How Years of Safe Foods Led to a Curry Obsession (And What Travel Had to Do With It)
- stephyablonsky
- Apr 20
- 6 min read
From about the time he turned two, my son has cycled in and out of safe foods that he was willing to eat, usually of the beige variety. Even deciding which of these foods he wanted to eat at a given time caused great stress, leading us to produce an endless variety of methods to wordlessly bypass this demand as best we could (wheel spinning apps, dice cubes with options written on each face, menus with Velcro manipulatives... we did it all).
Outsiders may have (definitely did) judge what they perceived to be permissiveness, enablement, plain old bad parenting, but anyone who's been in the same boat knows things aren't that simple. That behaviorist tactics would push us farther in the opposite direction, any threat of potential manipulation detected like a mine-sniffing dog on an abandoned battlefield. So we prioritized safety. We brainstormed. We waited out spells where every safe food fell off the list, one by one, until he found his way back. For years.
It doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to understand why food has always been the toughest part of travel for us. So when we booked a family trip to Thailand, I packed snacks like I was preparing for a siege. Nuts. Granola bars. An entire bag of peanut butter pouches for emergency protein. He could survive off of it, if necessary, though I suspected we'd be able to scrounge up some chicken tenders along the way.
Flash forward 3 weeks and I'm getting back on the plane, returning home with a snack bag that's still half full. But before we get to that, let's take a trip back to where this story began...
It started in Morocco.
In 2025, we took the family to Morocco. Every day, multiple times a day, we made a pilgrimage to the same crepe stand in Chefchaouen. The woman who ran it became our best friend over those three days, faithfully fulfilling my son's order: plain crepe, no filling.
Not for lack of trying, I should say. My husband spent a heroic amount of time in Chefchaouen on a single mission: track down ham (one of my son's safe foods at the time). Armed with Google Translate and laggy WiFi, flashing pictures at shopkeepers who looked at him like he'd completely lost it, finding pork in a Muslim country felt, by his account, like conducting a drug deal.
He came home triumphant. ...But the ham was the wrong temperature. My son didn't want it.
A lot of parents would have pushed back by day three. Negotiated. Offered bribes. Insisted he at least try something. We didn't. Because we've learned something important over years of traveling with neurodivergent kids: the nervous system can't be brave when it's busy feeling unsafe. Safe food in an unfamiliar place isn't the failure. It's the strategy.
So we found her every day. She learned his name and his order.
And something quietly shifted.
The tagine.
By day 14 we had made our way up into the Atlas Mountains, staying at a small Berber lodge, the kind of place where the dining area is open to the sky and the mountains, and you eat surrounded by textiles and lanterns and a culture so ancient it has its own written language that looks like it was carved into stone before recorded history. Because it was.
It's about as far from beige as you can get.
And somehow that was exactly the point.
At dinner that night, he tried chicken tagine.
Internally I was confetti. Externally I was a person who had absolutely no feelings about what was happening and suddenly found the mountains very interesting to look at.
Because anyone with a demand-avoidant child with a restricted diet knows you're not allowed to so much as smile about them trying something new. It's like being on safari and finally spotting some rare, elusive creature. You don't shout "There it is!!!" Too much enthusiasm and suddenly trying new food is a thing -- a thing with expectations attached, a thing that might not happen again if he feels any pressure to repeat it.
So I took a sip of my drink. Said nothing. Kept eating.
He ordered it again the next day. And the day after that.
To this day, chicken tagine is something we can put on the weekly dinner menu without needing to cook a separate meal. That felt huge at the time. I had no idea it was just the beginning.
Then came Thailand.
He hit the ground running in a way I genuinely didn't anticipate. On literal day one he was trying curries. Really trying them, not just tasting and rejecting. By the end of the trip he had tried six different kinds and declared favorites. Red curry. Massaman curry.
The western options were right there on every menu. Pizza. Chicken nuggets. A picky eater's dream.
He didn't want them.
I kept thinking about the fact that we cook Thai food at home all the time, how he won't so much as look in the same direction as the food on our plates. Same food, different context, and suddenly he was a curry connoisseur ordering seconds.
It was never about the food. It was about what travel does to the nervous system.
Being immersed in a place where a food belongs, where it's everywhere, where it's just normal; it creates a psychological permission slip that home simply can't replicate. The context changes, and for some of our kids, the rules feel different too. Something loosens.
And then we came home.
We got back on a Sunday. By Monday we were already building a new weekly dinner menu together. He requested red curry. Massaman curry. His sister added beef and broccoli.
On beef and broccoli night, he asked if there was any chicken in the dish. When we said no, just beef, we expected him to turn it down. Instead, he said, "I'd like to try it."
I silently mouthed "Oh my God" to my husband in the other room. I was fully prepared for him to transfer foods he ate in Thailand to our home dinner menu, just like the tagine. I was not at all prepared for trying brand new foods at the home dinner table.
He hadn't eaten beef in years. He didn't eat beef once in Thailand.
But he liked it. He went back for more. A third of a pound of beef more.
This had nothing to do with the trip directly and everything to do with what the trip had quietly done to him. His nervous system had expanded. And now it was applying that new curiosity at his own dinner table, to foods he'd never encountered on the journey.
And here we are two weeks later, and we still haven't had to take a separate dinner order. At this point, I feel like I can't rule out the fact that I might have suffered a boating accident and am actually lying comatose in Thailand. The sound bites from the dinner table are absolutely surreal.
For example, over a plate of Vietnamese shaking beef the other night: "Yum! The stuffed shells were yummy. This beef is yummy. I'm going to try all of your dinners! What are we having tomorrow?"
If I read this I would tell the author to shut their filthy lying mouth. But I'm the author, and I was there for it. And I will never stop being grateful.
What I want you to take away from this.
I'm not telling you that travel will fix your child's restricted diet. I'm not under any illusions that we've solved dinner forever; he'll likely cycle in and out of safe foods phases, because that's just how it works for many of our kids.
But I've watched years of patient, intentional travel build something in him that I couldn't manufacture at home. Morocco cracked it open. Thailand blew the door off.
Traveling with a picky eater can be daunting. But safe food isn't surrendering. It's holding the door open until they're ready to walk through it themselves.
And when they do, it's worth every single crepe.
If you're navigating travel with an autistic child and wondering where to even start, that's exactly what I help families with. Feel free to reach out or explore the site to learn more.
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