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'm very sensitive when it comes to textures. I can't stand multiple highly-contrasting textures in the same dish (raw tomatoes are a personal pet-hate; flakey peel, crunchy flesh, slimy innards full of tiny hard seeds!) or slimy textures at all.
Flavour wise, I can't abide vinegar but I think that's more my smell hypersensitivity than anything. I adore very very hot (as in spicy) foods and mostly live on spicy, highly-flavoured curries/stews/etc.
A couple of people that have responded to this thread have mentioned having difficulties or preferences regarding certain textures of foods, personally I don't think that I'm bothered by different textures. Oddly, I'm not a huge fan of cooked tomatoes, although I can eat them and I'm fine with them incorporated as part of a dish such as spaghetti bolognese. What textures do you prefer?
I don't use vinegar either but it's got nothing to do with the taste, I actually like the taste of vinegar and will eat it with pickled onions or as salt and vinegar crisps. I just managed to make an association in my head when I was 6 between having eaten vinegar the night before and getting a sickness bug! Unfortunately, although I realise logically that the vinegar had nothing to do with it, I've never managed to unlearn/over-ride that association and still won't put vinegar on food!
Do you use spices in food more for heat than flavour then?
I can't pinpoint any textures I'm incredibly fond of except cheesecake, that has a great mouth-feel. It's mostly about what I dislike with texture. I like pasta sauces blended so they're very homogenous and that used to apply to almost every foodstuff; I had to blend all curries, chilli, stews, etc. until my late teens.
I use spices for both! I like strong flavour and heat combined.
The good old fashioned remedies of our grandparent’s generation!!!
"Unwashed bins in the middle of summer" flu cure!
I can well imagine that it would! I’m sure she meant well though!
Nan used to make chicken liver soup when you were ill. It made me feel more ill! Smelled like ***!
I can’t eat any liver. I imagine over-cooked liver is probably even more chewy than liver that’s cooked well
Kitsune said:Can you eat liver?
Lambs liver isn't too bad. I use a recipe with a roux gravy with onions, and only lightly cook the liver. Over-cooked liver is terrible though, criminal!
Thank you! I think that you may have inadvertently helped me with my 2 year old's eating habits!
You know what I thought of while I was doing the school run? You mentioned about needing a lot of meals to be blended until your late teens. I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread that my youngest is super sensitive to food. Honestly, the last few days we've been struggling to get her to eat anything other than bread! But she will quite reliably eat homemade soup with broken up pieces of bread in it. So what I am going to try is blending all her dinners, such as bolognese sauce; roast; stew; etc into a soup like consistency and then breaking up bits of bread to put in it.
Hopefully this works and gets her diet a bit more varied. I'll let you know how she gets on with it :-)
Can you eat liver? I can't! Apart from the fact that it tastes of bile! In fact it's like bile flavoured rubber! It's got to be the chewiest food in the world ever, I just can't chew it up enough to swallow it, no matter how long I chew it for! I just physically can't swallow it, It's made me gag when I've tried to swallow it in the past! don't even bother to try to eat it these days!