Bill
Click to listen to Bill’s story while exploring the images.
Almost half of all Americans know someone with an eating disorder.
This is a photographic representation of (most of) Bill’s meals for 13 years. In addition to the depicted foods, he would take a multivitamin to supplement his nutrition.
About Bill
Bill is a motion designer and drummer who lives in Queens, NY. He is also a supertaster, which means he has more taste buds than the average person.
One might think supertasters are born gourmets. The reality is that many are extremely picky eaters. They are extra sensitive to bitter and spicy tastes. Pain receptors surround taste cells -- which means that supertasters have more pain receptors, and eating foods that they’re sensitive to can literally hurt them beyond what the average taste bud-endowed person might experience.
For Bill, being a supertaster meant that most food tasted awful, and the experience of eating most food was beyond unpalatable. He remembers having actual convulsions from having tasted celery at a friend’s house when he was 9. He described throwing up after many different kinds of meals when the taste and texture of the food was unbearable.
Because eating unfamiliar foods was an unpleasant gamble for Bill, he developed avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). ARFID is a restriction of the types of food that an individual eats, which often causes physical and psychological damage of the variety that you might expect when someone is severely limiting their food intake to include only certain kinds of foods.
Bill ate the same two meals for over ten years. His breakfast included 6 egg whites, a bowl of Gerber’s baby applesauce, and LIFE cereal. He didn’t eat lunch because breakfast was huge on purpose, and meant he wouldn’t be hungry enough to need to eat at school. For dinner, he would have a big bowl of spaghetti with Kraft Parmesan cheese and two boiled hotdogs.
As he grew older, his taste buds dulled. He gradually became open to tasting new things. As an adult, Bill is having what he calls, “a food renaissance”. He explores all sorts of cuisines in depth when he travels, often recreating the foods he likes in his kitchen.
Being a supertaster is a genetic condition, and ARFID can be passed down as well. It is the eating disorder with the highest heritability.