“Your spinach isn’t creative enough.”

I watched as the chef Marcus Wareing delivered this crushing blow about a plate of delicately arranged leaves to a distraught-looking Masterchef contestant and chuckled to myself.

“Maybe he should have picked something like bok choy instead,” I suggested to my partner, whilst I shovelled Batchelor’s Cheese and Broccoli flavour Pasta ‘n’ Sauce into my gob.

For those outside the UK, Pasta ‘n’ Sauce is basically rehydrated pasta with a powdered flavouring. It’s the kind of food better suited to a post-hike meal around a camp fire, or maybe something to store near your tins of baked bins, in case of the End Times. Yes, it wouldn’t look out of place on r/depressionmeals. But I assure you, it is exquisite.

I was in my 20s when I realised people actually liked food whose predominant colour isn’t varying shades of beige and brown. Up until meeting my partner, who is very much a foodie and a more than competent home cook, I had presumed the general public were just lying to themselves, pretending that they liked fruit, vegetables and meat that wasn’t the weird ham in a Dairy Lea Lunchable.

Food has always been a bit tricky for me and there were plenty of foods that I was averse to when growing up. It was mostly the textures that made me want to hurl myself into a skip. I lived in fear of unpredictability and inconsistency. As a kid I lived off cheese sandwiches on white bread (and 30 years later, I still sort of do). My poor mother went as far as to sieve the chicken pieces out of tinned soup, because the random bits of meat upset me so much. Without an autism diagnosis back then, I can only wonder now if she thought that this toddler, her only child, was just a massive diva?

I had all the typical childhood disgust of vegetables and fruit, plus odder ones like a total aversion to most cooked meat unless it was covered in breadcrumbs or fried or both, anything remotely spicy, and cereal of any kind (milk turning cereal to mush remains high on my list of World’s Grossest Things).

Luckily for me, children of 90s working-class Britain were not expected to eat such fare. Every day at school we were served a delightful dinner usually consisting of ‘turkey’ twizzlers or dinosaurs and chips, or chicken nuggets and chips. Always chips. I estimate that I have eaten more chips in my life than any other food.

As a proud northerner, saturated fat is entwined within my DNA, as is the word I use to refer to a bread roll. Northerners feel incredibly strongly about this topic and I believe it’s the one thing that holds us back from forming a Republic of the North. I call a bread roll a ‘barm’, which is short for ‘barmcake’. My partner calls them a ‘teacake’. I have friends who call them ‘cobs’ or worse ‘muffins’. Get lost. This is why we cannot work together. Barmcake gang 4 life.

School dinner was always rounded off each day with a square slice of sponge cake. Every day the same. I lived in a world where beige food was the standard. All was well. As a little space cadet kid marvelling at how fellow school kids managed to make friends and move through the world with relative ease, food was one less thing for me to worry about.

Every Saturday I would visit my grandmother, which would result in me consuming more beautiful beige cuisine as well as plenty of biscuits and full fat Coke, so I’d always be buzzing my head off by the time I left to go back home. I spent my early Christmases with my nan, who, rather than making me eat a Christmas dinner full of dreaded vegetables, chose one year to serve me pizza (score!) and another year beef burgers (get in!). I would eat the pizza slices upside down, so the cheese and tomato topping touched my tongue, rather than having to feel the sandy, graininess of the frozen pizza base. Weird textures averted once more.

It was mostly at my nan’s where I ate fish and chips. Until I was an adult I insisted that batter made me feel ill, so yet again Princess Me got their wish and the chippy would fry me a fish without batter. Glorious. There was also something incredibly satisfying from a sensory perspective about the texture of chippy chips. Some were smooth and oily, while the smaller ones were crunchy and stuck in your teeth.

As I grew older and spend the summer holidays at my nan’s, we would take the bus to different towns, mainly out of boredom - something my nan always referred to as ‘breaking the day up’. We would travel to a random town and alight at a shopping centre that had seen better days. We’d find somewhere to eat chips, cover them in salt, gossip while eating said chips, ask each other if there were any particular shops the other person wanted to visit (never, neither of us particularly liked shopping), and then we would get the bus home. Most weekdays throughout the summer holidays we would do this ritual. We called it the Great Chip Tour of the North. We were kindred spirits, if you catch my drift (They didn’t spot autism in girls in the 1990s, never mind the 1930s).

Birthday parties were brilliant because the buffets were always beige. Mini sausage rolls, a crescent of crisps and a few party ring biscuits on a paper plate? Yes please. Food at parties never caused meltdowns. The kids at parties were a different story.

As a Beige Food Believer, naturally I am a connoisseur of Greggs. At a previous place of work that was located near a Greggs, I had the same lunch for the majority of working days over a span of six years. A Mexican chicken sandwich (doesn't sound very beige but it literally has one lettuce leaf in it), a chocolate muffin and a Coke Zero. Most days. Six years. Again, this was before my diagnosis. I even used to walk around work singing a jolly tune to myself; ‘I buy the same thing everyday, I buy the same old thing, everyday.’

The fact I escaped detection until age 29 is frankly barmy.

The thing about beige food is that, unless you absolutely fuck up the timings on your oven, the food tastes exactly the same each time. Other food, such as fruit and vegetables, can be wildly inconsistent. When you peel open a seemingly ripe, bright yellow banana and bite into it, you are running the risk of tasting inedible mush. That is not a risk I am willing to take.

If it was up to me I would live off pasta. Along with bread, pasta is the most accessible version of beige in my opinion. Sadly my favourite kind of chips need to be fried and…I do not trust myself to operate an air fryer. Boiling water is about my limit.

Living with someone so adventurous with food gave me no other option than to try my best to expand my horizons. I do in fact eat vegetables now, I know, please clap.

But nothing feels safer than a safe food. Nothing feels safer than being surrounded by family who just knew that on some level food had the potential to genuinely upset me. They tried their best to help me. They must have been at their wit’s end sometimes, but they did what they could to make me happy. I look back and smile at the memories. Food is nostalgia, security, home. The best food is beige.

You like what you like, and besides, there’s always vitamin supplements, so leave me to eat my chip barm in peace.

Thank you for reading whatever that was.

Subscribe to me if you want to read more unhinged articles tenuously linked to neurodiversity.

Subscribe for more high-octane content

If you’d like to support my work but don’t want to subscribe, you can tip me here.

Ren's Tip Jar

You can also click below to browse other things I have written, if you fancy.

Read more of my stuff here

If you’re this far down, what task are you procrastinating from?

Thanks for being here, your support means a lot to me.

Take it easy in this weird world of ours,

Ren