If there were a "highlight reel" made of your life, what would it include?

The births of your children, your wedding day, and family vacations top the list. How about after that? How many of the highlights would involve food and eating together with friends and family?  For most people, there would be several.  Why then, do we as an "industry" pay so little attention to the process and experience of dining for our elders?

I ask these questions because we are in need of someone to run our kitchen.  Our current "Food Service Director" (I hate that title, by the way) is leaving her position over the next few weeks, and we have an opportunity to hire someone with the forethought and vision to look beyond PPD's, and 2 gram sodium diets, to what is truly important - preparing and serving good food that is part of a dining experience that warrants a spot on our residents' highlight reels!

Obviously, this position requires a skill set that can't be ignored.  Typically, our support staff in the kitchen are lower paid, and often times are high school aged kids.  This presents the need for our new "Executive Chef" to be a good leader, who can create an atmosphere where the staff is excited about coming to work every day, and places a value on doing their job well.

With food being such a large part of our resident's lives, this new director needs to be able to communicate well with other leaders of the facility, front-line staff, and most importantly, our residents!

One of the other areas that I think we get hung up on a lot, and I would love to hear from others on their view of this, is knowledge of the regulations that govern food.  I can teach a new Executive Chef the regulations if he/she doesn't know them - I CAN'T teach that same person how to create meals worthy of the highlight reel!  Because of that, I am opening this search to people with NO long term care experience at all.  Everyone reading this is looking to de-institutionalize everything we do, so my thought process is that someone with fresh ideas from a restaurant background will have less "unlearning" to do, and will never utter the phrase "...because we've always done it that way!"

I would like to hear from others that have gone down this road, and hear people's thoughts on what a new, "outsider" can bring to the table. We all know that our resident's lives don't end when they come to live with us - their highlight reels shouldn't end either.