Preparing Food Together: The Role of Directives

In Chapters 2 and 3 we argued that people living with late-stage dementia are severely challenged in performing many individual activities (like eating) but also in participating in joint activities—something that makes the person more dependent on supportsupport from others, especially as the disease progresses over time. Most of these everyday activitieseverydayactivities are habitualhabitual in the sense that they have been performed daily over many years. Often the person living with dementia might be able to perform specific skilled behaviors (peeling a potato) but might have severe difficulties in knowing when to do something (when to eat for instance), or how to find and organize the various materials needed (spoons, coffee cups, etc.). As many everyday activitieseverydayactivities also include multi-step tasks, i.e., actions need to be performed in a certain order as when brewing coffee, also the sequential organization of actions might become difficult to perform.