Aging in place: The roles of food-related activities engagement among older Indonesian women

Support through built environment factors is key to enabling older adults to age in place successfully. Identifying appropriate types of environmental support for aging in place requires a comprehensive understanding of social, cultural, and physical aspects within residential settings. This chapter employs Rapoport’s approach to dismantling culture to identify a concrete and specific expression of culture: food-related activities and their associated systems of settings. Through the Food-Related Activities Engagement and Adaptation Study (FEAST), we analyze older women’s aging-in-place experience through their engagement in food-related activities. This chapter highlights two case studies to illustrate the similarities and differences in culture’s manifestation within participants’ routines, preferences, and challenges as they prepare, cook, eat, and clean at their respective houses. To demonstrate how culture manifests in food-related activity systems, layers of cultural expressions are unraveled in three examples: division of tasks, maintenance of control in the kitchen, and connectivity of activities and space when hosting guests. This study reveals that food-related settings carry deeper meanings that represent older women’s agency, authority, and identity. Therefore, considering cultural values and everyday practices in food-related activities engagement and associated settings is critical to successful aging-in-place experiences of older women, particularly to ensure continued engagement with food-related activities.