Opening Doors: David Waters (GRS’89)

Bostonia: Who opened doors for you in your career?

Waters: Sometimes it was my alumni networks [he also has a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in dramatic literature, both from Middlebury College], but it was often peers in the food industry. There’s a unique relationship between HIV and the restaurant community, in that many of the people who were sick and dying were restaurant employees, and so there was a personal connection for most chefs and restaurateurs in the city to fight HIV. In some ways, it was similar to what we’re living through now with COVID.

Bostonia: As a gay man, did you experience discrimination in the workplace?

Waters: Not in the workplace; I was certainly luckier than most. But I certainly experienced stigma and bullying in schools as a child. Civil rights for the LGBT community are wildly different now than it was when I was coming out in 1982.

But on top of that, you had what appeared to be a death sentence around HIV tied to intimacy. So my generation had a lot of trauma around that, and I think that only makes me more aware and respectful of other communities that have experienced even more stigma or more trauma than I did, as a white middle-class man who has some privilege.

Bostonia: Can you talk about Community Servings’ decision to pivot from serving just those with HIV/AIDS to including those living with other critical or chronic illnesses?

Waters: When we first started feeding people, there were no drugs available, and people living with AIDS were faced with a condition called AIDS wasting syndrome, which is essentially malnutrition. Your body is attacking its lean body mass trying to kill off the virus. And if you loved somebody with HIV or AIDS, and you were desperately waiting for a cure, your only solution was to feed them.

So programs like ours grew around the country with the dawn of new HIV medicines. The landscape changed in the mid-90s, such that some people didn’t need our services or needed them for a shorter term. And so it opened up the opportunity to offer our services to a wider audience because we naively thought we were feeding people with HIV, and someone else fed people with breast cancer, and somebody else fed people with diabetes.

And then we realized that in America, we’ve made a commitment to feed children through child nutrition programs and feed the elderly through senior nutrition programs, but feeding the sick has never been a priority. And yet, if you’re too sick to shop and cook for yourself or your children, or you have a very complicated diet and you don’t understand how to control potassium, glucose, and phosphorus, as most of us don’t, we discovered how scared, isolated, and hungry you could be. So we expanded our mission to feed people with any illness, and developed, in partnership with others, this concept of what we call “medically tailored meals,” where we can customize your diet, much like a prescription, to feed and provide you with the daily nutrition you need that fits with multiple illnesses, medications, side effects, and cultural issues.

And then we went on to do the research to prove the cost savings, such that we are now oftentimes paid by healthcare [organizations] to feed their sickest patients.