Some autistic people experience food and eating differently. These “invisible” differences can include being comfortable with a limited range of foods, or experiencing difficulty eating where there is noise, bright lights or particular smells.

Adam Harris founded the autism charity AsIAm based on his own experiences growing up as an autistic person. There were just a small number of foods he felt comfortable with as a child, he says. “Those foods mostly would have been ‘beige foods’, which I suppose are predictable and consistent,” he says. “I really didn’t like the texture of vegetables growing up. I would eat them in stew, but only if they were mashed or blended together; that was the only way I ate vegetables until I was around 16.

“I would have had very strong views about foods not touching each other, too, and still would be concerned about the textures and smells of food. It certainly would have caused a lot of anxiety and a lot of discomfort.”

An autistic person may have a very particular sensory experience of some foods. “One of my big triggers was the smell of crisps, so anywhere that crisps would come out on a plate, for example, or if I didn’t know if they would or would not, that would cause me an awful lot of anxiety,” Harris says. As a result, there were a lot of restaurants and coffee shops that his family just wouldn’t have gone to. “It’s not just that I don’t ‘like’ the smell of it, it’s that I can’t tolerate the smell of it. And I think that’s an important distinction. Someone might not be able to tolerate [the feel of] how the food is mixing in their mouth, for example.”

Some autistic people can experie