AUTISM EATING “RITUALS” — PART 1

There are certain types of rituals that children with autism perform before or when they eat. These “rituals” as I call them differ from one individual to another depending on their sensory challenges.

We all have senses we live our everyday life by, and these senses help us distinguish between good and bad, safety and danger, etc.

There could be more of these senses — I’m not sure but for today I want to talk about the five most important ones that we all know of, more so because of the role they play in the life of autistic individuals.

These are the five senses we all have:

· See/sight (visual)

· Taste (gustatory)

· Hearing (auditory)

· Touch (tactile)

· Smell (olfactory)

If you are following my posts sequentially, then you know by now how different people with autism are because I’ve explained it and, right now you’re probably asking what these senses have to do with eating.

To a non-autistic person, this won’t make sense at all but to people with autism, these senses create eating behaviours you won’t understand unless you know how they all feature.

Now, autistic individuals always — and I mean always struggle or are controlled by one or two or all these senses.

I will explain in my next blog post how these can make the life of an autistic person difficult if not understood by their loved ones, parents, caregivers, or whatever the case may be.

But for now, we talk about the rituals that are influenced by each one. Here’s what I’ll do, in this piece I will break down the first two and explain the remaining three in the next post. Without any further ado, let’s dive in, shall we?

The visual eaters

These are very visual individuals; they see everything, everywhere, they even see things at a microscopic level. Again, I’ll explain in the next blog where I talk about sensory challenges.

That’s how good and strong their sights are. So, visuals of any sort can either attract or bore them, but these individuals are highly visual, nonetheless.

Now, here’s what they do before they eat. As I’ve explained that they are visual beings — this means that presentation is everything to them and this includes food on their plates.

They would make excellent judges in the cooking competition shows because they are all about presentation.

This also means that they prefer their food in a certain cadence. The food must be neatly placed with no chaos at all. The food must not touch each other on the plate.

If you find yourself dishing for an autistic individual and you see them setting the food in some order, then you should know that they are doing this because the food is not properly presented or structured.

Maybe you’ve put one type of dish on the left, another in the middle, and another one on the right, too close to the other, or on top of it, or whatever.

Don’t be offended but understand they want it in a certain order or nothing. Simply understand that your presentation skills don’t meet their satisfaction and move on.

Let’s make an example with real food — let’s say on the plate there’s some steak, potato salad, and a sauce and everything is touchy-touchy.

That autistic visual eater would either separate the food to create room for one another and if the plate is small enough to allow this manoeuvring, then the person will have difficulty eating their food. But if it isn’t they will perform this ritual with ease before eating.

Here’s another type of visual eater

In our black culture, we have food we call a “seven-colour meal” or “Sunday kos”. In the olden days this meal used to be for Sundays and very special occasions.

Obviously, that’s not the case anymore as it can now be enjoyed anytime, but the name stuck, nonetheless. This name was created after observing the multi-colours of the food on the plate.

An example of it would be rice, a sauce/gravy, beetroot, green salad, bean salad, pumpkin/sweet potatoes, potato salad, and of course, some meat.

Imagine this whole shebang in one plate. You can see the picture, right? IT’S A WHOLE RAINBOW ON A PLATE!

Now, imagine a person mixing all this food, and by mixing, I mean the actual blending of all this food on that one plate. Looks chaotic and almost disgusting, doesn’t it?

You can almost say EUW with capitals. Looks like one of those clumsy paintings where the artist just spilled different shades of colours on top of one another.

But guess what? To that autistic individual, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this awful picture. Matter of fact is they actually love their food like that. You may hate this because really, who wouldn’t?

But understand that it’s not about you but your autistic loved one. You can try everything to stop them from doing this, but you must also know that they might have difficulty eating their food — and that’s if they’ll even eat at all.

The gustatory eaters

These are individuals who always — I mean always taste their food by licking especially with the tip of their tongue before they eat it.

It doesn’t matter what it is. Anything that goes into their mouth including liquids, they taste first. My son is one such individual.

Anything these individuals consume must first be approved by their senses of taste or taste buds. Their gustatory approves and disapproves what they should and should not eat, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And if the food tastes terrible to them, they won’t eat it even if that same food tastes great to everyone else. Remember, children and adults with autism are not everyone, they are themselves, and the sooner we learn that the easier it would be to understand them.

NB: This was part 1 of autism eating rituals, stay tuned for part 2 next where I will be explaining the remaining three types of autistic eaters.