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Part 9 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series
Belief: Food aversions are just pickiness.
Reality: They’re neurological — and they make socializing genuinely painful.
Action: Name your aversions so you can navigate them without shame.
Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.
Last week I wrote about my relationship with food — the dopamine-seeking, the emotional eating, the rebellion against my mother’s voice in my head.
But there’s another side of ADHD and food I didn’t cover: not being able to eat certain things at all. I don’t have strong food aversions personally. I’ll eat most things (except chicken feet, blood, and most organ meats).
However, put me at a table next to someone chewing loudly, and I’m done. The sound is piercing. It cuts through everything — conversation, appetite, enjoyment — instantly. I can’t unhear it. I can’t ignore it. My attention locks onto it like a laser and won’t let go.
That’s misophonia. And it’s just one way sensory processing shows up around food for neurodivergent people.
For others, it goes much deeper: textures that trigger a gag reflex, smells that cause genuine distress, tastes that feel physically wrong in the mouth. These aren’t preferences. They’re neurological responses. And the social world —family dinners, work lunches, team offsites — doesn’t make room for them.
We’ve all heard it.
Just try a bite. You’re being difficult. It’s just food. Everyone else is eating it.
The assumption baked in is that food aversions are a choice — a stubbornness someone will grow out of if enough people pressure them hard enough.
For neurodivergent people, this belief causes real harm. You become the picky eater at the work offsite, the one who orders plain food while everyone shares plates, the person who eats beforehand so they don’t have to navigate the situation at all. You get laughed at, called difficult, and told to get over it.
The message is always the same: your experience is an inconvenience. An imposition and something to be ashamed of.
So you either force yourself through experiences that are genuinely painful, or you start avoiding the situations altogether. Either way, you lose.
Sensory aversions aren’t about being fussy — they’re about how the brain processes sensory input.
Michael Asaku-Yeboah, licensed therapist and ADHD coach, explained: “When kids are very picky with food — especially because of textures, smells, and taste — those are early indicators of neurodivergence. And if they are forced to eat things that feel wrong, that’s where eating disorders begin to develop. It grows with them.”
It follows people into adulthood — into every social situation that involves food. Which, if you grew up in a culture where meals are the center of everything, is almost all of them.
Rupert Dallas , executive coach, is hyper-vigilant about eating socially, especially with people he doesn’t know well. His thing: people with dirty hands eating. It becomes genuinely difficult for him to be at the table. He knows it’s his, not theirs — but it doesn’t make the experience less real.
Michael’s is auditory: “When people chew crackers or anything crunchy, it drives me insane. I found this out on a bus in Japan. I always carry loop earplugs now.”
Mine is loud chewing. The moment someone starts, I’m gone. My daughter recently developed this habit and can destroy a family dinner in under a minute.
You know what happens when you tell a seven-year-old to chew quietly like a ninja? Nothing — they revel in your pain. It’s not too different from some workplace settings, where the expectation is that you’ll manage it quietly or risk being the difficult one.
Michael summed up the cost: “Workplace social eating results in isolation — ‘I just don’t feel like eating’ — when really, they’re trying to protect themselves from an overwhelming experience.”
The team offsite where everyone bonds over dinner, and one person is quietly suffering through textures they can’t handle or eating plain food while being teased for their “restrictive diet” — they’re not being difficult. They’re doing their best in an environment not designed for their brain.
The first step is the hardest: accepting that your aversion is real and legitimate, and you don’t have to justify it to anyone.
Name what’s happening. Is it texture? Smell? Sound? The more specific you can get, the more agency you have. “I have misophonia” is more useful than “I just don’t like noisy environments.” Language gives you power.
Build your workarounds without shame. Eating before a social event, choosing your seat strategically, carrying loop earplugs, ordering the plain option without explaining yourself — these are accommodations, not failures. You don’t owe anyone a full explanation. “I’m particular about textures” or “certain sounds really affect my focus” is enough. The right people will get it.
Advocate in the spaces you have influence. If you’re planning a team offsite or a work lunch, think about the environment. Loud restaurants, communal food, no menu options for selective eaters — these aren’t neutral choices. They quietly exclude people who will smile through the whole thing rather than say something.
The world treats food aversions as a personality problem to be fixed or hidden. For neurodivergent people, they’re just part of how the brain works.
The real barrier isn’t the food — it’s the disconnection it creates. From colleagues at a team dinner to family at the holiday table. From the version of yourself that just wants to enjoy a meal without managing a sensory experience that no one around you can see. That disconnection has real costs: missed bonding moments, avoided events, relationships that never quite deepen because food is always in the way.
You shouldn’t have to apologize for any of it.
Get coaching that helps you find what works for your unique brain and situation.
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