Published on 12, July, 2020
I've had several food related discussions recently with a few autistic friends of mine, both on and off the forum and I can't help but be intrigued by how autism affects our taste in food. I have a couple of friends who are very hypersensitive to a lot of different tastes and textures and can only eat very bland tasting food of certain specific consistencies and yet there are other friends and also myself that seem to like lots of strong tastes; spices, etc. Food seems to be important to autistic people in one way or another! So I wondered where everyone else is with food. Do you prefer strong tastes and flavours or do you have a lot of food sensitivities that limit what you can eat? I'd like to know other people's opinions and thoughts on this?
I prefer strong flavours (my mum's always said when I was a baby they thought I was going to be fussy until she started feeding me the stuff they were eating-which was a lot of tomatoes and garlic and stuff, and they realised I just didn't like the bland jars of baby food). Unfortunately, I have GERD so whilst I like spicy things, my stomach does not. There's a very wide range of stuff I like and very little I completely dislike, but I have very particular opinions about how things should be and what things shouldn't mix (like, coleslaw is an abomination because of the mixture of textures). I hate when things aren't quite the texture I expect.
That baby food just wasn't up to standards was it? To be fair though, I've tried my daughter's baby food when they were little and wondered 'how on earth do baby's actually like this?' Although I made the majority of their baby food myself, they only had the odd shop bought jar, it's pretty minging though!
That must be annoying, liking spicy flavours but not being able to eat them? Actually I do know what you mean about having particular ideas of how things should be, with me it's about what vegetables go in certain dishes, so although I would eat it I would get very thrown if I was given a chicken korma with chunks or carrot and parsnip in it, because I don't think they belong in a korma.