the case until, I believe, 1965 with the older Americans Act, when the feds finally said, all right, okay, a good idea is a good idea. You'll cough up some money for your Meals on Wheels programs. And it's been that way ever since. So, customarily, the older Americans Act provides about 35% of funding for the Meals on Wheels programs in America, I should say. And then the rest, it's like, it's an early public-private partnership where the rest is meant to come from state and local governments, private donations, foundations, grants, wherever

they can get money from. And the Meals on Wheels program is meant ever since 1965 in the U.S. to have been able to rely on over a third of its annual budget coming from the U.S. government to provide that foundation so they can get the rest. Yeah. So, that, like you said, is specifically because the OAA and delivered through the Office of Health and Human Services and got a shout-out corporate donations because I feel like people like to bag on big corporations, but part of their funding does come from corporations

chipping in. And then you talked about grants. There are three specific block grant programs, the community development block grant, the social services block grant, and community services block grant. And just put a pin in that because that'll come up again later. Right. So, again, most of the funding comes from things other than the federal government, right? And there's another way that this program is funded, and this is kind of surprising

to me, but it's from the people who are the recipients of this aid as well. Yeah. In some cases. It's a co-op. It is. And this is actually another Doris Taylor innovation, at least in Australia, before it was, well, this is charity, so here, just take this. He was like, yes, we're going to incorporate volunteers, and the volunteers don't need

to be paid, obviously, but we still need to pay for the food. We still need to pay workers to prepare the meals. And kitchen space. Yeah. I mean, obviously, some of that could be donated, but yeah. Sure. Not all of it. You just can't rely on that always to be donated.

You can kind of always rely that there's going to be somebody there who will fill in for somebody who didn't show up that day in meal delivery, right? Yeah. Or you can go do that yourself. But the more skilled stuff, you need to be able to pay somebody so that they will show up and do this stuff, right? So the idea of having the people who can afford it pay for the meal, that is kind of innovative, and it helps keep the program going.

The thing is, is if you can't pay for the meal, you get it for free. And then there's a continuum. There's a sliding scale between, I can afford a little bit for this meal. There's some. And then I think the people who are able to, physically able to, but are financially unable to afford a meal, are asked to volunteer to be a part of the Meals on Wheels program themselves. Yeah.

I'm a big, you can call me an old hippie if you want. Oh, I always do. But the sliding scale is one of my favorite things. An old hippie? A hippie's like the sliding scale? Sure, man. I think everything from, I mean, when I was a young, broke mid-20-something and I wanted to go to a shrink, they, you know, I found a shrink at a sliding scale.

Like there are people out there that'd be like, you know what, what can you, what can you pay? Right. And it wasn't some government program, it was a private therapist. And this is across the board. There are all sorts of people who offer sliding scales, like, you know, Meals on Wheels. If you can pay a dollar, then that helps. If you can't pay anything, we'll give it to you.

If you can pay full price, I didn't see what full price was for a meal on wheel. I saw somewhere, and this is just a Meals on Wheels, like a volunteer who wrote something on Vox said that they, they're usually about $2.25. That's full price? Yeah. Oh, man. Which is ridiculously low. Well, yeah, because I guess they're only paying for food costs and they're getting bulk,

you know, they're getting gallons of mayonnaise at the warehouse, you know. Yeah. But you have to order about 10% overage for mayonnaise to cover shrinkage because everybody's always got their fingers in the mayonnaise jug as they're walking in and out of the kitchen, you know? That's what Pappy used to say. Yeah. That's what Mr. Otis always said.

He probably did. So, so there is, there is, there is money, there is financial contributions involved. But for the most part, being a part of Meals on Wheels as a recipient, it's based entirely on need. And I think the first thing that they look at is your medical need, right? Yeah. For sure. So, how, how able are you to get around your house?

How able are you, and this is, this is one I hadn't thought of, but I'm like, okay, well, you can get up and get around your house, you can cook for yourself. Can you also go to the grocery store? Huge. Right. You can be physically able to hang out in your house and, you know, maybe play canasta, do whatever. But good, but getting to like, let's say you lost your driver's license or you don't have

a car any longer, or, or it's just getting to the grocery store and shopping and then getting back is just way too much. You would probably qualify to be a Meals on Wheels recipient, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a range of people like they also have like centers where they feed a lot of people like in a cafeteria setting, and they encourage you, if you can get out, you can still get your, your really nutritious, because I don't think we've said that yet, but that goes without saying these meals are specifically catered to the needs of the elderly.

Right. Yeah. I think ever since 1972, there was like an amendment maybe to the older Americans act that said, maybe get those, those single cigarettes out of that tray that you're bringing back to the, to the older seniors. Let's actually make this like, like a nutritious meal. Yeah. So you can go to a place and eat with a bunch of other people like you and have a good conversation

if you can get out of the house, but the real focus in the core of the program are those, we call them shut-ins at our church. I don't know if that's a... I think homebound is what they normally call them. Yeah. I think that's probably an antiquated Southern Baptist term. Right. So we would deliver meals to shut-ins through our church.

It wasn't like meals on wheels and there are plenty of other programs that do this, but Meals on Wheels is definitely the biggest and broadest. Yeah. I get the impression too that Meals on Wheels isn't particularly concerned by competition. No, I don't think so. They're like, okay, it's fine as long as everybody's getting their, their meals. Yes. Agreed.

So let's say you, you are, you qualify medically as somebody who is a Meals on Wheels recipient. Next, they would look at your finances. What can you afford? What can't you afford? You can't go through and dig, dig through your checklist. They say, hey, give me your wallet. Right. Right.

Let me see what's in there. Yeah. You, you go to grab it from them and they just put their palm on your forehead and hold you back. Right? No, they're not going to do anything like that. They're going to just ask you like, what can you afford or what are you living on a month? How much extra income maybe do you have?

That's probably going to be the extent of it. I get the impression that it's largely an honor system kind of thing. Right? Probably. And then if you, if, if you're like, I just can't afford it. They'll say, okay, great. Depending on where you live, you will either be put into the rotation or you'll be put it sadly on a waiting list.

And if you're put on a waiting list, there's, you, you might be waiting a little while before they can include you. The whole reason anybody would put you on a waiting list is funding and we'll talk about funding later on. Let's stick to the good stuff right now. Yeah, so the meals that you're getting are, or they're delivering, they can be hot meals. They can be cold meals. They can be frozen if that's what you want, if you don't want to eat it right then.

They can be shelf stable or canned. If you live way out in the sticks, you can probably arrange to have like a week's worth of meals delivered frozen. They really try to work with you because they, they try to, I mean, their goal is to say that there is no community in the United States that we cannot serve. Right. Yeah. I think if you like live out in remote Alaska, they're, they're going to be like, uh, can

we just bring you a week's worth of frozen meals? Can we just drop an elk off on your front porch and a buck knife? Yup. And a buck knife. That's right. And you'll say, yeah, that'd be great. Well the rural Alaskan, elderly Alaskan would say, well, I'll just put it with my other 19 buck knives and my other three elk.

Right. And they would say, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got that many elk? We're going to share it with the rest of the community and you'll say, uh, that's wealth distribution, you socialist. So here's one interesting stat though that I saw that, um, less than 5%, this is an estimate, but less than 5% of eligible older Americans receive meals and that on average, they receive less than three meals per week.

And that is, that is sad. And I don't know if that's, is that because they can't, the program can't be robust enough? I'm sure there's a million different factors involved, but I would, I would be very surprised that the leading factor was not funding. Yeah. Because there seems to very much be a will. There seems to be a pretty great system, decades old system in place that through communities throughout the, uh, the country, um, I would guess that it's just having enough money to

add another person to the list. You know? Yeah. Well, that's, that's a sad wait list. I would guess also volunteer volunteers are, they're probably another factor as well. Uh, I was looking into volunteering actually after doing this research. I was like, man, that's, because not only do I want to teach like having a kid really can inspire you to be a better person because you start to think, Oh, well, they're going

to be looking to me and what I do. Yeah. And it's great to donate, uh, money to stuff, which is we're good about, but volunteerism is a really big thing that I think not enough people do. And I certainly didn't do enough of, that I'm going to try and teach as an example going forward. Fantastic. Like man hours, person hours is, is vital to every program like this in the world.

Yeah. Like money is one thing and funding is super important, but it goes lockstep with people showing up and saying, I will help you do this. Yes. Yes. That is well put Chuck. Well put, man, because yes, donating money is great. You can be like, wow, we've got 10,000 meals, but they're all just sitting here rotting

because we don't have anybody to deliver all of them. It is very important. Emily did it in high school actually. Oh yeah. I'm totally not surprised. Meals on wheels. Yeah. She did.

She's a candy striper and did meals on wheels. And, um, she said it was tough, uh, you know, sometimes this is the only human contact these people have in a day, uh, and she said it and she really takes stuff on emotionally and it's hard for her. And she said, as an adult, she said, I don't know if I would be able to do that. Like I'm going to try something else, but she said, all I would think about is I need to help that one person. I need to like try and help like move them into a different house or the next person.

Yeah. Exactly. But she said it's, it's tough to, um, you know, a lot of these are very, very sad cases. And if you have in your mind, like, you know, I just whistle zippity-doodle on, bounce around the neighborhoods and drop off meals and have a quick chat. I mean, it can be that, but it's, it takes an emotional toll. So like hats off to people who are able to do this and put it in the right place in their own emotional life.

Right. Right. And anyone can be a Meals on Wheels volunteer, right? No matter how emotionally invested you are in other humans. Right. And the reason why anybody can do this is because Meals on Wheels, well, we neglected to say there is an organization called Meals on Wheels of America and they are basically like the, the lobbying central umbrella unit of all the independent Meals on Wheels programs.

There's like 5,000 of them around the country, right? So they do advocacy, they issue grants, they figure out best practices. And one of the things they've said is like, here is what you as a volunteer should expect. Right. Yes, you are going to be confronted by people you want to help. But all you have to do is like all that's expected of you and you can, you can get as involved and invested as you want. But all that's expected of you and it is enough to, to bring a meal to this person's house,

say, hey, how you doing? Good to see you. You're looking fine today and I'll see you tomorrow. You take care of yourself. See you tomorrow. That that, they figured out that that is enough to keep people from being completely disconnected from society. And again, the food that you're bringing them is, is helping keep, keep them alive.

Yeah. I read that something like 3,000 to 5,000 seniors in America die of malnutrition every year. Wow. Every year. This is not like a 1917 statistic. This is, this is this year. So the, well actually it was based on 2006 data.

I can't imagine it's gotten too terribly much better. But the fact is that if you volunteer just doing those, those basic things, it's, it's enough to have a major impact in the life of somebody. You want to take another break? Yeah, let's. All right. We're going to deliver three meals and we'll be back right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. You know, I'm glad you said that before break about this is like what all you have to do because I didn't want to scare people off by volunteering because of Emily's taking things on emotionally. Like there are people that are, are, will do a great job going out there, checking in

on people and can successfully do that. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, totally. And I'm sure like, and I'm sure Emily would, would tell you that there's probably recipients out there. You're like, good Lord, that person's a jerk or this person's sweeter than that person or this person's really easy to talk to. Like I'm sure just the experience on both sides is, is different for each interaction

as well. For sure. Yeah. I think that was, that was worth saying for sure. There's, we should just say though, when we were talking about what you're expected to do. Yes. So there's basically three things you are doing just by visiting.

And they said that they can, they can arrange your, your Meals on Wheels volunteer schedule. If you want to volunteer, just go look up Meals on Wheels America and they will connect you to whoever's got a program going in your community. It's easy as pie. They, they will, whatever your schedule allows, that's great. They'll take it. That would be fine for them. If it's like, call me if you need somebody to fill in or I can do this once a week or

I can do this once a month or I can do this five days a week. What they typically say is you don't have to be independently wealthy. You don't have to be unemployed. You, you can do this on and typically if you have an hour and a half for lunch break, they can put you on a Meals on Wheels route. Yeah, and they, they typically try to fit the meal deliveries into that lunch break and it's a midday delivery. But if you're like, man, I can't get away from my job.

So sorry, I can't help you. They'll say, no, no, no, no, we'll find something for you to do after hours. There are, there are always plenty of things to do, whether it's helping out in the warehouse or if you want to volunteer in the kitchen, you can do stuff like that too. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Like food prep experience, like, like actual experience, they would probably say yes.

I'm sure there is a need for that. Yeah. So volunteering is very easy. The program is really good. What you're doing again is you're showing up with a good meal. It's usually, I saw somewhere it's like a third of the daily calories of people who are receiving the meal. And just that alone is worth bringing a meal for.

Even if it's the biggest jerk in the world or you're the biggest misanthrope in the world, just giving them this meal can do things like help them recover from disease faster, illnesses or conditions faster, keep them mentally acute. There's a lot of just benefits to having like nutrition on a daily basis that you take for granted because you can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like it's nothing. But imagine if you can't make it to the store to get peanut butter or jelly or your hands shake too bad to spread the peanut butter or the jelly, to be able to have that meal, that alone does it, right?

But then the fact that they added in these other two layers that there's the like keeping social isolation at bay. What they call and Meals on Wheels just a friendly visit where you're chit-chatting saying hi, how's the weather? You don't have to be a particularly great conversationalist, but just saying hi basically. And then asking them if they need anything, looking around, making sure that they haven't fallen is a big one. Just keeping tabs on this person five days a week, just having people who are going to

their house, it's going to cut down on the amount of time between something happening to them like a fall and somebody noticing that they're not answering their door any longer. Yeah. And that's not all. This but there are, and because there are more than 5,000 Meals on Wheels programs in the United States, it really varies per community as to what it's like, but they all fall under that banner.

But in some programs, you can get pet food delivered for your cat. Sometimes they can offer home repair services. Sometimes they can offer transportation services if you have to go to the doctor. If there's bad weather coming up, you can get emergency meals. They're just all sort of like hospital discharge programs to reduce readmissions. Sometimes they have gardens that they grow their own, like the Meals on Wheels garden will grow vegetables that they can, you know, it's like a farm to table meal delivered to your home.

Exactly. You're like, I've had better bok choy, but thank you. So it's pretty cool, man. I mean, it's hard to, there's so many great organizations in the world that help people, but Meals on Wheels is like, they're really up there. I agree wholeheartedly. So there, if you talk to anybody in Meals on Wheels or anybody that has anything to do with aging, they will, they will, you'll find that they're like biting their nails and

looking around nervously while they're talking to you. The reason why is because remember the baby boom that happened after World War II? We did podcast on that. We did and they turned into hippies and then they turned into sock brokers and then they turned into kind of born again hippies a little bit after they made their millions. Well now they're just, they're the biggest population in the country and they're aging and they're aging fairly fast and we are not set up at this moment to handle what's being called the silver tsunami, this massive influx of aging people into our economy,

into our social structures, into needing social services, needing healthcare. We might be set up for it maybe, but we're certainly not funding it correctly. And one of the, the programs that is really poised to take a big hit is Meals on Wheels. Yeah. So are we going to go with the funding talk here? I think so. March of 2017, there were a bunch of big headlines made when the president's budget chief, Mick Mulvaney said, you know, they released what's called their skinny budget, which is basically

where everybody can look and see in a broad sense of what's being funded and what's being cut as far as their budget goes. And Meals on Wheels was one of the things mentioned and Mick Mulvaney said that it's a program, it's one of many that is just not showing any results. Right. What was his quote? Which is, I think they call that foot and mouth disease because it was a really dumb thing to say no matter who you are.

Yeah. What I want to know is what, where is he getting that? Like what does that mean because there are, there have been plenty of legit peer-reviewed studies that show that Meals on Wheels is a very effective program. Yeah. Right. Because like just almost immediately people started like tweeting and reporting on studies that show that, yeah, there's actually really good results from Meals on Wheels.

In addition to just keeping people alive, it's, it actually is shown to like improve their lifespan, to improve their nutritional health, to reduce social isolation. And the, the point of it, the biggest result too is there's this big push and there has been for a couple of decades now to, to get what are called low care Medicaid recipients out of assisted living for a couple of reasons. One, they're low care meaning they can care for themselves, they just have been moved into a home or whatever you want to call it. It's not a nursing home yet.

Assisted living is just basically like you're at like a senior living facility, but it's not necessarily, you're not necessarily receiving nursing care, right? Those people who are low care senior citizens, they can live on their own. And if they live on their own, they cost a lot less to society than if they were in these assisted care facilities. Now if you're going to encourage people to live independently, what's called aging in place, which means you stay in your home as you age, you, they, they have to have a lifeline, a connection to the rest of society.

And you, there's a number of different programs that the Older Americans Act addresses this through, but one of them is Meals on Wheels. So if you're going to have it one way, you got to have the other thing too is the point. Yeah, there's a few stats here. Here's one. The average cost of a one month nursing home stay is equivalent to providing home delivered meals five days a week for seven years. Yeah.

And another one, 2013 study from Brown University said that in most states, increasing Meals on Wheels enrollment would result in a net savings from decreased Medicaid costs from nursing home care. And then they found just literally as far as the health goes, they did through the AARP, they did a study that said that there were statistically significant differences in health benefits among the three groups of people, people who got meal deliveries, people who didn't, and people who are on a waiting list. Was that the other one?

Exactly. And basically, the people who had face-to-face visits, they had the highest gains. So there is something to this, another human being touching you physically and handing you a meal, and it's... Touching you physically in an appropriate manner. Yeah. So I did some digging on this funding because it's really hard to go through the web of numbers on how, what a budget cut means.

So what this budget cut is proposed is, right off the bat, cutting $3 million from the OAA, which is where the 35% of the actual federal funding comes from. Right. Which is a problem because they need an increase from what I saw of 12% a year, not a decrease of any kind. Yeah. We should point that out. That's a question that already was hurting.

Right. And with the silver tsunami coming down the pike, if the people who are going to continue to need the expanded version of Meals on Wheels, you need more funding and apparently 12% increase a year is what they're asking for. Right. So remember earlier, I said, put a pin in those three block grants, the CDBG, SSBG and the CSBG. The Trump budget completely eliminates all three of those.

Not just the money, but there are no more block grants. Those three are gone. Right. And I have to say, there was some pretty poor reporting around that McMullvaney press conference because he was largely talking about cutting block grants, which is $3 billion from the federal government. He just decided to use Meals on Wheels as a poster child for block grants that don't get results because state and local governments use block grants for all kinds of stuff.

All sorts of different things. One of the things that they customarily use them for is to additionally fund local Meals on Wheels programs, right? But that was just the absolute worst program he could have picked because not only is it like, no, they actually do bring meals to people and keep them alive. That's a result number one. But then the fact that there's all of these peer-reviewed studies that show even beyond that basis or that basic need that's being met, it's better than that.

That was just a terrible one to pick on. Yeah. And so trying to find out the actual money is really hard because the way it's parsed out, like you said, with these block grants going in all different directions. But they finally got an estimate, they think, from a senior office of management and budget official, that it looks like it would be about $48 million from – that's $45 million from the block grants and $3 million from the OAA. So about $48 million bucks is their best guess of what Meals on Wheels would be reduced annually

when they needed more money to begin with. And it's about a $1.4 billion annual operation. So you can say it's only a 3% cut in federal funding or in overall funding, but a 3% cut when people are on waiting list and they needed a 3 – I mean, I'm not going to say a 3% increase. Probably needed more than that. It was 12, 12 a year. Oh, they needed 12 a year and they're getting a 3% shortfall or cut.

Right. And again, when you're talking about like figuring out where to put your money, like I've got another one for you. You ready for this? I'm ready. You kind of touched on it. But so the annual meal cost, according to Meals on Wheels America, the main group that kind of oversees all the independent groups, it's about $2,765 for the year.

Uh-huh. For the year. Okay? A cost of one day in the hospital according to Mathematica Policy Research is – no, I'm sorry, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is $2,271 for one day in the hospital, right? So the idea that this isn't cost effective is pretty wrong. And then the other aspect of it, like the fact that this is like being able to stay in your home and age in your home apparently extends lifespans quite dramatically.

I saw one that said that a healthy, active, 78-year-old person living independently has a life expectancy of an additional 15 or more years. So 93, that's not bad, right? But that when they enter a long-term care facility, that life expectancy decreases automatically by 50 to 75% according to this one study. So there's a really big – there's good reason to let people stay in their homes or help them stay in their homes. There's a couple of them if they want to.

Of course, if they want to go live somewhere because there's more socializing or better food or who knows, if you want to go live in a assisted care facility, I say, yes, do that. I think there should be plenty of choice, plenty of individual choice depending on the circumstances and the needs and the desires of the individual for our aging population, no matter whether they're baby boomers or Generation X eventually, whoever. I think once you reach a certain point in your life, you've contributed enough and you deserve to be taken care of by the rest of us.

Agreed. That's my two cents. Heck yeah, man. You got anything else? No, it's just so sad that as you age, you should be able to have a dignified existence still. Yeah, right. And not everyone has kids who make enough money to take care of you or to put you in

the most expensive, really great quality nursing home. Or you might just have terrible kids. Yeah, that's a good point. Anyway, yeah, that's all I have to say. So we were told that Meals on Wheels has this big push going on right now, which we were like, well, we'll release an episode about that then because it's good. So they have something called AmericaLet'sDoLunch.org. I think it's like a volunteer campaign drive.

And you can also donate too. You can do both. You can do one. You can do the other. But do something. How about that? Yeah. I mean, just go to Meals on Wheels America on the web or AmericaLet'sDoLunch.org.

Yeah. For sure. There you go. And be human. If you... Oh, wait. No, Chuck, we haven't gotten there yet. Since I said be human, it's time for listener mail.

You know what? Let's skip listener mail this week. Okay. And use that extra 90 seconds to go to your laptop and just do a little investigating on Meals on Wheels. Okay. We'll wait. All right.

If you want to get in touch with us, especially to let us know about a cool, interesting, or crazy Meals on Wheels experience, we would love that. You can tweet to us at JoshMClark or SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash CharlesWChuck Bryant or slash stuff you should know. Oh, yeah. You can catch up with Chuck, too, on Twitter at moviecrush. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. This is Hey Dude, as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.