Sensory eating on campus
Author: Quincy Hansen
I remember taking a tour of the college I now attend, Colorado State University, back in early 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic had shut everything down. My activities as an autism advocate during my high school years had gotten me awarded a highly prestigious scholarship that meant I had the option of attending any in-state university essentially for free, and as an aspiring biologist Colorado State University seemed like the obvious choice as a tier one research university known for its biological sciences program. There were many neat things about the university I got to see on the tour – from an aquarium full of lionfish in the lobby of the biology building to an amazing on-campus rec center with an indoor climbing wall, all of which the ultra-preppy tour guide was excited to show off to us prospective students. One campus feature that left me a little bit wary however was the proclamation that the CSU dining halls offered many “sophisticated” dining options, including a Mongolian grill and a focus on multi-cultural meals.
I know it might seem kind of strange that I would be taken a bit aback by such excellent dining options, but it all comes down to the way my brain works. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the Mongolian grill is fantastic, and I do believe that food is one of the best ways to build understanding between people of different cultures and everyone has a right to feel comfortable and included on campus, making multicultural dining options nothing but a good thing. However, I have always had a really difficult relationship with food because I am autistic, meaning my body processes incoming sensory information differently, and because of this I need to have access to a very narrow list of safe foods to ensure that I am able to eat. The prospect that these options may become more limited as dining hall chicken strips and cheese pizza are replaced with rice bowls and tamales does therefore make me anxious, and is just one of several things that makes eating on a college campus more challenging for me.
Being autistic means that I essentially have to live my life in the middle of a giant balance of sensory input. My brain has trouble integrating all the incoming input from my senses, and sensory inputs that most other people find acceptable can be incredibly overwhelming or even noxious for me. This means that what I can and cannot do is dictated in large part by the sensory inputs that are required of me. I have written before about how this affects the way that I handle food, but what it essentially comes down to is that if my sensory system can’t tolerate it, which is unfortunately most things, then I physiologically can’t eat it any more than you could just pick up and chow down on a rotting piece of roadkill. This sensitivity comes down to much more than simply taste as well, and involves smell, consistency, texture, and temperature much more than just taste. I am a sensory eater. Sensory eater is a term that I use to describe people like me who have to work within a narrow set of sensory prerequisites when it comes down to what can and cannot be eaten.
I’d like to take a little closer look specifically at the access barriers that a sensory eater such as myself while on a university campus. Because of the unique time at which I am writing this article, I will also be devoting some focus to how some of the pandemic measures that my school, Colorado State University, put into place have affected my ability to eat while on campus.
What is a safe food?
The first concept I want to explore here is that of a safe food. A safe food is essentially a food item that one knows that they can tolerate and eat, and so can act as both a fallback plan and a comfort item. If I’m going to go to a new restaurant I need to know that there is a safe food somewhere on the menu even if there’s something there that I think I might be able to try and tolerate.
For many sensory eaters, finding a safe food may be difficult on a college campus, especially at smaller universities which may not have a wide range of dining options. This problem will also very from person to person depending on what their safe foods are. My safe foods are the very “stereotypical” chicken nuggets, cheese pizza, Kraft mac and cheese, and other such items that are generally considered to be “typical” of a college dining hall, and so I am very likely to always be able to find a safe food somewhere on my large college campus, irrational fears about improving food quality pushing these options out notwithstanding. However, another person might have a very different set of safe foods that may not be easily available to them in university dining halls. This may especially be the case if the person in question grew up in a culture that is different than the predominant one of the university they are attending, wherein their safe foods are dishes that are never offered anywhere on campus. Thus, the uncertainty surrounding the availability of safe foods can make eating at university dining halls needlessly stressful.
COVID and food limitations
This year at my university this issue was hugely compounded by the fact that due to the COVID-19 pandemic every single dining hall was closed to in-person dining. So how did students with on-campus meal plans eat? Well, we had to go online to a special website and reserve a time slot in which we could go into the dining hall and pick up the pre-prepared meals that were sitting in individual covered paper platters and take them back to our dorm rooms to eat. Each dining hall only served one or two preset meal options every week, which would be rotated throughout every dining hall on campus. This meant that in order for me to find the one meal they were offering that was “safe” for me I had to try to track down where on campus the chicken strips were being offered that week and walk there.
This is massively inconvenient and meant that the majority of my meal swipes were spent on snack foods and microwave pizzas from the mini-market supplemented by boxed macaroni and cheese in addition to occasional runs to nearby fast food restaurants. Another thing to consider is the fact that because the meals from the dining halls were served pre-prepared and pre-packaged, most of the time chicken had been sitting there for quite a while under a heat lamp in 100% humidity along with steamed vegetables and some other side item, which caused the entire meal to become soggy. Because I have a very narrow range of textures that I can get down my throat, this often rendered the meal inedible anyway. I’ll just say it straight: the COVID pandemic sucks, and it sucks even worse if you’re a sensory eater on a college campus, apparently.
Executive functioning plays a role too
This leads nicely into the next challenge often faced by sensory eaters on college campuses: the executive functioning skills necessary to, well, eat food. Sensory processing differences and difficulties can occasionally appear in a person on their own, but usually are part of another disability. These disabilities often mean that sensory eaters are often also facing executive functioning challenges, which can make it very difficult to execute all the steps necessary to get food. This is true even in non-pandemic times. Think about all that is necessary for a student to eat on a college campus: one must recognize that they are hungry, transition away from whatever activity they are currently engaged in, get everything together to travel from wherever you are to wherever the food is, plan your route and method of transportation (walk, bike, take the bus), swipe your meal card (or the equivalent), rehearse the social scripts necessary to get the food once there, and then figure out what to do with the food (where to sit, what to eat first) once you have it. For a person with executive functioning challenges, the difficulty in planning all these steps often results in just not eating at all. For this example I presumed that our student is eating in an on-campus dining facility, but other forms of procuring food such as cooking require a similar number and complexity of steps.
Executive functioning challenges are really difficult to explain to people who don’t experience them, because many people see these things as easy and automatic and struggle to comprehend how such simple steps could ever cause a problem. But when your brain has trouble initiating, remembering, and planning tasks no matter how hard you want to do something sometimes you just can’t, thus the problem. I have to be reminded to eat multiple times a day or else I will just straight up forget and go a day without food, and I know that I am not the only one who faces such a challenge. With the newfound independence of living on a college campus this meant that I did frequently go days eating little to nothing, caused by a combination of executive functioning challenges and the other access barriers addressed here.
Eating environment matters!
It is also worth mentioning that social anxiety can make it difficult to eat in a college dining hall in certain settings. I know several fellow autistics who cannot eat in front of other people because it causes them anxiety. Many university dining halls (in a non-pandemic setting at least) do not allow students to take food out of the dining hall, and so someone who cannot eat in front of others would be left with the option of not eating the campus-provided food at all.
Finally, the last access barrier I’d like to specifically explore are sensory barriers that do not necessarily involve food. If you have sensory challenges related to eating, chances are that you face other sensory challenges as well that can indirectly make eating difficult. For one, myself and many others have trouble with interpreting and integrating interoceptive senses, or the internal body sensations that tell us things about our internal states. Hunger is an interoceptive sense, and because of the sensory weirdness that is my brain I do not always process the sense of hunger in a way that allows me to actually feel hunger. Don’t get me wrong, I feel something, but it’s often hard to interpret this internal sensation as hunger, which means it can be difficult for me to recognize when I need to eat.
There is also the challenge posed by external sensory stimuli, such as sights, sounds, and smells. The environments in which a student would normally be procuring food, whether on campus in a dining hall or off campus at a grocery store or restaurant, are generally total sensory nightmares. These overwhelming environments can be incredibly difficult, even painful, to be in and as such can act as yet one more access barrier to procuring food on campus.
I hope that you can see how as a sensory eater on a university campus procuring any food at all, let alone healthy and nutritious food, can be a tall task. But what can we do about it? There are lots of personal strategies that the sensory eating student can take on their own to mitigate many of these challenges, whether they be sensory, cognitive, or otherwise. But I won’t be focusing on these here; instead lets look at what university campuses can do to make eating more accessible.
Accommodations
First, I cannot stress enough the importance of reasonable accommodation. There seems to be this misconception out there in education that disability accommodations must always be expensive and logistically difficult to implement, but this simply isn’t the case. Something as simple as letting a student take a boxed meal out of the dining hall to eat somewhere else or clearly posting your menu online can make a huge difference. The existential resistance that so many campuses and schools have to making accommodations is truly unfortunate and simply isn’t warranted. It’s also worth mentioning that many of these accommodations and suggestions will be a major benefit to many neurotypical students as well, and so don’t think of these types of dining accommodations as being only for the sensory eaters.
Second, and this seems hilariously obvious but at the same time out of most people’s control, we have to end the COVID pandemic. Many of the barriers I faced this year when it came to eating were a direct result of the university’s COVID response. Everyone these days loves to talk about moving towards a “new normal,” but I cannot stress enough that the dining system I saw on my university this semester with its soggy, pickup only, pre-packaged option-limited meals absolutely cannot be part of the “new normal.” Thankfully I think that the end in the developed world is much closer than many people think, and I think we should make restoring the lost accessibility that pandemic measure brought a top priority.
Sameness can be comforting
One thing I would really like to see on my own campus is some stability within the dining halls. Colorado State has obviously worked really hard to expand and diversify its dining options, which I think is great, but often this means that you could walk into the same dining hall on two different days and get two totally different selections of menu items. I know that the situation is similar at other universities, and if I could make any change to this system it would be that every dining hall had a section of its menu full of typical crowd pleasers that is never changed and is available every day. This would provide a safe food for a good majority of the people on campus who need it, and might I add that we sensory eaters are far more likely to be willing to try something new if this safe option is in place.
Another neat thing that I would like to see (though is admittedly more of a dream than an easily implemented solution) is more university campuses with grocery stores that students can purchase food from using meal swipes. My own campus already has a “mini-market” where students can use meal swipes to buy a prescribed amount of food, but this food is typically of the corner store variety: packaged snack foods, microwave dinners, and bottled drinks. What if there did exist on campus an actual student grocery store stocked with actual produce and other raw ingredients where students could opt to spend their meal swipes? This combined with access to community kitchens in dorm common areas could be a game changer for sensory eaters. Food can be prepared in the exact specified way that that person requires, and the need for just about any safe food can be met. Such a system is probably a stretch to easily implement on a university’s part, but this is a solution I’ve long been thinking about and I thought it might be worth discussing.
I don’t claim to have all the answers to this complex problem, and I don’t claim that this short article is an exhaustive treatise on all the possible access barriers that neurodiverse sensory eaters may face on a college campus and all possible solutions to these barriers. But I do hope that I’ve gotten you thinking about this a little bit more as an accessibility issue, and perhaps I can even inspire some change through sharing my experience on this topic.
About Quincy:
Quincy Hansen is an autistic advocate, speaker, and author who is passionate about changing the world’s perceptions of autism. Quincy is the author of the blog “Speaking of Autism. www.speakingofautism.com