Well, here we go, I guess. Time to talk about the one weirdness I try to keep quiet. I have ARFID, Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. It’s an eating disorder, not one of the famous ones and it does impact my life, although mostly not in the way you might expect.
It basically means I have a very restricted diet. I mean, it’s all in the name. Avoid and restrict. For a lot of people, it’s caused by some traumatic event – you’ll hear a lot of “after I got food poisoning for the first time, I could never eat anything except [x] again”. Some of us were born with it – hi, it’s me. I’m no psychologist but it’s entirely possible that in my case it was also something traumatic, only I don’t remember in my conscious brain because I was only a few hours old. Anyway, this is from birth for me and I don’t know what caused it.
You’ll have seen people like me before. Every couple of years, one of us used to appear in a newspaper to announce “I only eat chicken nuggets” and from the comments, I’ve deduced that people who don’t eat “normal” food are the most-hated on the planet. Comments run the gamut from “spoiled” to “selfish” to “so unhealthy!” to “Satan himself” and so I tend not to talk about it. I know what happens every time I have to eat with someone new: I get interrogated with varying levels of aggression (let me tell you about the time my boss gathered the entire company and a whiteboard in the meeting room….), I get the same ideas and suggestions I’ve had from literally everyone I’ve ever met and it’s always topped off with “but have you just tried…?”. If there even is anything I can eat, I’m kept too busy answering the interrogation and feeling awkward to actually eat it. I swear, one day I’m going to tell someone “Oh, thank you for all your knowledgeable advice on a condition you didn’t know existed five minutes ago and which I’ve lived with my entire life, it’s so helpful to have someone so experienced and wise to solve all my problems. I’ve never thought of just trying something, thank you so much for being so wonderful!” And I’m going to say it with the blandest voice but most aggressive face and then maybe I’ll stab them with my fork.
“Trying” is somewhere between difficult and impossible. That’s the avoidant part of ARFID. I have a mental block in my brain, caused by a lifelong eating disorder. A mental concrete and lead wall at least ten miles thick. Yes, I’ve “just tried” many things. Do you know how difficult it is to put a new food in my mouth at all? My brain is screaming “CAN’T EAT THAT CAN’T EAT THAT!” and it’s backed up by my throat, which is going to lock up so tight that at this point, I couldn’t eat a grain of cheese. At best, I can nibble this thing. I can’t eat it and even if I can tolerate both flavour and texture, it’s impossible for it to become something I like.
I compare it to camel’s eyeballs and house bricks. Do you need to try either to know that you can’t eat it? Because whatever you’re suggesting, I can’t eat it. I don’t need to try it to realise that. It’s not a simple matter of discovering that actually, I like this thing. I can’t like something if I physically can’t eat it.
Oh yeah, it’s been helpful to reframe as “can vs can’t” instead of “like vs dislike”. I can eat cake. I mostly don’t particularly like cake. Texture is an issue, obviously. I like things my teeth can get hold of and cake is often just too soft and spongey and nothingy. Cake comes in small portions and I rarely finish it because I so quickly get to the point of “not enjoying this and now my throat is going to close and refuse any more”. On the other hand, I do like bananas but I can’t eat them – too soft. Odd how it’s the same problem but opposite result. I also need to know what to expect. I don’t mind soft bread rolls but if I bite into it expecting crusty bread and instead it just collapses under my teeth, my throat is going to lock up and refuse the rest. But if I know going in that it’s soft, it’s fine.
We get compared to five-year-olds a lot. I guess ARFID is often a response to trauma and so people often deal with that trauma by only being able to eat plain, bland or soft foods, foods which feel safe to us but which are also the kind of thing you introduce small children to solid foods with. Having the diet of a toddler really doesn’t help the “spoiled/selfish/lazy” comments. I assure you, most of us would rather not be restricted to the diet we are. I adore the smell of pizza. I wish I could eat pizza! Even crunchy vegetables – normal people could surely understand “I don’t eat cooked vegetables because I like them to crunch”. I have no personal desire to eat meat or fish (or “fake” meat or fish) but there’s an entire world of “pretend to be normal” vegetarian food out there and if I could only eat some more of that, it would make my life so much easier. And by easier, I mean where other people are concerned. I’m pretty settled and comfortable with it in myself.
But how does all this relate to a travel blog?
Well, when you’re travelling, you’re going to encounter new foods. You might even be expected to try new foods. So how do I cope with travelling when I have such a restricted diet? Answer: I live out of supermarkets. Proper restaurants, street food, and even cafes, they’re pretty much out of bounds. I mostly can’t eat that. I go to the supermarket and I can usually find my own personal basics. “Safe”/”can eat” foods vary hugely between people with ARFID but for me when I’m travelling, it’s bread and cheese. I can always find bread. I prefer rolls over sliced sandwich bread but honestly, it depends on what cheese I can find to go with it. Cheese doesn’t necessarily keep well if you’re carrying it around all day, especially if your accommodation doesn’t have a fridge. I tend to live off “plastic” cheese slices and Babybels, both of which are pretty bombproof and available everywhere I’ve been so far. Plastic cheese slices go well with sliced bread or rolls, Babybels go better with chunks of bread. If I can find and store cheddar, a chunk of cheddar and a piece of bread eaten like I’m Sam Gamgee on a quest is heaven.
No, it’s not ideal. It’s not quite what I would eat at home (mostly toast and Marmite and rarely cheese, while I’m being open and honest. I certainly don’t eat cheese slices and Babybels at home). I supplement that with snacks – crisps are fun because they’re crunchy and sometimes they come in interesting new shapes. I quite like a croissant but I’m otherwise not big on pastries and I don’t drink coffee – tried that one as a student and have since concluded that I quite like being the sort of person who doesn’t need to be drugged to get going in the morning. I daresay living on that long-term wouldn’t be very good for me but the longest trip I’ve ever taken was a day under three weeks and you can live off supermarket junk food for three weeks pretty comfortably.
Of course, there are difficulties. Day tours and group tours, especially the multi-day ones. I’ve been eyeing various Egypt tours – Egypt being a place I think I’ll find difficult solo – but they all seem to involve home-cooked meals with local families and group bonding dinners and see the paragraph above for why anything involving food is the absolute worst way for me to bond. Lunches are awkward – I’ll always have food in my bag and can snack on route or even wait until I get home but then I have to sit with people I don’t know well, holding a drink and either try to explain my personal issues to a load of strangers or breeze my way out of explaining anything, and I’m not the breezy kind. When I walked the Laugavegur Trail in 2018, there was one person who I think took a dislike to my semi-conscious hypothermic state after the first day but really didn’t approve of me not eating the evening banquets. When we got back to Reykjavik, I went to the pool in the evening to rest my weary bones and made a point of looking out for her as I walked up the street she was staying on, with the intention of crossing the road if I so much as glimpsed her in the distance.
One more kind of travel: school trips. I had a few teachers who more or less accepted me for what I was and made arrangements for me, and that was nice. Then I was used as an example for later years – “you don’t have to worry about dietary requirements – we once took a girl who only ate Marmite so we can handle any problems you might have!”. I guess it’s nice that my difficulties can make things easier for other people in the future and make them feel less awkward. The various families I stayed with on exchanges must have found it, at best, weird but we got by. When we went to Russia and stayed in hotels instead of local homes, I paired up with Martyn, the human dustbin of the trip, and fed him all my meals while collecting bread and butter for my own meals. Oh, supplemented by trips to various shops, of course. It helped that one of the teachers in charge was Mr Warbis who’d had charge of me on umpteen French & Spanish trips by that point. He knew when to help, when to back off, when to push other people off and when not to worry. I swear, one day I’m going to write an entire blog post on the effects of two or three of my teachers.
So that’s why the only foodie content on my travel blog is the Chocolate Wars. That’s why I mutter vaguely over the picnic I take on my long hike and the dinner I have after my long day out and never show you a delicious plate at a cafe or restaurant. The food is a highlight of the trip for some people and that’s great, it’s good to discover new foods that you don’t get at home. For me, food is, at best, a tedious necessity and at the other end of the scale, it can be the thing that makes me the baddie of the group trip.
Thank you so much for writing this. I worked with someone once whose grown son had a similar diet (whole milk, soft garlic bread and thin apple slices) but I hadn’t realised that it had a name. So glad it doesn’t stop you travelling, but sad (although not surprised) that everyone thinks they are the expert in your experience. Not sure why we can’t ever just accept what someone tells us.