• David Martin and Harry Shen are chefs from St Vincent's Care, a nursing home in Melbourne.
• The chefs understand that not all nursing homes have the budget, but they hope to raise standards.
• Their efforts come as nations worldwide are facing aging populations.

David Martin can still recall the conversation that changed his career path.

He was 25 and had spent the past decade working in the restaurant and fine dining scene. The hours were brutal — up to 16 hours a day — and he was on the verge of burnout.

His parents brought up the idea of working in a nursing home. They had a cousin who worked in that industry and suggested he try it.

"I told them, 'Why would I want to go to aged care? That's where people retire. My skills will go to waste,'" Martin recalled. Still, with an open mind, he decided to give it a shot.

He hasn't looked back since. Martin, now 35, is an executive chef manager at St Vincent's Care, a nursing home facility in Australia.

By his side is Harry Shen, 39, a senior head chef who also left the restaurant scene to try something different. They share the same vision: to raise the standard of food in aged healthcare.

Apart from working under top chefs, including Donovan Cooke, Shen had also picked up shifts at Australian nursing homes in the past. It was during that time that he noticed frozen food was often the norm.

So when he saw a job posting from St Vincent's for a chef to elevate nursing home food, it stood out.

"This is something I also wanted to do. To change things," he told Business Insider.

A premium offering

With Shen on board, Martin and his team worked during the pandemic to reinvent meal plans at one of St Vincent's healthcare centers in Kew, a suburb of Melbourne. The facility doubles as an aged care home and a hospital.

It's a more premium nursing home option. According to St Vincent's Care's website, a stay at a standard room in the facility costs 171 Australian dollars a night, or around $111 — almost double the basic daily fee for nursing homes in Australia, which is AU$63.57. The room has an ensuite toilet, and residents can access a café, cinema, and hairdressing salon within the facility.

A typical meal plan at St Vincent's is as follows: In the morning, residents are offered a continental breakfast and a tea cake of the day. For lunch, they have a main with a selected sauce, a starch, and two vegetables.

They end the meal with a sweet — warmed apple coconut strudels on some days and a green tea cheesecake on others — then round the day up with an afternoon tea snack and a generous dinner selection.

"We want to break the stereotype that aged care food is just a lump of food on a plate," Shen said.

Cooking for older residents does come with certain considerations. In particular, the chefs have to look out for residents who have dysphagia, a geriatric syndrome that affects swallowing. According to the Mayo Clinic, 10% to 33% of older adults have dysphagia and can face malnutrition as a result.

As such, the chefs provide a range of options for residents with different needs so that everyone — even those who struggle to swallow — can enjoy a hearty meal.

Nursing home food on the world stage

Martin and Shen wanted to show the world that nursing home food can — and should — be just as good as restaurant food.

In 2023, they decided to compete in culinary competitions together. After placing in several local competitions, they were approached to apply for the International Salon Culinaire, one of the world's top competitions for chefs. Previous winners of the competition include Gordon Ramsey and Michael Deane, a Michelin-star chef.

In March this year, the duo competed alongside top chefs worldwide over the three-day competition in London. Their dishes included coconut rice pudding with crème brûlée and seafood paella — food they can serve at a nursing home.

They emerged with two silver medals. But more than the accolades, they hoped that people would focus on the message they were trying to send.

The chefs are well aware that not all nursing homes have the same luxuries of staffing and budgets to prepare premium meals. Still, it's about setting a standard, they said.

"We want to make this industry better for now and into the future for our parents and grandparents to be respected in," Martin said.

"The main thing is the frame of mind. The chef can be creative, whether it's adding a bit more garnish for presentation or baking things in-house rather than buying," he continued.

A graying world

Shen and Martin's efforts come as nations worldwide are graying rapidly. In October, the World Health Organization called for an urgent transformation of care and support systems for older people. They projected that 1 in 6 people will be 60 or older by 2030. By 2050, this number will double to 2.1 billion.

In the US, the aging of the baby boomer generation means that the number of Americans ages 65 and older requiring nursing home care could increase by 75% by 2030, a recent report by the Population Reference Bureau found.

That's where the importance of food comes in.

Dr. Andrea Maier, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore's Centre of Healthy Longevity, told BI that raising food quality is especially important in nursing homes, where people are often at the final stages of their lives and need nutrition.

"If they don't have an appetite, they're losing muscle mass, and their health is deteriorating. So food needs to be fun." When food is fresh and well-plated, it gives residents motivation to eat, she added. "It's a double positive."

Then there are the emotional impacts of having a good meal.

"When you're in a care home, life is relatively unrushed. Dining is one thing that I think people look forward to other than engagement activities," said Wee Shiou Liang, an associate professor of Gerontology at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.

"So, that experience is even more important."

Martin and Shen now collaborate as co-creative directors on menus in St Vincent's homes across New South Wales and Victoria. They also manage and mentor chefs in the region.

Neither chef intends to return to the restaurant scene. Seeing their impact on their residents has moved them to stay.

Working in end-of-life care, Martin said each meal, pastry, or salad could be the last dish their residents eat.

"And that's big to me because if you can give comfort to someone when they're in serious pain, that is a present to them," he said.

"They don't need to remember your name. They don't need to remember the dish. But if at that moment they realize they were at ease and were comforted by you — that's the heart of it."

• Tokyo is introducing a four-day workweek to help boost fertility rates and support women.
• It's also rolling out a policy to allow parents to sacrifice salary in exchange for shorter days.
• Japan faces a declining fertility rate. It had just 758,631 births last year, a record low.

As Japan grapples with a record-low fertility rate, Toyko's government is trying new strategies to try to encourage women to have more children.

The capital's government is introducing a four-day workweek starting in April next year, in effect offering state employees a three-day weekend.

The policy applies to the more than 160,000 employees of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, one of Japan's largest employers.

"We will continue to review work styles flexibly to ensure that women do not have to sacrifice their careers due to life events such as childbirth or child-rearing," Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said in a speech on Wednesday, according to a translation by the Japan Times.

The local government also said that it would allow parents with children in grades one to three of elementary school to sacrifice some of their salaries in order to finish work early each day.

The Japan Times said this would allow parents to reduce their working hours by up to two hours a day.

The measures intend to ease the burden of child-raising for working mothers.

"Empowering women, a goal that has lagged far behind the rest of the world, has been a long-standing issue in our country," Koike said, per the Japan Times.

Japan is one of the oldest countries in the world, with its population rapidly aging due to a combination of long life expectancies and low fertility rates.

Japan's fertility rate sank to a record low of 1.2 in 2023, far below the global replacement rate of about 2.1.

The replacement level is generally required to sustain a population over time, barring massive fluctuations in mortality rates or large-scale immigration.

According to Japan's Health and Welfare Ministry, 758,631 children were born in the country last year, the eighth consecutive year of decline.

Then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called the decline "the biggest crisis Japan faces."

The International Monetary Fund said in May that many reasons contributed to the decline in fertility rate and births, including later and fewer marriages, as well as the high cost of living, a large gender wage gap, and expensive childcare.

Japan's government has spent billions on initiatives aimed at reversing these trends, such as improving access to childcare services and promoting egg freezing.

The local government in Toyko announced earlier this year the launch of a dating app that requires users to verify their income and desire to get hitched, in the hope of fostering more marriages.

Meanwhile, other Asian countries grappling with similar declines in marriage and fertility rates have introduced their own creative methods to try to help single people find a match.

South Korea, for example, is spending heavily on preventing loneliness, as well as offering money to reverse vasectomies and providing subsidies to new parents.

• Trump's plans to deport millions of immigrants could exacerbate America's demographic challenges.
• The US birth rate has been falling, which economists say could hobble the labor market and economic growth.
• Trump's plan could result in an older population and fewer workers, economists told BI.

Donald Trump's plan for a sweeping immigration crackdown involving mass deportations has been described as potentially inflationary, but economists say it could exacerbate another problem America faces: an aging population.

Immigration was thought to be one solution to Americans having fewer kids, and reversing the trend could result in a larger population of older people and lead to a smaller workforce, economists have said.

Demographic shifts are likely to be greater if immigration is significantly curtailed, Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said.

During his campaign, the President-elect promised to deport unauthorized migrants, of which there are around 11 million in the US, according to the Center for Migration Studies. Trump also promised to ban refugees from some countries and reinstate travel bans he implemented in his first term, which could restrict immigration flows.

If immigration were to fall to "low" levels—which the Brookings Institution defines as 350,000-600,000 net migrants per year—the US population could drop by 4% by the end of the century, Berube said, citing a 2023 Brookings projection. If the US were to completely close its borders, the population could drop 32% by 2100.

Berube told BI that the effects of the immigration policy Trump ultimately pursues in his term would likely fall between those two estimates. He added that this could create issues for the rest of the population, which will need to support a larger cohort of older people.

In the group's low immigration scenario, America's 65-and-older population would make up 57% of the working-age population by the end of the century, up from 28% in 2022.

"The US workforce right now is aging more rapidly than at any point in our country's history," Berube said. "Even as our population ages, if we cut off the supply of immigrant labor, the challenges that go along with an aging population and an aging workforce are going to get much more serious."

Trump and the Republican party have said that the goal of deportations would be, in part, to drive down the cost of healthcare, housing, and education for Americans.

"The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver," Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump's camp, told BI in an email when asked about the potential impacts of Trump's immigration policy.

Economic challenges

Fewer people coming into the US would likely be a headwind to growth, given that the birth rate has been trending down for decades. The general fertility rate hit a record low in 2023, with just under 55 births for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Berube said immigration is thought of as a band-aid to demographic problems since immigrants tend to be younger, which offsets the aging population. Immigrants also tend to work at higher rates, supplementing the job market.

The US had around 8.3 million unauthorized immigrant workers in 2022, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Certain sectors are particularly at risk of labor shortages in the event of fewer migrant workers, according to José Torres, a senior economist at Interactive Brokers.

Sectors with a high proportion of undocumented immigrant workers, like construction and agriculture, could see the number of workers fall. Those industries are already facing steep labor shortages, with construction in particular facing a shortage of 200,000-400,000 workers each year.

While Trump's pro-market policies will offset some of the economic impact, Torres thinks GDP could fall by half a percentage point once Trump implements his immigration crackdown.

"When you have immigrant flows, that's growth positive. That lifts your GDP in the short run because you have all these folks that are coming in. They're coming for economic opportunity, they're working really hard," Torres told BI. "So that's going to be a headwind to the labor market overall," he said of deportations.

Todd Buccholz, a former White House economist during the George H.W. Bush Administration, thinks Trump's immigration policies will have a mild economic impact, partly because he doubts immigration will fall over the long term.

"I think it's important that the country recognize the aging of the population, the lower fertility rate," Buccholz said. "If you say, no one else is coming in, the gate is locked and no one else can play … we're going to be shrinking and have more senior citizens and fewer people to support them. I think that raises real issues," he added.