Sauerkraut and jalapeño on vegetarian burger

For years, I restricted myself to eating burgers that are “plain and dry,” so I thought I’d share news of notable progress via the food-chaining route. Here’s a vegetarian burger patty, paired with Dave’s Killer Bread. To it, I added sauerkraut and slices of jalapeño. These added items are cold (a long-standing problem texture for me), but the warmth of the heated vegetable patty and the toasted bread enfold them and reduce their intensity. I trace this progression from being able to select ingredients at a build-your-own sandwich franchise. I would ask that wait-staff heat those toppings along with the bread and the protein.

Round Table’s ‘Gourmet Veggie’ without cheese

Aaah ... pizza! We love Round Table’s Gourmet Veggie: artichoke hearts, zucchini, spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and red and green onions on a Creamy Garlic Sauce. We leave-off tomatoes on my half, and add Jalapeños to the entire pizza. But the most important modification we make is to completely omit cheese. I really cannot emphasize this enough, which is why it bears repeating: We love pizza, but eating so much cheese always made us feel horrible afterward. And without the cheese, we find all the other flavors so much richer and more fully enjoyable.

Salsa verde, eaten cold

If you‘re familiar from past entries with my sensory history, you‘ll understand what a triumph in food-chaining it is for me to dip a corn chip in salsa verde. The idea with “food chaining” is to start with a food considered “safe” by the problem eater and then slowly introduce foods with a similar taste, temperature, or texture. The eater progresses from a food considered safe to the final “target” food. In this case, the food problem I’ve been addressing is an aversion to cold, clammy textures. No, this does not mean I am now desensitized to all foods that are cold and clammy. But I like to savor what feels, to me, like a moment of victory.

Smoothies mitigate difficulty eating fruits and vegetables

All my life, I’ve struggled with eating food that had the wrong taste, appearance, color or texture. In extreme duress, eating the “wrong” food could make me retch or gag.

More frequently, but perhaps more damaging, I faced condemnation and ridicule because of my limited diet.

Eating fruits and vegetables is where I particularly struggle. There’s something about this food that is difficult for me to handle.

Fortunately, we know that the way food is prepared can drastically change its “eatability.” When cut raw, tomatoes are grotesque and slimy. But what a difference to eat sun-dried tomatoes on pizza or in pasta, with a smooth creamy marinara sauce.
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Flavor Bible, essential resource for researching new foods

I rely on “food chaining” to help with my transition from foods that are familiar and comfortable, but what about those foods and ingredients that I know nothing about?

Tactile sensitivities related to food taste, temperature and texture, make trying new things difficult. As a risk-averse person who wants to know ahead-of-time if new foods are “safe” to try, I find the idea of The Flavor Bible to be very empowering.

Written by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, The Flavor Bible (Little, Brown and Company, 2008) offers an alphabetized listing of foods and ingredients with essential details about taste.

Page and Dornenburg explain that many factors go into the experience of flavor: these are taste, “mouthfeel” (temperature and texture), aroma and the “X Factor,” which they describe as the emotional response to food. “When we are present to what we are eating,” they say, “food has the power to affect our entire selves.”

Eating can be one of toughest challenges

Eating is easily the most difficult sensory task for this woman on the autism spectrum. Risking unfamiliar tastes and textures, trying new food takes time and fortitude.

Can’t we just enjoy water?

Source of image: Pexels, under Creative Commons Zero Universal (CC0 1.0) license

On Friday afternoon, walking around Medford, Ore., we stopped in at a local eatery. From experience, we knew that if we didn’t speak up immediately, water glasses would be deposited on our table, and those glasses would be clogged with ice. So we quickly told our server, “We’d like water with no ice.”

Unwanted chocolate carries burden of punishment

Public domain image by George Hodan

At Personal Branding Blog, Maria Elena Duron cautions against gifts that hurt the giver’s personal brand, by “shouting” to the recipient that the giver doesn’t know him or her.

Diagnostic ‘labels’: Don’t be so quick to discard

From blogger Gail Forsyth-Vail writing at Beacon Broadside, I learned about an argument by Enrico Gnaulati, for removing children’s diagnostic “labels.” By briefly sharing my background, I hope to explain why this idea makes me uncomfortable.

When I grew up, I was painfully aware that I was not like other people. It was continually made evident by classmates who taunted and rejected me.

From kindergarten onward, I was a school-wide outcast.

​Adults condemned me as a picky eater, because I could not tolerate certain foods. On one occasion, a babysitter tried to force-feed me chocolate cake. My mother actually had to tell this person that I didn’t have to eat cake if I didn’t want it (because a clamped-shut mouth and pulling away in revulsion were not accepted as communication). My mother found me, face smeared with the cake that the sitter tried to force on me.

‘Food Chaining’ by Cheryl Fraker, et al.

As validated as I felt learning that a book like this exists, I felt even more validated when reading Food Chaining by Cheryl Fraker, Mark Fishbein, Sibyl Cox and Laura Walbert.

Eating is easily the most difficult sensory task I face. In childhood, I easily fit the profile of a “problem eater,” as described in this book. I accepted few foods, had strong adverse reactions that included gagging and was reluctant to even touch new foods.

My difficulties didn’t have the benefit of a book like this, however. Instead, adults labeled me “picky,” “spoiled” and “bad” because I could not eat what was served to me.

Even today, it takes time for me to get used to an unfamiliar food, and it requires considerable fortitude to be willing to try new things. If I go to an event when I know that I will get hungry, I have to bring my own snacks because I can’t rely on the selection including foods that I am able to eat.

Validated by fact that ‘Food Chaining’ is a thing

“Validation” would be my choice if I had to name my feelings reading this statement by Loree Primeau, PhD: “Since feeding involves all sensory systems (sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste), eating is the most difficult sensory task that children face.”

Eating continues to be the most difficult sensory task for this woman on the autism spectrum.

To expand my palate, my husband and I take an approach very similar to the “food chaining” discussed by Primeau at Aspergers101.

It takes time for me to get used to an unfamiliar food, and it requires considerable fortitude to be willing to try new things. An experience that is already fraught with challenges on the basis of unfamiliar or unpleasant tastes or textures is further burdened by past experiences and prevalent social attitudes.

Sweeter food is less good for you

To personal distaste, add health concerns among reasons to resist the tyranny of sweetness. According to Jo Robinson writing for the New York Times Sunday Review, farmers have bred nutrition out of food in a quest for sweeter flavors.

“Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.”

The two common themes, according to Robinson, is plants with the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste and early farmers favored plants that were low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil.

“The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.”

Robinson recommends selecting corn with deep yellow kernels, cooking with blue, red or purple cornmeal, arugula, scallions and fresh herbs.

“We can’t increase the health benefits of our produce if we don’t know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health.”

‘Delicious’: most over-used adjective

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.” ― Harper Lee

With its Facebook status update on June 7, I Love Libraries shared this great quote. When re-posting it, I commented that this quote would be ideal on the in-box for community news submissions.

Submitted press releases frequently contain unnecessary and subjective adjectives. The most notorious and overused is “delicious” when promoting a meal. Whatever the occasion, formal dinner or barbecue, the meal is nearly always “delicious.”

As if the person preparing the meal would ever strive for any other kind, right?

Unfortunately for the submitters, their notion of “delicious” is a matter of personal opinion and the media are in the business of reporting just-the-facts.

On one memorable occasion, every single item on a club’s bill of fare was absolutely revolting to me, a person with food sensitivities. Billed as “delicious,” the menu consisted of cold, clammy, chunky textures that I absolutely would not eat.

But my reactions to food textures  are equally subjective -- so while “delicious” was cut from the text, it was NOT replaced by the adjectives that, if asked, I would have supplied to the meal: “revolting,” “vile,” “inedible.”

If a person has difficulty separating fact from subjective opinion, he or she would do well to heed Atticus’s advice and delete the adjectives. It’s an effective place to start.

Overwhelming circumstances don’t make me a ‘brat’

On the Café Press website, an entire line of T-shirts and other items serve as proxy advocates with which parents can communicate, “Your parenting suggestions are unwelcome unless you have a child with [fill-in-the-blank].”

Sweetening in foods = inescapable tyranny

There is an inescapable tyranny present in our society -- the pervasive use of sweeteners.

Managing sensory challenges during English high tea

I had English high tea the other day! A woman I know took me to a local inn that's modeled after the Victorian style and during the holidays the proprietress serves high tea in the afternoons.

This was a pretty big deal for me because the experience involved eating these little finger sandwiches, tuna or egg salad or such-like, the kind of food that would have made me gag as a youngster.

I took really tiny bites, I didn't particularly care for them but I was able to eat from them without gagging. I don't think I'd want to eat the actual potato, egg or tuna salad though, without the sandwich-bread buffer. But I feel really proud of my accomplishment.