Food and textures

I grew up a fussy eater, but also as someone who enjoys food. If you feed me something I like, then I’ll enjoy it immensely. Feed me me something I don’t like, and well, I’ll be trying to disguise my horror.

Vegetables. They have been a big problem, cooked or raw. Cous cous, mushrooms, nuts and seeds. Fruit. Salad – in particular things like peppers and radishes and cucumber. Many vegetarian dishes cause me problems, especially if they have items like lentils or chickpeas in them.

So – I must have tried these foods that I don’t like at some point in the past, to reach the conclusion that I don’t like them, right? Well, maybe. I suspect, however that that isn’t the case a lot of the time. I think I’ve reached some arbitrary decision that I don’t like things.

When I was a child, I’d sit and pick out the bits I didn’t like from whatever meal I was presented with. Often I’d end up with a pile on the side of my plate that was almost as big as the food that I would eat. This was normal for me, and I couldn’t see what was wrong with it. Doing this as a child is perhaps not so unusual, but I carried it through into adulthood as well.

In the years since I met and married my wife, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown less fussy, and now eat many foods that I wouldn’t have entertained five years ago. My wife has been called a miracle worker by my mother, for managing to do what she failed to do whilst I was growing up.

So what was the problem, and how did my wife help me deal with it?

The most important revelation about my dislike of many food items came well over ten years ago, at some point in my twenties. When I dislike a food it is almost always because of it’s texture.

As a grown up man in his twenties, it was far more difficult for me to decline to eat food that others were providing for me, so I’d mentally grit my teeth and try and eat what I was given. It was the texture that more often than not caused me the problem.

One particular meal sticks out like a beacon in my memory. I was eating with my parents and brother at my aunt’s house. The first course was a large field mushroom, cooked and with some sort of topping on it. Mushrooms are a particular problem for me. I ate it. Well, I tell a lie there, I ate about half of it. I even got a quiet ‘well done’ from my mother (I was probably about 25 at the time!). What really sticks in my mind about it, however was the texture of the mushroom when I was eating it. There was no escaping it – it was the texture that I didn’t like.

It’s difficult to put into words what it is about the textures of some foods that makes me dislike them. They just have the power to send a chill down my spine and make me want to spit out what I’m chewing. Chewing is definitely a part of it, and I think that it’s a particular range of textures that have caused me the problems. If you look at the texture of cooked veg, or of mushrooms, for example, they have broadly speaking a soft texture but with a bit of bite left. It tends to be that sort of texture that causes me problems.

But as I’ve found, it doesn’t have to stay a problem.

I eat most cooked vegetables these days, and they no longer make me grimace. Cous cous is fine too, and I will eat some salad as well without picking all the bits out, but – if I’m honest it still wouldn’t be a meal of choice for me.

In the end, my wife simply wouldn’t stand for my fussy eating, and put pressure on me to eat a more varied diet. I felt silly about being fussy, and guilty that I was limiting her diet, and so braved the cooked veg.

After a while, it was fine – the texture was no longer a problem. It feels like I retrained my response to various foods.

Some are still a bit of a problem, however. I wouldn’t out of choice eat aubergine, nor tomoatoes in a salad (but of course tomato sauces are fine).

Now I’m aware of my Asperger’s, I wonder if my fussy eating was caused in some way by it. Were or are any of you fussy eaters? Are you raising kids on the spectrum who are fussy eaters? Is texture your problem too? I’d be really interested to find out if there is some correlation here, or if my fussy eating is coincidental.

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