Autistic kids often depend on routines more than most of us. On top of that they often have very limited diets based the texture of the food. The more autistic they are the more these traits tend to be true. My son was on the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum so I am familiar to a slight degree with these challenges.
Crystal MacDonald of Attleboro Massachusetts has an 11-year-old daughter Ashlyn, who has severe, non-verbal autism. When the COVID quarantine closed her school things went haywire. Everything was out of whack for Ashlyn who then reverted to only eating SpaghettiOs and Meatballs. Turns out a lot of people were eating the same thing. In just a few weeks SpaghettiOs and Meatballs were gone from the store shelves.
A mother of five with children ages four through 13, MacDonald stopped working in April to take care of her children while earning her accelerated nursing degree online from Simmons University in Boston Crystal obviously was very stressed but her biggest problem was the SpaghettiOs! She started telling friends about her problem and they told other friends. Pretty soon everyone in Attleboro was hunting for SpaghettiOs and Meatballs. She would get messages about where they were. Then people started buying them out and delivered them to her!
Word got back to the Campbell’s Soup Company, which owns SpaghettiOs, and they’re now donating a year’s supply to her!