Garden City’s Life’s WORC has spent three years quietly solving a problem that stumps caregivers across Long Island: how do you get someone who’s never trusted vegetables to eat spinach and actually enjoy it?
Susan Rust has an answer. And it starts with turkey meatballs.
Rust, a Huntington resident who ran a bakery in Bayville for years, now serves as culinary director for Life’s WORC, the Garden City-based nonprofit that supports people with developmental disabilities and autism across Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan. Her job isn’t just cooking. It’s rebuilding the entire relationship between the people Life’s WORC serves and the food on their plates.
That’s harder than it sounds. People in the developmental disabilities and autism community often face serious sensory and behavioral barriers around food, making it easy for caregivers to default to what’s fast and familiar. Processed meals. Frozen dinners. Anything sodium-packed and shelf-stable that doesn’t require a negotiation.
“When it comes to eating right and balanced meals, these individuals have most always been extremely challenged,” Rust told Long Island Press. “I heard a lot of frustration from both family members and staff about the difficulties in getting people supported to eat nutritional proteins. Unfortunately, it has been too easy to just provide junk food or sodium, sugar-filled processed instant foods as a quick fix.”
Rust didn’t walk in with a fixed menu. She started with interviews and focus groups, asking the people Life’s WORC supports what they actually liked and disliked eating. That step mattered.
The intelligence she gathered shaped a set of recipes designed to be taught to group home managers as part of cooking lessons and life skills sessions. Staff, managers, and residents work through meal planning together. Then they cook it. Then they eat what they made.
The turkey meatball recipe captures the method perfectly. No frozen, preservative-loaded package in sight. Rust brings in fresh ground turkey, has participants chop mushrooms and add spinach, and walks everyone through rolling the meatballs by hand before they go in the oven. “While the meatballs were in the oven, we talked about how this was a meal which they cooked,” she said. “The anticipation grew. While eating dinner, we credited everyone for their work in the kitchen.”
Ownership changes everything.
Chicken fingers follow the same idea. Fresh, not frozen, not processed. The goal is to get residents engaged before the food hits the table, using touch and smell as entry points for people who might otherwise refuse to try something new. Photos from Life’s WORC sessions show participants like Joe Fornasier and Derek Kurdle cutting spinach and smelling seasonings and herbs, which is exactly the kind of sensory involvement Rust builds into each lesson.
It works partly because Rust came to this world through an unconventional route. Before Life’s WORC, she built her culinary experience running her Bayville bakery and worked alongside people with developmental disabilities and autism through after-school programs and summer camps. She brought both halves of that background into the job when she joined Life’s WORC three years ago, which is why the program doesn’t feel like a clinical nutrition intervention. It feels like cooking class.
The Life’s WORC program reaches hundreds of people across residential and day habilitation programs. For families of those residents, Rust’s work addresses something they’ve worried about for a long time. Caregivers can prepare nutritious food with confidence. Residents actually want to eat it.
“Taking the information the people supported and expressed, I made this into a participation where managers, staff and people supported together had a meal planning session with some kitchen demonstration on how we would prepare the meals,” Rust said. “This is an audience who often balked at eating any vegetables. So I tried to get them interested, open to trying these meals by having them help out and take part.”
For anyone who has ever tried to get a picky eater to touch a vegetable, that sentence lands hard.
Developmental disability advocacy organizations have long pointed to nutrition as an underserved quality-of-life issue in residential care settings, one that often gets buried under more visible concerns like housing, employment, and behavioral support. Life’s WORC is making the case that food belongs in that conversation, and that a former Bayville bakery owner might be exactly the person to put it there.
Jordan, one of the residents photographed during a recent session, gave the meal a thumbs up.
That’s the whole review right there.