I know it’s diet food but what about Nutrisystem? They deliver monthly and your dad can probably get around 1400 calories a day which might be enough for an elderly person, or add some Ensure. He’d also have to add vegetables but perhaps canned or frozen will work. Almost all the Nutrisystem foods are microwaveable.
That’ll be me if I make it that long, and maybe something a lot stronger. 
Actually, the person we hired to come cook for my in-laws when they no longer could manage partly won the job because she made an excellent whiskey sour, which was my MILs favorite. But she also whipped up a lot of highly nutritious soup and breakfasts and could be quite stern about getting them eaten.
I mostly can’t stand polenta so I rarely eat it in any form, but when I’ve traveled to places in Italy where it is at least as common as pasta, I have noticed that it is seldom prepared or served plain. I don’t know what nutrients are missing, but I’ve seen polenta mixed with high-fat cheese, eggs, with meat poured over it, made with veg, mushrooms, nuts (in sweet tortes with eggs), no end of herbs and onions – none of which I’m sure was available to many Italians in the 30s, 40s and even 50s.
However, I have also noticed many higher-end stores in Italy selling polenta taragna, which mixes ground corn with ground buckwheat. This is from the Alpine regions of Italy, where you can also sometimes find antique polenta-like dishes that are made with ground chestnuts, and I would think those are highly nutritious. I take it it just became cheaper and easier to grow corn at some point, and it replaced these more nutritious predecessors for many recipes, and possibly stunted a lot of kids. Just guessing.
My elderly mother drinks Ensure even though she cooks and eats sensibly on her own. I think she feels like she might no longer be absorbing vitamins as she should, or maybe she just finds easier than taking vitamin pills. But it might not be a bad idea for most any elderly person.
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Yes, ordinary people in that part of the world have lived on porridges of that sort long before maize arrived from the New World. Including Roman legionnaires.
I don’t detest polenta, but it certainly isn’t something I’d want to subsist on. Yes, I’m sure polenta taragna is more nutritious - and lower GI - and it has a more interesting taste, but perhaps you don’t like the porridgy texture of polenta.
Yes, the way foods like that are used in the relevant parts of Italy nowadays is nothing to how peasants had to eat, yes, up until the 1950s, before the “economic miracle” of the 1960s. An Argentine friend prepares it with milk and layers it with tomato and cheese, but those Italians (and Spaniards) emigrating down there were in search of the land of milk and meat…
That is a big part of it, because grilled polenta cakes I don’t mind so much. But it is also the blandnes (which makes it a good base for toppings). A polenta-like dish made essentially of chestnuts that I ate in the valle d’Aosta was marvelous.
