Food weirdness.

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I'm new to this whole Asperger's thing. So, please excuse posts that might be obvious like this.

Are there foods you won't eat? Why?

My food issues are much many:

All the time:
Cooked vegetables - too mushy
Stringy/veiny fruits - I can feel the veins in them. It freaks me out.
Seeded fruits/vegetables - I don't like seeds. Strawberries are okay sometimes, but sometimes not.
Fuzzy fruits - Things I eat should not be fuzzy.
Citrus - The texture tweaks me out.
Citrus juice (by extension) - pulp freaks me out
Thick soups with chunks/beans/meat (chili, etc) - Makes me feel like I already ate it.
Bananas - Ugh.
Mushrooms, ever. - They grow in poop. When cooked, they are slimy and horribly textured.
Steak, pork chops, etc - I don't like chewing thick chunks of meat, for some reason. It makes me hyperaware of the fact that it's an animal. Can be disguised with steak sauce or barbecue sauce in mass quantities.
Seeded...anything - Looks like little bugs.
Sauces with chunks - When I was a child, my mom made pasta with tomato sauce a lot and if there were chunks of tomatoes in the sauce, I would pick them out one by one and set them on the edge of my plate. Eventually she caught on and started making me eat the chunks, cold. I gagged.

I gravitate towards foods with a lot of basic flavor. Things that are really salty, really sweet, really sour. I really like salt and vinegar chips, for example. I also, as a snack, will dip sourdough bread in balsamic vinegar.
I also tend to eat the same things over and over again. Even now, if living alone (which I did for four years, but now I live with my grandparents), I will eat the same thing night after night. I ate Ben and Jerry's ice cream, the same kind, for like six nights in a row for dinner. I wonder what the store guy thought of me, going in every night and buying the same pint of ice cream! Or I'd have Annie's Mac and Cheese. I used to work in a restaurant, and often I'd order the same meal every night I worked until I got absolutely sick of it, and then progress to another food a couple weeks later.

I hope someone out there has food particularities too... =)

Last edited by PurpleOctober on 07 Jan 2012, 9:27 pm, edited 3 times in total.

To me food is just colours and forms, so I have big issues with eating at all. They called it "anorexia", but it is not, that I don't want to eat, but there is something not functioning in "recognizing" food, I don't know how to call it. I had trouble eating from when I was born and from age 1, I was underweighted, because I refused to eat. Now, I can only eat one food at a time, I cannot mix.

Last edited by Eloa on 07 Jan 2012, 7:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am a notoriously picky eater. Even the foods I like to eat, have to be exactly right, and I have days when I still can't eat those.

With a few exceptions, I don't eat any fruits or vegetables. Fruit flavors are too strong for me, and I don't like the texture. I can eat grapes, but don't especially like the texture. I drink grape juice all the time though. I like strawberries and cherries, as long as they aren't too pulpy, but only once in awhile. Yeah, nothing with seeds in it.

I can't stand to eat crackers, except for one particular kind that I like okay, most of them are too dry. It feels like it sucks all the moisture out of my mouth.

I don't eat soup or sandwiches. No white loaf bread, actually hardly any kinds of bread at all. Every once in awhile I get lucky and find some bread that I like, but I can only eat it once or twice and then it starts tasting bad to me.

It would be a much shorter list to name what I DO eat, than to name what I don't.

Only foods I will not eat for reasons other than taste are tomatos and aubergines, I just dont like the texture of them. Other than that I can and do eat anything.

I understand that. When I was younger, I was weird about food on my plate not mixing. It took me until I was 19 to even try Shepherd's Pie because to me, that's the ultimate foods mixing! If I was eating at someone else's house, because at my mom's house, we only usually had one food for dinner (usually pasta with plain red sauce or with butter), I would make little alleys between my food and would quietly eat around food that had been "contaminated". (For instance, water from my peas got into my mashed potatoes. Forget those potatoes.)

Yep.

For my first few weeks at WP, I was convinced that I somehow managed to avoid having the infamous "sensory integration issues" because the examples everyone else cited were mostly sound-related. Then it hit me... food. More generally, taste & smell. Oh, god... I'm turning green.

I'm an amazingly cheap person to take on a date. Take me to the Olive Garden, I'm in nirvana. Take me to Chili's, I'm delighted. Pizza hut lunch buffet or Cici's? Pure bliss. Take me to a 5-star exotic restaurant with no menu and unpronounceable food items that contain things like seafood, mushrooms, poultry, reptiles, or stringy/mushy/smelly vegetables, and I'll be bolting for the door after throwing up into the napkin.

My list of foods I like is longer than a few lines, but if push came to shove, the list of acceptable ingredients could easily fit on a single sheet of notebook paper. Basically, if it involves pizza, pasta, hamburgers, or American-style Mexican food... I'm good. Deviate more than slightly, and I'm in panic. Leave me without even the option of something that can be loosely described as "melted cheese on some kind of bread", and I'm likely to have a total meltdown if I'm prevented from escape.

Whatever you do, don't let adjacent food items touch. OK, I won't freak if the garlic roll is sitting on top of the french fries or touching a bit of the sauce, but I usually eat things one item at a time. The one inexplicable exception I'll make is corn + mashed potatoes. I've mellowed out a tiny, tiny bit in this regard since childhood, but things like casseroles and "one dish mystery slop" still completely freak me out.

I also can't stand mushy cooked vegs. They also tend not to taste like food any more, but thats the only way my mother used to make them. Yuck! Only recently have I been able to handle canned cooked carrots--with a little honey, and canned kidney beans--with BBQ sauce, but I drain the canned liquid before adding the BBQ sauce and cooking them. I don't like that liquid. But forget those beans in baked beans. They are absolutely gross.

Most citrus fruits and juices upset my stomach, but I can handle a little lemon or lime, but they all smell good to me. On the other hand, I absolutely can't stand the smell or taste of bananas. I hate canned sweet potatoes or yams, because they are overcooked. Also, sometimes there are rotten ones in the can, and I hate that excessively over sweetened liquid in the can. Whenever I had them, I drained that garbage off before eating the sweet potatoes or yams. There was enough still coating them, and absorbed into them for seasoning them. I do like the uncanned, raw ones, though.

I don't like berries with hairs or seeds on their outsides, or furry fruit, and I can't stand soups or broths, mostly because of the oil or grease in them. It upsets my stomach, especially chicken broth.

I don't care for thick meats because they are too hard to chew. I also don't like them too raw, or cooked too dry. My mother preferred to cook meats until they were dessicated, especially chicken. I can't stand gravy, and almost all other sauces, including pasta sauces. I don't like some of the seasonings used in pasta and other sauces, and don't like tomatoes, except in BBQ sauce, and some marinade sauces. I have occasionally had soy sauce, but I am not especially fond of it. I also can't stand very hot seasonings, but do like garlic, and sometimes a little pepper, preferably red pepper seasoning. For some reason it tastes better to me than black pepper. I don't like onion, unless it is a little bit of seasoning already in some store bought food, like BBQ sauce. I prefer the Bullseye BBQ sauces because they got rid of the corn syrup, have no alcohol, and the first ingredient is tomato puree, instead of water or sweetener. I know that's not logical, as I hate tomatoes, but their BBQ sauces actually taste good, even with tomatoes being the first ingredient.

I also prefer to eat many foods one at a time, but there are exceptions. I like sandwiches, and I will also sometimes mix other foods into rice or pasta, and I like cheese or BBQ sauce on meats. Although I mostly hate cooked vegs, I will eat some raw ones, and some raw fruits. I also like some dried fruits, and fruit sauces. I like to buy those packs of little fruit sauce cups, with no added sugar, and turn them into sorbets, by putting them in the freezer. Yummy!

According to what others have posted here, being such a picky eater is common among those of us on the spectrum. I have always been accused of being a picky, and weird eater. Don't worry about it. Eat your way, and do try to eat healthy. And remember, we on the spectrum are all:

A Different Drummer

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
Perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears,
However measured or far away.

--Henry David Thoreau

I'm not a very picky eater. I'll eat most things. I just have to have a lot of salt and I prefer to eat with a heavy spoon instead of a fork. In public or at someone's house I'll eat the "right way" with a knife and fork, but at home I like eating everything that I can with a spoon. The only exception is something like steak or roast. If I'm alone while eating, I'll actually pick up the roast with my fingers and eat it. I do that for ham too.

Oh, I eat pancakes and waffles or biscuits and gravy with a fork. Some things require one, but what can be eaten with a spoon will be eaten with a spoon when I can do so.

I do go for some pretty wierd combinations though. Ranch dressing goes on roast beef or pork. Grey Poupon goes on all ham, unless it's in a sandwich then butter goes on it instead of mayo and mustard. Boiled eggs are seperated from their yolks and the whites discareded and the yolk is spread on a piece of light toast with salt, or it's mashed with regular mustard and spread on sausage. The sausage must be that long single link thick type thats sliced and then cut in half longways where it opens up but is still connected. Eggs otherwise must be scrambled with cheese. A bowl of mayo is a perfectly acceptable dip for potato chips. Avacados are mashed in a bowl and spread on plain pringles potato chips.

My weird combinations:
Ranch dressing goes on sweet corn and all forms of cooked potatoes.
Barbecue sauce goes on everything.
Balsamic vinegar goes on bread.
Ketchup goes on macaroni and cheese.
Steak sauce goes on pasta and fried potatoes.

Essentially condiments are a food group and should be consumed as such.

Frances? What _is_ the name of the song?

And for all of you, I'm really, really glad I don't have to cook for you! My husband was quite bad enough! No cold starch, no fish, no horseradish, butter (margarine, actually: he didn't like the flavor of butter either) on sandwiches, and on otherwise plain egg noodles, nothing with pineapple in it, no coconut, no coffee, no onions unless they were chopped really fine in the blender, no sweet peppers, and on, and on, and on. He drank Nestle's instant tea, either hot or iced and presweetened (when it was hot and all the sugar dissolved). I eat (almost) anything that doesn't eat me first. And the funny thing is, I'm the Aspie. He was schizophrenic, more or less, most of the time less.

Baba O'Riley, by the Who.

I'm not all that picky, except in the things I prefer to put on my own food, and the way I prefer to eat it. I'll eat almost anything.

My husband is a very picky eater although he's gotten a bit better. He's a meat and potatoes guy. Literally. Every meal must have meat and either potatoes, pasta or rice. The only vegetables he eats cooked are corn and green beans. He's gotten a bit better and will try certain things, but he's never going to be a big vegetable eater.

My younger son (16) is somewhat picky too. He really only likes orange or orangish food. It's not the color that he likes, it's just that almost all the food he likes is orange or orangey-brown. He's always got money somehow, and if I cook something he doesn't like he will either get a ride to Subway or walk up there. He could live on Subway.

There are only a very few meals I can cook that will please everyone in my home at once, and I'm not cooking the same thing over and over. Somebody is going to be unhappy almost every night. They are all welcome to make a sandwich or some eggs or something else we have on hand, but I'm not running a restaurant.

i'm over prawns but eggs still haunt me

I don't like tomatoes because of the seeds and pulp. I will eat tomato sauce, and the solid parts when seasoned. Same issue with eggplant.

Seeds bother me too, but not on bread, and I don't have an issue with rice. I think that seeds in fluid or sauce feel like inconsistencies; indicating something is wrong.

Mushrooms bother me because I don't think food should be rubbery and crunchy at the same time. I can swallow slices whole.

I feel that berries are too high maintenance, for example cherry pits. That said, I'm starting to come around after discovering reiner cherries.

Think that's most of it.

I was incredibly picky about food when younger, and still have major sensitivities. I am repulsed by any kind of meat, and always have been. I never used to mind chicken, and before I became veggie five years ago, I used to eat it a lot. Now, I even find chicken gross.

I can eat eggs if they are in pad thai and similar dishes, but never by themselves.

I also cant stand iceberg lettuce and other crunchy, watery, cold vegetables, such as cucumbers. I can only eat tomatoes if they are chopped up and warm, or in some kind of sauce. When I have a salad, it can only have dark leaves. Until recently, I have never been able to eat any cold vegetables...now I can do broccoli, cauliflower and carrots with dip...as long as I eat them alongside other foods.

When I was 5 I used too eat chicken nuggets and rice for breakfeast lunch and dinner and if it wasn't cooked the way or if my parents tried to give me somthing else I would through a temper tampturme.

I was a very picky eater. Things got better with time. I had sensory issues with food, but they are slowing going away.