SOMETIMES I can’t believe what my 82-year-old mother has been eating. Living now in a retirement home in Durham, N.C., she told me she recently had cherry cobbler for breakfast. Apparently she’d had French toast stuffed with bananas and Nutella for lunch the day before, and after lunch had gone to dessert theater (“You know, like dinner theater, but with desserts”), where she’d gobbled down a lot of cookies. “So when they served cherry cobbler for dessert that night in the dining room, I thought, I better take this back to my room and eat it tomorrow. For breakfast.”

Nancy Cardozo shares a house with her friend Aileen Ward in New Milford, Conn.; both are writers in their 90s. “We eat everything we like,” Ms. Cardozo said. “Any kinds of eggs, blini, any good red or beluga caviar with crème fraîche, cheesecake, chocolate soufflé with whipped cream, crème brûlée, filet mignon, pasta with pesto. Aileen drinks Lillet, and I’m vodka and tonic. We drink as much as we can.”

The cartoonist Mort Gerberg, now in his late 70s, went to a bat mitzvah in Denver last year for his great-niece. “Usually at these things they have a table with desserts or chocolate, but at this one they had a sour cream table,” Mr. Gerberg said. “They had all these cockamamie things to put on the sour cream: candies, chocolate. I had heaping portions. It was thrilling. And all I could think was, where are the potatoes?”

It’s a common belief that life as we know it ends in old age. Gone are the little joys that make existence worthwhile  béarnaise sauce, pancetta, cake batter  all subsumed under a banner reading, “Doctor’s Orders.” For older people, the irony of eating is that your metabolism slows down, so you need less food, but your body needs just as many nutrients, if not more.