Wartime PTSD + Food hoarding

[Kate8889]

I love my grandma but she lived through a wartime situation when she was a child where there was not enough to eat, and refuses to throw any food away, even if it's expired.

As she gets older, this is becoming a more frequent issue. She is 89 now and ends up passing out/in hospital at least once a year because of food poisoning.

I understand that when she was a child she lived through war and famine but eating food that has gone bad and hurting her health is bad for her and for us, her family.

Thoughts? Experiences? Thank you

Would she accept a cleaner? Someone who can clean the fridge and throw away expired food.

She has a social worker come by twice a week but won't let them throw out food. When we visit, we do it but when she's in another room in order to not stress her out. A lot of times she doesn't notice.

@FunRedHamkeep your snake oil to yourself.

How is she getting her food? Little and often is the way forward, less chance of things expiring.

Usually at the grocery store, sometimes they don't have small packs of everything

Imagine struggling so hard with Alzheimer’s yet still being able to advertise shite on the internet .

@FunRedHamreported. Imagine trying to cash in on someone’s distress. Disgraceful.

Can you move her to frozen foods that don’t expire? Long life milk? That sort of thing? Iceland’s range is very good and she might like that she’d get 10% off on a Tuesday.

I didn’t really mean where, just how? It seems she is still shopping independently though so that makes it far more difficult to control her levels of food.

My mum was a food hoarder, and the essential thing for my parents was always making it look like there was plentiful food in the house - so in conjunction with their carer we found a plan of using long life foods to bulk out the fridge, the carer making sure the tins in the cupboard were rotated by use by date properly, and freezing half a packet of butter (for instance) so that it could be put back in the fridge when the in use one looked low but without it going off.
She also worked on a shopping list system, and would bring them 'some meat that would go to waste' so it was an amount that would get eaten in date, and assuaged the frugal feeling. Later this transitioned into her making food and bringing it as 'leftovers' which were accepted well.
And of course the fridge got purged silently into the outside bin as needed, and we gave away a lot of tins to the food bank eventually, but working with the need to have visible food security did really help them.

She lives in a different country if I recall correctly? There's nothing you can do in between your visits apart from flag up to the authorities in Russia.

Yeah she is still shopping for herself