Published on 12, July, 2020
I'll come clean to start with.
I am a very fussy eater. My diet is very bland. It used to drive my mother to despair the way I wouldn't eat much variety of food.
I hate strong flavours, with the exception of kippers and sardines. I eat very little meat. And I eat very few vegetables either, and cooked vegetables are a very big no, except for potatoes in the form of chips or baked.. Lettuce, radish, watercress, and raw carrots are the only other vegetables I eat. The only poultry I will eat is in the form of a boiled or poached hen's egg, except as part of the recipe for a cake. Bread, nearly always wholemeal (I do like white bread but avoid it because it is less healthy.) And milk, butter, cheddar cheese, yoghurt, and fruit (oranges, bananas, apples, peaches, strawberries, .... nothing exotic. ) There is very little else I will eat. I know I won't like it and 'gag' at any attempt. An onion I could detect at fifty paces and it is amazing that others insist there is not onion in what they are eating - many things have onions or onion powder in them which I can detect.. Strong smelling foods I find thoroughly revolting.
This extends to cookery programmes on television, pictures in magazines, etc. I have an absolute aversion. Lidls the supermarket, was selling snails the other day, they looked just like snails collected from the garden. How anyone could put them in their mouth I do not know, they looked disgusting.
This food aversion has been with me throughout my life. Right from just after I was on solid food. Nothing my mother did could force me to eat things I dd not want. I believe this is strongly linked to being autistic.
I am writing this not to ask for advice on how to eat. Nor to express my concern over my diet. I am 62 and am not dead yet and it has not done me a lot of harm. I just wonder how many others of 'mature' years also have a restricted diet. And I also hope that it may reassure parents that if their children are very fussy, as long as they are eating some healthy food they need not worry too much.
The main problems it causes me are that I cannot eat out (except fish and chips with no funny stuff on them, just salt and vinegar.) A meal at a restaurant I would look on as a punishment. Rather than that I would much rather sit down to two pieces of wholemeal bread and butter with a banana.
And if that is what I like, why should that be of concern to others?
The things I could not tolerate as a child were eggs, especially fried or scrambled. The smell of egg white makes me gag. So does the smell of lard or butter being cooked. On fact I nearly threw up passing a greasy spoon recently, I think it was bacon of some kind cooking in some kind of fat.
Bit that could be a liver thing, in Italy they will say it is a liver thing anyway.
I did not like the smell of hot milk either, nor cheese, though I like it now.
nexus9 said:The things I could not tolerate as a child were eggs, especially fried or scrambled. The smell of egg white makes me gag.
Me too and exactly as you describe. At a push if I had to I could eat well cooked yoke as long as it had absolutely NO white in it at all but just the smell of egg white can make me sick not let alone the taste. Its not an allergy thing though as I have no problem with eggs as an ingredient as long as I can't taste them. Can't stand meringue though, the egg whiteyness comes though that stuff.
I'd forgotten that thing I had about undercooked egg whites as a child. My mum did this terrible thing of stirring a raw egg into a bowl of hot Readybrek - I'm feeling nauseous at the memory!
When I was pregnant I got so sensitive to food smells that a TV add for lamb burgers made me retch!
Ugh!!!! I hated ready Brek too. My aversion to eggs has not diminished in the slightest. Some restaurants over here do a full English for the tourists, makes me retch if the smell is strong enough