This is a weird way to eat…

[Ifyouwantmeillbeinthebar]

Each element on your plate separately…

i.e salad 1st, potatoes 2nd and meat last. (or whatever order your food preference is) DH has always done this and I think it’s so normal to me now that I don’t think much about it, however I took my DD’s out for lunch today and noticed middle DC does the same thing too.

AIBU that when a meal has been designed/ made its with the intention of flavour, textures and parts to go together.

So often here you see replies like ‘maybe they have dementia; maybe they are neurotypical’ to descriptions of behaviour. I’d say the poster’s comment isn’t not an anti-autistic comment, but a reflection of the impulse to pathologise behaviour on this site. It must be maddening if you are, say, neurodivergent to routinely see all sorts of behaviour from lateness, laziness, disorganisation, rudeness, spitefulness , self-centredness or how you eat food attributed to your condition.

No. My comment was just an observation based on my DC, relatives and friends. It wasn't remotely negative.

Separating foodstuffs or components of meals isn't something I do myself but it could easily be. Most people with autism will recognise it's an autistic phenomenon to have strong food preferences.

MN is packed to the rafters with those of us who are neurodiverse. Why the hell should we be quiet because you disapprove?

Unless you're doing molecular gastronomy like Heston fucking Blumenthal you don't get to dictate the way in which somebody eats.

This is what I don’t get about this thread. A few posters seem to have assumed the alternative to eating each bit one by one is “mushing everything together” or having a mouthful of everything at once. It isn’t!

Let’s say I’ve got cauliflower cheese with new potatoes, carrots and peas. I might have a forkful of the cauliflower cheese first, then a potato, then some peas and so on. That doesn’t mean I have to cram it all in at once. But I wouldn’t eat all my cauliflower cheese before so much as touching a potato.

I had a friend who used to cut up every part of her meal and then create individual mouthfuls that all had a bit of each part of the meal. Each to their own!

I always did this until I saw my friend at uni getting a little bit of everything on his fork and it was a revelation.. I had NEVER seen anyone do that. Now I do a bit of both as I like to appreciate the taste of things alone still.

It’s a bit uncouth. A lot uncouth. But perhaps better than another habit I’ve witnessed, which is someone mashing all elements of a meal up and shovelling.

I agree with you. People self-diagnose and appropriate conditions both for themselves and their children as if it's going out of fashion. It's so, so irritating to have any and all behaviour 'squared away' with a meaningless label.

One 'label' that I'd slap most people on this site with is gross intolerance to the way other people do almost anything. Some people seem to spend their whole lives observing what everybody else does and it's just rude.

It's better than the alternate version of an ex, which was to slam knife and fork onto the plate until all food stuffs assumed a fairly homogenous brown or beige paste roughly the consistency of human vomit, slacken the mixture off with additional gravy and butter, add grated cheese as a binding agent and then slurp it through the gap in his teeth with much smacking of lips and dribbling, followed by a huge belch and a loud 'AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH'.

We didn't eat together often once he started doing that in front of me.

The majority of people don't eat this way but plenty do....and I mean lots. It's particularly common for those either autism and many don't even like food touching. When I'm at home I prefer my food in a large shallow bowl/dish with a knife and spoon and I dislike hot or cold food, but in company I'll follow social norms ....but sometimes forget. I once horrified a friend by just swiping my meal under the cold tap to dilute the (in my opinion) thick salty gravy.

Your poor husband. Are you this judgy about everything?

I always make sure I had some veg or salad left til the end as a palate cleanser. However I also have to have some potato/bread etc to mop up any remaining sauce/gravy/dressing

Yup my two children do this both asd one of them so bad with it meals like spag bol she eats the bits of meat first then the spaghetti leaving a pool of sauce in her bowl takes her an hour but one of her favourite meals 🙈