Keeble

Like a lot of neurodivergent people, I grew up with food aversions. Mine were pretty all encompassing, with very few "safe" foods. When I was around, say, 7 years old, the short list of things i ate numbered no more than 25 or so foods: pancakes, cheese pizza with the cheese taken off, grilled cheese sandwiches, fries, bread, Tacos made with just ground beef and cheese, etc. Basically no vegetables, basically no meat other than ground beef in that hyper-specific context; and, most significantly impactful on me, no pasta and no rice. Which was a problem, because that was a large part of what my family cooked and was always around. I had alternate things to eat that id get by on (little cups of yogurt and a spoonful of peanut butter with a side of ritz crackers were common), but even the sight or smell of cooking pasta or of long noodles dangling off of a fork was so viscerally disgusting to me that it took me a long time to get to the point where i wouldn't just vomit on sight. Like, when i was like 4, i was throwing up every day or every other day, mostly just from the sight or smell of pasta. Every time i even attempted to pack lunch for school in kindergarten, i threw up at some point just from sheer disgust over what was happening around me, which would lead to the same isolation and checking my temperature under the assumption i was ill. It was very, very difficult, but i don't remember a life before it (it apparently started when i was 3; i don't have many memories before that).

You'll notice I was using the past tense there: most of this stuff is in the past now. My parents were persistent, being lovers of food themselves, and encouraged me to try new things. It took a long time, but there were steady breakthroughs. One of the first i remember was at 7, when i started putting ketchup on my fries: at first haltingly, then later enthusiastically. My mom later told me that this was the point that she truly gained confidence that i would get over this, that i would discover foods i would later love. She told me that she had a dream about this time, where she dreamt i was eating, of all things, cream of celery soup. And she was so happy for me, because i was better! then she woke up. The breakthroughs came very slowly, but come they did: cheeses from cheese plates at 8, pizza with the cheese actually on it and fried fish at 9, my first cheeseburger and caesar salad at 11. If youve ever seen me in person, you'd never get the idea that any of these were ever foods i had severe aversion to. The big breakthrough, the REALLY big one, was at 15, when my pace of trying things accelerated: steak, chicken, and most meats fell into place here. Finally, the truly big bad starches of pasta and rice? I started eating those at 20.

I do not want to undersell how hard this was, or just how much work was involved. It is very, very tough to go from thinking something is so disgusting that looking at it makes you vomit to willingly put it in your mouth. It is a grueling desensitization process that involves a lot of just being okay with what feels like failure, but is actually great progress. There were a couple tactics that worked particularly well for me:

• Have "Safe" foods available. There are two "safe" foods of mine that were and are often available alongside whatever i was trying: bread, and french fries. You'll notice that a couple of the things that were early breakthroughs for me above are things commonly served with fries, and that's something that definitely helped: when you try a thing you have an aversion to, at least for me, there was a brief second or two when you actually tasted it for what it is until the WAVES of disgust hit you and your brain screams at you about how disgusting it is what you are doing, and the urge to gag begins. Fries are great here because you can slowly wean yourself off them: perhaps a tiny bite of, say, that burger, and then immediately shove 5 fries in your mouth and you can choke it down. eventually, you lose the need for that, and its a normal sized bite of burger than two fries. Etc etc. One ridiculous manifestation of this that worked rather well was with salad: I would initially only eat caesar salads, and only then with extra croutons, so that every bite had at least one crouton (a form of bread) in it. By 10th grade, i didn't really need the extra croutons anymore. Your safe foods might be neither of these, maybe its chocolate! maybe its chicken fingers! either way, its good to have it around as a reward.

• Patience and realistic expectations. At least for me, it takes at least 10 times trying something to get fully used to it generally (there are some happy exceptions that i loved from first taste, like most Indian food). This patience can be difficult because, like I said above, ordering 12 pieces of sushi and only getting yourself to choke down two before the disgust hits you is demoralizing on some level, until you remember that, hey, a year ago even eating one of these pieces was something i had never attempted. (the first time I made a serious effort to try sushi was not coincidentally the day Anthony Bourdain died--he was a hero to me in many ways back in high school, and one of those ways was his unapologetic and enthusiastic curiosity for food. it seemed like a freedom i could only dream of. it felt only appropriate to honor him by trying something new.). I would treat myself after trying something new and difficult with some sort of dessert, too.

• It's not "just texture". Something I hear a lot from both neurotypical and neurodivergent people to try and find a logical explanation of food aversion is that its mostly a reaction to unpredictable texture rather than taste. This is a neat and tidy explanation, and one I subscribed to for a while, but I've come to think this isn't quite right. Sure, your brain will latch onto anything that makes it seem like food aversion is the result of some sort of objective reality of Why This Food Is Disgusting, but at least in my experience this is just your anxiety trying to find any justification it can to explain why it has such power over you. Your anxiety brain can, and will, lie to you about the relative safety/risk of things. The way I think about what food aversions mostly were to me is that its less about the actual texture and more what you imagine the texture to be, which are often not the same thing at all. Think to my pasta example: when i was little the way i imagined the taste of pasta was nothing how like it actually end up tasting, nor was the texture anything similar. And after trying something and still experiencing aversions to it there's a weird cognative dissonance-ish thing that goes on where what the thing actually tastes/feels like is at war with what i've built up the taste/feeling to be with in my mind. This fear gets amplified over time--an initial bad experience for potentially unrelated reasons likely from before you have active memories (maybe you got sick after eating it and your brain associated it with being sick, like the way my aversions apparently developed) gets turned into a wall of awful (to borrow and ADHD term) and is bad for non-specifically all encompassing. It's weird--foods you have aversions to are somehow disgusting inherently for no reason in particular, but also every individual feature feeds into why these Now, after you go through the whole prolonged process of trying there will likely be foods here that you don't like because of texture (im still not wild about shrimp, for example), but you'll likely be able to eat them. But its key that you don't think Food Texture is some sort of objective feature of reality that explains aversion: aversion is somewhat a product of co

• Do it for yourself, not for others! Food aversions certainly make it difficult to be yourself around neurotypical people, and it's nice to not have to hide as much when eating more; that being said, eating more food is its own reward beyond the need to sometimes mask. While the foods that were safe as a kid kept me alive, they weren't very nutritionally good for me. What's more, even completely separating out nutrition, trying new foods has totally blown my mind and opened me up to new experiences I never could have had otherwise. I can think to eating Japanese curry so spicy it made my eyes water topped with a delicious pork katsu and just being unable to resist shoveling more rice coated with the velvety curry into my mouth, being so utterly satisfied after. I can think back to the first time I had lasagna--I was 20, and in, uh, fucking Italy. What a way to be introduced to that, with an unconventional roman take on it (i was in Rome, and it was a cacio e pepe lasagna. I was having dinner there with my cousin, and matter of a factly told her while i was eating it that, did you know this is the first time ive ever had this?) My second lasagna was in Bologna, the city that invented it, and was a hyper-traditional take on the dish...my mouth is watering just thinking about it. I can think back to Xi'an's Famous Foods in New York, and going utterly agog at the introduction to the hand-ripped noodles and mouth numbing Sichuan peppercorn broth. There are tons of these memories of first food experiences relatively late in life, many of them somehow both special and mundane: Ropa Vieja from La Carreta in Miami, making the family's old tomato sauce recipe that came straight from sicily finally for guests and seing how much they enjoyed it and the meatballs I made with it, ramen from some hole in the wall place in Long Island City, the simple joys of the Denny's sponsored "Hobbit Hole Breakfast" promotion in 2012. Hell, even a simple italian sub would have been a huge leap for me as a child--the only sub sandwich i would eat was from subway, and it was just cheese on bread, nothing else. And this is, again, not to undersell just how difficult this process was! But the rewards were, and are, so delicious.

The closest parallel to getting over food aversions that I've experienced was, in fact, getting over aversions to sexuality. I used to be quite internally homophobic, being out in name only and being fine (i guess) with the idea of gay people but never actually letting myself get close to queer people. My first gay friend, even, was at 22. Though im pan and thus could hide by just dating what other people perceived as the opposite sex to me, I couldn't even do that, really--i was too scared, too convinced that i was so irredeemably late to sexuality that there was no hope. If a couple of things had gone differently, if i had ended up on 4chan rather than the av club, if i had found the subreddit /r/foreveralone....I worry what could have happpened, what i could have become, who or what i could have blamed all this on. It took meeting other queer people online via masto (initially) to really start to break some boundaries in my head, slowly and haltingly in the way that food aversions break down: wait, i actually am hot! wait, when gay couples are publicly gay, its really cute! Wait...friends can just help you out by introducing you to sex with little strings attached, where they're okay with you learning! Like with the food, since embracing the whole "trans furry slut" thing I've felt so much more comfortable in my own skin, so much more like me. I have a long term partner who i can share adventures with, too.

Despite all of this, I don't want to give the impression that I'm "all better" now, though food aversion largely is not a significant social impact on my life anymore. Some aversions are still there, to some extent, in ways that make little sense. Long pastas are still inherently more disgusting to me than short ones, and in a restaurant setting ill rarely order long pastas in favor of short ones. Home cooking, frustratingly, is much more difficult for me still than restaurant cooking, because as a kid most of my active trauma of seeing other people eat was from my mom's cooking. Despite my mom in actuality being quite a good cook, many foods she cooks still feel less "safe" to me than anything from a restaurant or prepackaged, which is sad. This also means that I sometimes get grossed out when other people cook me things out of kindness because Something Became Weird about it, often not even at the start of the meal but after ive eaten enough to know that, in reality, its a good meal, well prepared. Eating vegetables still feels like doing homework. I've never really put in the required work to get over that bump, and as youve seen that amount of work is...a lot. I've tried all these things initially, of course, but they're not yet something i have without thinking about it, a natural part of my diet, which has obvious nutritional ramifications. And when these things happen, they're as humiliating as they ever were. However, they are now fewer and farther between, a once a month thing rather than multiple times a day.

If there's a point to this long rambling thing, its the following: food aversions suck and can be overcome via embracing your own curiosity and desire to try new things. This is not an easy process, nor a straightforward one, but for me was and is VERY worth it in ways that have little to do with the whole "eating more foods makes it easier to mask" thing. Don't eat more to please the neurotypicals in your life, because they'll just find something else to think is weird. Do it for you. Do it because food can be an awesome and amazing part of life, one that im incredibly thankful to get to experience more. Do it with patience and persistence, like a workout routine. You'll not only be proud of yourself when you're done, but you'll have a whole new way to experience the world. And, hey, if you're one of the half dozen or so neurotypical people on cohost that knows someone with a food aversion: note some of the tools above so that you can be supportive if the food averse person wishes to work on expanding their diet (do not do this for them! this is their decision to make). If you're gonna be serving them something new, learn what their safe foods are and have some around. if they get down in the dumps about not being able to eat something, reassure them.

I hope this all helps, and thank you for reading this far. This is mostly based on my own experiences, so if your food aversion experiences are different please let me know in the comments. Also, if you're also like me, and have had a lifelong battle with eating food and want to bond or vent, let me know as well. it can feel very very lonely to be food averse, but its not your fault and its better to have others.