Imagine an autistic child 20,000 years ago: no chicken nuggets, crackers, boxed mac ‘n cheese or frozen pizza. No grocery stores.
Food comes straight from animals, plants, nuts, seeds and whatever else the parents can find or obtain.
What happened when a child on the spectrum refused to eat what was available?
- Did they starve?
- Did the parents somehow discover a prehistoric version of chicken nuggets?
- Or did the kiddo eventually eat something else? After all, the hunger drive is powerful – so powerful that people stranded in the wilderness have been known to eat bugs, rodents and leaves.
Today’s parents of picky autistic eaters will insist if they don’t give their kids whatever beige, highly processed foods they demand, they won’t eat anything and will starve.
Are they sure of that? Because homeless city people will rummage through trash cans and eat spoiled food, even rotting meat and fish, due to hunger from malnourishment.
It’s fascinating to wonder what a modern-day very picky young eater with autism, who eats only plain pasta, chicken nuggets and lime jello, would be eating had he or she been born halfway around the world into a hunter-gatherer culture.
Autistic food selectivity can’t be explained simply by the existence of modern processed foods.
Autism Existed Before Grocery Stores
Autism wasn’t invented in the 20th century. It’s believed that autism existed long enough ago to conclude that there had definitely been a time when autistic children and the absence of processed foods co-existed.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition; there’s no reason to assume that the picky eating that sometimes comes with it suddenly appeared in recent history.
Of note: Overly choosy food consumption isn’t exclusive to autism, but it’s more likely to occur in autism.
What was on the prehistoric menu?
Some communities relied heavily on hunting and fishing.
Others gathered wild plants, roots, berries, nuts and seeds.
Over time, humans also developed agriculture and domesticated animals.
Prehistoric kids didn’t have access to today’s familiar beige convenience foods, but that doesn’t mean their diets lacked variety.
Meat, fish, eggs, tubers, fruit and other edible plants offered different flavors and textures.
Of course, a child who disliked the texture of meat might have struggled with a meal of tough, fibrous animal flesh.
One who found bitter tastes intolerable might have rejected certain wild plants.
A strong aversion to unfamiliar foods could have created problems when the available menu changed with the seasons.
Those are plausible scenarios, not documented cases of ancient autistic kids refusing food.
Were modern processed foods responsible?
If ultra-processed foods created autistic picky eating, we would expect severe food selectivity to have appeared only after those foods became common.
Yet modern research points towards sensory differences, resistance to unfamiliar foods and behavioral rigidity as important factors in autistic eating difficulties.
A review published in 2010 by Cermak et al (Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2010) discusses how taste, smell, texture, appearance and temperature can influence food acceptance in autistic children.
These sensory differences don’t depend on whether a food comes in a plastic wrapper.
A child can dislike the smell of cooked meat, the slippery texture of a mushroom or the unpredictable consistency of a piece of fruit just as easily as with the texture of a packaged snack.
Ultra-processed foods can make certain preferences easier to maintain. This happens when the child is introduced to foods such as chips, fries, cheese crackers and waffles.
They are often predictable in taste, texture, appearance and preparation. Think those chicken nuggets!
Fair question: What would today’s autistic kids be eating if they were never introduced to these foods in the first place? For sure, they wouldn’t be starving. Remember, the hunger drive is fierce.
When a child finds the predictable features of processed foods reassuring — beige, artificially colored and fast foods can become reliable favorites.
However, fruits, nuts, seeds, hardboiled eggs, tuna salad and strips of whole chicken can also be just as predictable in appearance, taste and feel inside the mouth.
There seems to be something else going on, then. Could the “pickiness” be influenced by what the child has learned what foods are readily available or that his parents will always give him?
Did prehistoric kids simply eat what they were given?
Kids have always had individual preferences, and prehistoric parents would have had to deal with those who ate more of some foods than others.
Some might have favored soft foods, while others preferred crunchy ones.
Some might have rejected unfamiliar foods or eaten only a few familiar items whenever possible.
Research on primitive childhood diets offers a little insight into what children actually ate.
A 2022 systematic review in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (Iannotti et al) examined evidence from archaeological remains, chemical analyses of bones and teeth, and studies of contemporary foraging communities.
Researchers found evidence that kids consumed foods such as animal products, roots, tubers, fruits and vegetables, with diets varying according to local environments.
The study also makes clear that reconstructing childhood diets is difficult.
Archaeological evidence can’t tell us whether a child rejected certain foods at dinner or ate only a narrow selection of available items.
Did ancient picky eaters starve to death?
There are no reliable records establishing how many prehistoric children had extreme food selectivity, how many refused meals or how many had died from the consequences.
The absence of such records doesn’t prove that severe food refusal never happened.
However, what about the 19th century, long before the introduction of today’s abundancy of heavily processed foods, yet still ripe with manmade foods such as bread, cake, cookies, graham crackers and potato chips?
Yes, these foods existed in the 1800s. What would today’s autistic child, who won’t touch anything other than chicken nuggets, corn dogs and instant mac ‘n cheese, have eaten had they been born in 1850?
It’s not logical to assume they would’ve starved to death with those foods being non-existent back then.
Once again, could it be possible that environment and parenting have a much greater influence on the pickiness than what is generally believed?
What about Amish autistic kids, who have no exposure to chicken nuggets, fish sticks and toaster pastries?
Somehow, someway, those kids are surviving, and there’s no reason to believe that autism doesn’t occur among the Amish or other cultures where whole, natural foods are the primary diet.
Of note: Kids in ancient populations indeed experienced malnutrition and died from various causes, including illness and inadequate food. But so did many adults. And they died in numbers that don’t align with the apparent incidence of autism in the general population (1 to 2%).
Archaeologists can sometimes identify signs of nutritional stress in skeletal remains, but they can’t determine whether an individual perished because of sensory-based food refusal vs. famine.
Thus, nobody can possibly know whether or not primitive autistic kids starved to death from refusal to eat.
What we can say is that humans survived for thousands of generations without chicken nuggets, peanut butter pretzels and other modern convenience foods.
What does this mean for parents today?
Some autistic kids have such severe restrictions that they develop nutritional deficiencies or require specialized feeding support (Koomer et al, 2022).
But there’s a difference between acknowledging that a child has serious feeding difficulties and assuming that they are biologically incapable of eating anything outside a narrow list of modern processed foods.
- We don’t know exactly what primitive or hunter-gatherer autistic children ate.
- We can’t use ancient history to prove that every child can learn to eat a wide variety of foods.
- And by the same token, parents should not assume that a child will starve if a preferred packaged food isn’t available.
The more interesting question is whether modern food environments sometimes reinforce existing preferences by making familiar, predictable foods readily available.
Kids centuries ago had no choice between dozens of brands of munchies.
Their choices were shaped by their environment, their family’s food supply and their own sensory preferences.
