Are food jags an aspie thing?

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The daughter goes on food jags where she will eat almost exclusively one favorite food for weeks then be done with it. She has done this as a child and still does as a teenager.

She tries but we won't let her. We pretty much require her to try new foods and eat an array of her approved foods. No way would I let her eat one thing for days or weeks on end.

I do this sometimes.

I wouldn't worry about it - I find after awhile I get sick of the food, I'm guessing around the time I start needing different nutrients.

What matters is how healthy the food you eat is, not how much variety there is.

One of my kids does this. He isn't an "aspie", he's non-verbal, but autistic nevertheless. I'm sure it's not ideal and if you can encourage her not to, that might be good. But I figure, at least he is eating. I'll take it.

She will still eat normal meals (dinner, lunch if we plan something) but if she is digging around for a snack or breakfast it will be the current favored food. So at least it isn't as much of a nutrition concern as it could be. I do have to sort of keep an eye on what she is eating to make sure if the current obsession is carbs that she is balancing that in the rest of what she eats.

I did this as a kid (and still do, to an extent). I think there are two reasons for it: 1. over-sensitivity to certain flawors. Some food just smell or taste so nasty, or have such a nasty texture, that they are almost impossible to eat. This is NOT just normal pickiness, it really is that food that tastes a certain way or have a certain texture make me physically sick. I can't even go into the university cafeteria on the days they sea kind of prve liver, just the smell makes me gag. 2.Routine/familiarity. Aspies need certain rutines, we like doing things a certain way, so as to not be overwhelmed. If your daughter wants a snack and stands in front of the fridge looking at what's in it, it can be impossible for her to choose, because there's too many alternatives. If she always takes the same thing, she doesn't get overwhelmed by the fridge, because she knows beforehand what she'll get. I think it's perfectly fine to let your daughter eat a bit monotonously, to a certain extent. New flawors and foods should be introduced gradually. Oh and it's important to take theese food oversensitivity's seriously, it may look like it's just pickiness/stubbornness, but many people on the spectrum are extreamly over (or under) sensitive to certain smells, tastes, noices etc

This can definitely be an aspie thing.

When I was little, I mostly wanted a dish called pytt-i-panne (but only for dinner). When I was 6 I had a long period where I only wanted fish cakes for dinner, breakfast and evening meal. Then that thing ended by itself.

From age 7+ I didn't do so to that extent, but I can still go for a while on the same food, but not in the way I did at 6.
I still tend to use the same thing for breakfast for months though. For instance, almost every morning this year I have had bread with cheese and apple.

Come to think of it, I also went through a phase when I was about 7 or 8 where I wanted a lot of parsley, because a character on a children's TV show ate it for snacks.
A year or so later I wanted lemon drops on everything.
As an older child it was pepper. My NT cousin had the same thing with salt though. My grandmother watched us eat dinner, and as I reached for the pepper and my cousin took the salt, she just shook her head

I don't know if it's an aspie thing or not, but I do it, too. I don't eat only one type of food at a time, but I will eat the same thing repeatedly for a week or more, and then switch to something else. I almost always order the same thing from my favorite restaurants.
I do the same thing with music, tv shows, etc.