Textures of the weird
Live prawns and reindeer tongue might be high up the menu, but lumpy mashed potatoes are the devil
As an ex-food writer and restaurant critic, I can't believe it's taken me this long to write about the topic on here. Lucky post number 13 it is for an article on autism and its relationship with food.
Anyone who knew my pre-teen self would have laughed hysterically at the thought of me having a job that involved critiquing food because my relationship as a child was far from conventional. Behaviours that I have been teased about for decades, I now understand are common place in Autistic children.
ASD very often goes hand-in-hand with food aversions. Studies show that atypical eating behaviours are 15 times more common in Autistic children than in neurotypical children. Of those behaviours limited food preferences (88%) was the most common behaviour followed up by hypersensitivity to texture (46%). The latter is what it says on the tin, the former, however, is a lot more intense than what many people think of as 'picky eating'.
The carrot incident
My biggest issue has always been the latter. One of my earliest childhood memories is being in my granny's house and taking a handful of food from my plate while no one was watching, pocketing it, then going to the bathroom and flushing it down the toilet. It was like a child's version of the Shawshank Redemption but without the 27 years, two rock hammers and Rita Hayworth poster.
I'm famous in our family for once, as a nine-year-old, attempting to massage carrots into the underside of our kitchen table so I wouldn't have to eat them.
I'm still unsure as to how I thought that would end. All I know is that textures of the weird (or even just the memory or thought of them) can make me physically retch. By textures of the weird I mean anything that is unexpected and unwanted within food. Hidden horrors that make my skin crawl way worse than Wes Craven ever could.
A great example from childhood is my mum's mashed potatoes. I grew up in '80s West Belfast so I wasn't expecting each batch to match Joël Robuchon's 'best mashed potatoes in the world' (if you're wondering, a 2:1 ratio of potato and butter is the key).
The anti-Robuchon
In our house, mashed potatoes tended to be the enemy of Robuchon, with unexpected hard lumps, that every single time brought a gag reflex that's comparable to the sensation of having just downed your 14th Jägermeister in the space of 10 minutes. I genuinely thought I might vomit on my keyboard with the memories stemming from writing that last paragraph (the potatoes, not the Jägers).
In my adult life, I have reviewed hundreds of restaurants ranging from tiny local cafes to places that have appeared in the World's Top 100 restaurants list. As you'd expect from the latter, many of those have had dishes with weird and wonderful textures. The key word being wonderful. Textures of the weird seem to be challenging for me when they're nasty and unexpected.
The ones that are well thought out and purposeful from amazing chefs, I've never really had an issue with. I can still taste the freshness of the live prawn we were served at noma in 2011, two days after it was voted the world's best restaurant for the second year running. I adored the snail porridge and the hot and cold tea at the Fat Duck. The latter had one half of your mouth experiencing the liquid as cold and the other half hot at the same time.
Textures of delight: Snail porridge at the Fat Duck (top left); Cold fried chicken with ranch and caviar at Momofuku Ko (which sadly closed its doors in late 2023); beef and gold leaf Ferrero Rocher at Enrico Bartolini's restaurant at Mudec; reindeer tongue and live prawn at noma (pictures at noma by Mal McCann)
Give me the cold fried chicken with caviar (above) and I'm in heaven. Give me a piece of chicken with an unexpectedly weird texture and you'll find me hurtling for the bathroom (woody breast, anyone?). One bite like that and I'll have to put the contents of the plate in the food bin and dinner time is over. If I ever needed a diet, a spoonful of lumpy mash would put me off eating for 24 hours and would give me the kind of nightmares that Freddy Krueger wished he had.
If you live with an Autistic child or adult know that we're not doing this out of awkwardness. It's easy to get annoyed and frustrated, especially with those of us who have a hypersensitivity to texture and a meal can flip on its head at a moment's notice. Just remember weird textures are likely to make us want to hide under the table, where the carrots roam, and wait on the nightmare ending.
Links if you're interested in finding out more on this topic:
1. Feeding and eating problems in children and adolescents with autism
2. Atypical eating behaviours in children and adolescents with autism, ADHD, other disorders and typical development