Food Chaining: Study the Core Diet

There is so much that can be learned from looking at core diets. The core diet refers to the foods a child eats reliably. Studying the core diet gives clues about the child's taste, texture, temperature preferences and helps you see what may be successful in the future.
For example, a core diet of grilled cheese, french fries, cookies, chips, chicken nuggets, plain pasta (usually with spray butter) and cereal....these foods break down easily in the mouth when chewed, they are of a "uniform texture" which means there are not major changes in the texture of the food while the child chews it and before he swallows it. This is the child who usually does not like dips or sauces, who will not eat fruits or vegetables and refuses many types of meats. Why? These kids like liquids but don't like the feel of a thick sauce or liquid in the mouth. The foods are rejected because of the more complex mix of textures and the consistency of these foods. Think about biting into an orange. There is the surface of the orange, still has part of the white peel attached, it is bumpy and has a skin with stringy sections as well. You bite in and you must contain the juice and swallow it before you start chewing. When chewing an orange you are still dealing with the outer and inner texture. An orange is a difficult food to chew and form into a bolus before swallowing. Sometimes you can choke on the stringy parts. Now compare a regular orange with a mandarin orange, which many of our kids will accept. Learning about what your child will be likely to learn to eat by studying what he does eat is how food chaining works.
Grilled cheese may become cheesy bread, Texas toast, Garlic bread, breadsticks, cheese quesadilla. Later you can work on adding tiny amounts of sauce as you work toward goals of a more complex food like thin crust cheese pizza or cheese dip/salsa and chips. The child is not overwhelmed by the amount of sauce or salsa and is already familiar with the tastes/textures of some of the food items in small amounts he can handle. Chips can become all flavors of chips, sweet potato or veggie chips, fruit chips and eventually other potato products like tator tots or sweet potato fries. Each food item is expanded based on the child's ratings/reactions to foods. Higher rated foods help us re-assess preferences and we are then likely to choose even more foods that will be accepted based on what we know about a high rated novel food item. The ratings and the core diet give you the road map for successfully selecting new foods to offer.