In 1978, researchers from the Center for Behavioral Studies (CBS) at North Texas State University confined an eight-year-old autistic boy to a single room for thirty-one days, watching his behavior around the clock and closely controlling what he ate. The child was chosen as an experimental subject because he had been an unpredictable therapy client. Some days he presented as cooperative and attentive, willing to complete puzzles and other tasks. Other times he refused to comply, running around and throwing objects. His therapists could not identify a consistent set of external factors contributing to these behavioral shifts, so a group of researchers, led by psychologist Dan O'Banion, set out to test one of their pet theories: the idea that diet and certain behaviors were strongly linked. 1 O'Banion's work offers an entry-point for examining the history of autism within the framework of food studies, a field that has contributed much to understanding past ideologies and social structures but which has not yet sufficiently utilized disability as a category of analysis. Food access is a key means of measuring social status, and O'Banion's food deprivation study reflects a clear devaluation of autistic subjectivities. Similar perspectives continue to impact the way the historical archive of autism is constructed and how the history of autism is told.

To test their theory that some foods affected the child's behavior and others did not, the CBS researchers recorded what he ate alongside how frequently he screamed, threw objects, laughed, or engaged in any behavior that they found undesirable. For the first four days of the study, they fed the small boy food such as hamburgers, chili, and hot dogs. They then sought to remove all traces of these foods from his body, depriving him of all food for six days. Afterward, the CBS team reintroduced single ingredients individually at intervals of between four and seventy-two hours, offering him another food only when they believed any previous behavioral effects had dissipated. By the end of the study, the researchers had concluded that numerous common foods could be correlated with excessively active and unruly behavior and thus that the boy should no longer eat most iconic, American foods. Instead, they created a custom diet of bland food, including lean meats and rice, which they considered to be "calming agents." 2

The research team published the results of the experiment in the Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia. Their ability to produce this academic study was dependent upon their claim to authority over both the boy's body, as they limited his mobility and stifled his volition, and over the story of this experience, as they immortalized their perceptions without capturing his. In fact, they deemed trying to understand his experiences as impossible. Contemporary training materials from the CBS make their assumptions explicit, explaining that the autistic child "lives in a world apart from others—he cannot reach out and no one can reach in." 3 Operating on the belief that autistic people were unknowable, the researchers acted without attempting to gauge their effect upon their clinical subject.

Significantly, the CBS study, designed both to bolster the careers of its authors and ostensibly to provide treatment ideas, also inscribed this nameless boy into the historical record. Even as clinical results become outdated, such publications retain their significance as an archive of past experience. However, like all traces of the past, the story they tell is a partial one. Although there would have been no study without the child, his presence, as Gracen Brilmyer puts it, is "partial in a way that undermines…personhood, autonomy, and agency." 4 The limitations of trying to reconstruct the lives of historical subjects whose experiences find their way into the historical record via materials created by members of a more powerful group, whether slaveholders, political figures, familial patriarchs, or, in this case, a team of researchers, have been widely acknowledged. For example, in her study of enslaved women in the Caribbean, Marisa Fuentes mourns the fact that the distorted lens of white supremacy "pervade[s] the archive and govern[s] what can be known" about the women whose lives she fervently hoped to uncover. 5

Although the traumatic experiences of racialized, enslaved women cannot and should not be equated with those of a twentieth-century autistic child, I am deliberately invoking Fuentes's work about the skewed archive of enslavement to help make the point that the archive of autism is likewise distorted. According to Phil Smith, the ideologies of "normative whiteness and able-ness" are equally invisible, especially to those who have been placed in those categories of privilege, and these categories have been used to push members of some communities "not just outside the margins, but off the page." 6 Awareness that the archive of autism is flawed makes scholars accountable for finding creative ways to document the experiences of silenced subjects. A child-centered rereading of the CBS study provides fragments of insight, which in combination with other similar efforts, can begin to tell the history of a community, which, J.J. Hahn argues, found covert ways to demonstrate agency that "defied the medical co-opting of their bodies" long before the advent of the neurodiversity movement. 7

Unlike the researchers who transformed their interactions with the child into a scholarly article, the boy lacked the technical ability to write and distribute his own story. As an autistic child who likely struggled with verbal communication, he may have been unable to speak fluently to the scientists observing him during the study itself. 8 Thus, the silence of the historical record may very well mirror the silences of a lifetime. To resuscitate him from objectification, silence, and erasure requires acts of imagination, including speculations about what physical and psychological sensations he experienced during the experiment and about what his life was like outside of the parameters of his engagement with O'Banion's team.

There are a range of possibilities about what the child's actions and movements meant from his perspective, but he was almost certainly using the tools at his disposal to express a range of emotions and sensations including, no doubt, anxiety and pain. The sounds and movements that led to this treatment might, in fact, have also been signs of protest at having been subjected to therapeutic interventions, as much the outgrowth as the cause of the experiment. A restoration of respect for the child's perspective begins by simply embracing the assertation that the child's sounds and movements, which the psychologists hoped to extinguish, were purposeful and communicative and indeed possible evidence of resistance to the cruelty inherent in a purely medical model of disability. 9

Compounded by the psychological stress that would accompany his confinement, the child likely endured significant physical discomfort. Reacting with empathy to the child's experiences in 1979, physician Charles H. Banov described the study as "cruel" and as "almost criminal in…character," arguing that any behavioral changes that researchers observed during this experiment were the result of ketosis, hypoglycemia, or hyperglycemia as food was taken away and then reintroduced. 10 Fasting children are more vulnerable to the effects of going without food than adults, potentially suffering from not only hunger pains but from the effects of severe weakness, fatigue, and reduced cognitive function. 11

To search for the child's perspective in a document not designed to capture it, one must also search for clues about his life circumstances beyond the confines of this temporally limited study. The research team underscored the child's vulnerability when they recorded that his mother died shortly after the study ended, noting that he was "placed in several institutional and foster home settings" where his trauma was likely multiplied due both to his transience and his profound loss. 12 It is important to acknowledge that not only does the clinical language of the published study do little to capture the interior experiences of the child who was experimented upon and then orphaned, it also obscures those of the mother who consented to allow her child to participate. Current knowledge about genetics suggests that she could have been autistic herself and thus inherently vulnerable to the same medical system that created the hunger experiment for her son. 13 Furthermore, the therapeutic process itself creates a hierarchy, with professionals at the top whose proclaimed expertise was privileged over maternal instinct. 14

The mother's ability to access services at CBS, a leading center of behavioral research at a time when there were few out-patient therapeutic options available for autistic children, may have been, in part, the result of the geographical accident of living near Denton, Texas. Regardless, the effort she must have taken to enroll and regularly transport her child to therapy sessions at the center must have been significant. 15 The little that can be discerned about her points to tenacity and concern for her child, but there are also hints of some underlying vulnerability. Not only was she, apparently, the single mother of a child with significant support needs, she was seemingly bereft of meaningful family connections since her child was swept into the net of social services upon her death. It seems plausible to conjecture that while she was alive her lack of better options may have made her predisposed to allow her son to be the subject of an experiment that, by its very design, would make him suffer.

The Big Implications of a Small North Texas Study

The CBS case is worthy of detailed analysis and contextualization because it offers an example of how autistic experiences are inscribed into the historical record and also because it is emblematic of countless abuses perpetrated against autistic people in the name of treatment. Furthermore, the study provides evidence about a widespread fascination with the idea that autism and diet are linked. An analysis of this North Texas study also adds a layer of complication to the most well-known narratives of autism interventions, which typically focus on the East and West Coasts as epicenters of research and treatment to the exclusion of other hubs of inquiry. 16

In the 1970s, interest in autism and food consumption was multi-faceted. Some, including the CBS team, viewed certain foods as a potential cause of autistic behaviors. Others saw nutrition as a potential cure for the condition, arguing that large doses of vitamins could reduce the signs of autism. Still others saw food as a way to induce children to comply with therapeutic interventions by supplying them with tasty bribes. Regardless of the specific function they thought food should play in treatment programs, members of each group were unified by a shared conceptualization of food as a potential tool that could be used to transform an autistic child into a "normal" one. 17

Since the goals of these interventions were to make autistic people eat in ways that would make them normal, the end result was a lack of respect for the interiorities (and appetites) of the clients who did not meet metrics designed to measure normalcy. The CBS study and others like it were shaped by the medical model of disability, which frames autistics as people in need of a transformational cure rather than of acceptance and support. 18 Inevitably, this mindset limited the agency of those regarded as "abnormal," sublimating their perspectives to those of the medical community. Furthermore, it continues to shape the historical archive of autism, compromising our present abilities to access the full richness of autistic histories.

Examining the function of food in autism interventions is uniquely revelatory because not only is food an existential necessity, it can also be a source of pleasure or of solace and a means of performing and constructing conceptions of self and community. Nothing in the human experience is more fundamental than food, thus anyone who controls food access wields enormous power. 19 The act of depriving the vulnerable of food inevitably hints at eugenics because those who control it are making assertions about who deserves to live. 20 At an absolute minimum, they are dictating the terms of survival. As a great deal of food history research has demonstrated, regulating food distribution has long been a key mechanism used to violate the bodily autonomy of minoritized and marginalized peoples. 21 The attempts to control autistic food consumption are linked to larger social dynamics where the powerful supervise the intake of those they hope to change, subdue, or exclude, yet identifiably autistic stories have not been integrated into these larger histories. This is due not only to the flaws in the archive of autism, which make autistic perspectives challenging to uncover, it is also because of the paradoxical fact that attempts to regulate autistic food consumption generally happen under the guise of therapeutic efforts to help, not to harm. For this reason, it has been sometimes difficult for caretakers and advocates to discern abuse. Furthermore, scientific researchers have often had a limited conception of the meanings embedded in food choices, making them unable to understand the full ramifications of the potential harm being done by food control.

When looking for linkages between food and autism, the CBS researchers and their contemporaries tapped into a distinctive brand of twentieth century American thought that depicted food as mere fuel for the body or, sometimes, as a kind of medicine, ignoring the psychological and cultural functions food serves. 22 The CBS psychologists who informed the small boy that he could no longer eat pizza or hot dogs, foods that the researchers themselves identified as part of the "typical American diet," were, in a sense, performing the symbolic action of excising him from a national identity that was imbricated with certain foods. 23 By focusing on what they believed food did to the young boy's body, they neglected to consider what food meant to the child or in the larger culture. As Deane Curtin bluntly puts it, "Food structures what counts as a person in our culture." 24 By denying him his fundamental right to food, the social scientists were also calling into question his humanity and his right to belong, making it unsurprising, in retrospect, that his subjective perspective is so difficult to uncover, even in a study that is ostensibly about him as an individual.

In a 1974 interview in Psychology Today, autism researcher O. Ivaar Lovaas similarly dehumanized autistic people, claiming, "You have a person in the physical sense—they have hair, a nose, and a mouth—but they are not people in a psychological sense." According to Lovaas, the goal of the therapist was to "construct a person" from the "raw materials." As he saw it, the primary means of achieving this goal was to enforce a uniform concept of behavioral normalcy. 25 Lovaas's assertation that autistic people are not quite human is resonant of other historical attempts to deny the full humanity of various groups in order to justify dominance, exploitation, or even annihilation. Yet, once again, the autistic experience is also distinctive. Though unified by some shared experiences and commonalities, autistic people do not all share the same race, ethnicity, or class position. Historically, their heterogeneity has made autistics less identifiable as a community of shared experience than members of some other groups. 26 Thus, efforts at bodily control, even if they are widespread, have often been interpreted as individual events rather than as evidence of a shared trauma. Furthermore, attempts to narrate a community-wide history are complicated by the fact that details about most individual autism treatments have not been preserved in widely available records. Thus, the 1978 CBS study should be interpreted as both the experience of an individual and as an entry point for gaining potential insights into the undocumented histories of a larger community.

Exploiting Vulnerability and the Production of Knowledge

Historically, researchers have frequently chosen subjects for medical and psychological experiments who lacked an extensive support system or who, for a variety of reasons, were unable to opt out. From enslaved women who were subjected to painful and gruesome gynecological experiments, to orphans who were deliberately infected with smallpox or malnourished to the point of developing scurvy, to disabled subjects who were intentionally exposed to hepatitis, to Black men whose syphilis was studied rather than treated, American medical knowledge has often been gained at the expense of people without significant power. 33 As an autistic person, the child who was the subject of the CBS study was the victim of a dehumanizing culture that had long subjected the disabled to harsh treatment. 34 It is worth speculating about whether or not the researchers (or the child's own mother) would have regarded more than six days of food deprivation as cruel and unnecessary had he been a typically developing child.

The trajectory towards institutionalization of the child from the CBS study was distressingly common for children like him, particularly before a movement to deinstitutionalize the disabled began its ascendency in the late 1960s. 35 People living in institutions, which housed a variety of populations with different needs, have long been among the most vulnerable to the whims of researchers. 36 Given this context, it is unsurprising that experiments conducted upon a different group of institutionalized children directly inspired the conceptualization of the CBS study. 37 O'Banion and his team of researchers were informed, in part, by the work of controversial psychologist George Von Hilsheimer, the superintendent of the residential Green Valley School for troubled children located in Green Valley, Florida. Von Hilsheimer's methods for disciplining children under his care had made the school a target for state raids and even a subject for U.S. Senate hearings. Investigators reported finding shackles, whips, and filthy conditions and shared allegations about violent and unorthodox practices. 38

Von Hilsheimer and various fringe medical professionals with whom he consulted believed that many of challenges Green Valley students faced were the result of allergies or of poor nutrition. 39 In order to identify the source of a purported food allergy, school officials put students on elimination plans or total fasts. Von Hilsheimer was such a strong believer that food and behavioral challenges were linked that he not only tried to modify diets to remove food he identified as reactive, he also made sure that the majority of his students received mega-doses of vitamins. 40

Bernard Rimland, a pioneering autism researcher and the father of an autistic child, was also a proponent of giving autistic children vitamin doses that were as much as several hundred times larger than the recommended daily amount, arguing that this treatment plan helped improve communication skills and reduced tantrums and other purportedly problematic behaviors. 41 Despite Rimland's recommendations, most contemporary medical practitioners were skeptical about the idea that there was a connection between diet, nutrients, and "autistic" behaviors such as hyperactivity. 42 Nonetheless, the embrace of food-based treatment plans greatly outpaced scientific studies about their efficacy. 43 These dietary regimes were popular, in part, because they were easy to implement and also because worried parents often lacked other therapeutic support options.

Stories about nutrition-based miracle cures circulated through informal networks of caregivers who, as historian Chloe Silverman has observed, often had "few resources other than each other when learning to treat their children." 44 The vitamin treatment plan resonated with many parents because giving their children nutritional supplements felt like a natural extension of their caregiving responsibilities. Yet both those who oversupplied their children with nutrients and those who deprived them of food, did so in a desperate attempt to cure them.

The Painful Quest to Find a Cure

"Cure," Eli Clare argues, "rides on the back of normal." The concept also implies a desire to return to "an original nondisabled state of being," one that did not exist for the autistic child of the CBS study. 45 The attempt to starve him in order to cure him reveals just how profoundly disability had been stigmatized as researchers used their overwhelming desire to alter his behavioral patterns to justify harming him. Their actions were far from anomalous.

In the mid-1970s, the Fields of Oak Harbor, Washington hospitalized their eleven-year-old autistic son, "John," for two weeks in an attempt to find out if he had "cerebral allergies" that were leading to autistic behaviors. From the time their child was a year-and-a-half old, they had correlated his "hyperactivity, silly giggling spells, frequent tantrums, and insomnia" to "food binges" when he ate primarily bread and crackers. 46 In order to test their theory, John was subjected to a four day long fast. Initially he responded to the regime by throwing tantrums and complaining of hunger and weakness, but by the fourth day he was, according to his parents, more "calm, cheerful, and reasonable." 47

Although the Fields reported that John made "frantic complaints" about his hunger, they regarded his discomfort as a small price to pay for the hope that they could find a diet that would enable him to engage in what they saw as normal behavior. 48 This example and others like it resonate with Stijn Vanheule's observation that the stress of caregiving has the potential to provoke carers towards violence as a frustrated response to the humiliation of not being able to rescue someone. 49 Such desperation can help explain the frequency of an action as dramatic as food deprivation, particularly when embedded in a long cultural history of widespread disdain for the disabled. 50 Disabled Americans have long been stigmatized due to the perception that they do not adequately contribute to a labor force that is designed to exclude them. Whether labeled as deserving of public pity and charity or stigmatized as being unwilling to rehabilitate themselves and earn their own bread, the perception that the disabled have not earned the right to eat has been pervasive. 51

Applied Behavior Analysis

Not only did some researchers and parents deprive autistic children of food on a short-term basis to study how it would affect their behavior, many therapists who worked with clients on an ongoing basis used food deprivation schemes in their regular therapeutic programs. The CBS social scientists likely developed their high threshold of tolerance for dietary manipulation gradually through therapy sessions with multiple children. The 1960s and 1970s were pivotal decades in developing the intensive therapeutic regime of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for autistic children, which can involve treatment for up to forty hours each week. Using the techniques of ABA, psychologists, other therapists, and paraprofessionals urged autistic children to perform normalcy in exchange for rewards, most often food, and to avoid punishment. This method had its origins in attempts to manipulate animal behavior in the laboratory setting where Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner taught rats to push levers to secure treats. 52

Skinner believed that behavior was a response to consequences, both positive and negative, not an outgrowth of free will. Thus, he believed that systems of rewards and punishments could shape behavior. He was eager to apply principles derived from nonhuman animal laboratories to people, believing that behaviorism had the potential to produce broad societal impact. As Lauren Slater puts it, "His vision was to build a worldwide community where the government would consist of behavioral psychologists who could condition…its citizens into phalanxes of benevolent robots." 53 Behaviorism was unabashedly promoted as a means of achieving social order. It was, according to Laurence D. Smith primarily "concerned with prediction [and] control." 54 Autistic people who did not behave in predictable ways became particularly tempting test subjects for social engineers intent upon creating an ordered society governed by a rigid set of ideas about proper behavior.

ABA methods quickly spread beyond the East Coast. For example, in 1960, Charles B. Ferster and Marian K. DeMyer taught autistic children to insert coins to retrieve candy from a vending machine in Indiana. 55 In 1968, psychologist B.L. Hopkins treated children afflicted with what he regarded as pathologically "low rates of smiling" by rewarding smiles with bites of candy at Kalamazoo Hospital. 56 In fact, the technique of dispensing food and drink in what Skinner labeled "operant conditioning" sessions was so commonplace that in 1972 the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis printed a "technical note," recommending that practitioners use a particular kind of bottle to dispense small amounts of soft drink or juice rewards. The tone of the article, which casually suggests that liquid reinforcers be used "alternately with the customary dry cereals and candies," offers a clear indication of how widespread the system of rewarding children for desirable behavior with food and correspondingly withholding it if they failed to comply had become. 57

The researcher most famous for applying the principles of behaviorism to autistic children was Ivar Lovaas, who developed his own approach at UCLA, beginning in the 1960s. 58 Lovaas sought to teach autistic children a range of skills. He sought to break them of self-injurious behaviors as well as practices such as echolalia and to teach them to follow verbal instructions, such as "touch my nose," or to give hugs on demands.

Lovaas broke each lesson into multiple steps. For example, teaching a child to hug might start with initiating fleeting physical contact with the child's cheek, which with scaffolded baby steps would evolve into a hug when the child learned to put their arms around the neck of their therapist. At each stage, the child would receive a reward for compliance or a punishment for an inability or unwillingness to follow instructions. The punishments ranged from expressions of disapproval to corporal punishments. The rewards and punishments often came in the form of food rewards or denial. 59

Lovaas systematically described his program for working with autistic children in the handbook Teaching Developmentally Disabled Children, which served as the Bible for a quickly expanding number of Lovaas disciples. Lovaas justified his emphasis on external behavior rather than the internal cause of that behavior by explaining, "you have to put out the fire first before you can worry about how it started." 60 His definition of what constituted a "fire" was expansive. For example, the master-teacher stipulated that it was necessary to "make your child look as normal as possible." This involved not allowing them to gain weight and "look like big balloons [so that] just the sight of them invites ridicule and isolation." 61

Josh Greenfeld, a screenwriter who chronicled his experiences raising his nonspeaking autistic son Noah in three autobiographical volumes, witnessed how Lovaas worked firsthand when he took his four-year old son to him for treatment in 1970. 62 They established the therapeutic goals of reducing Noah's repetitive behavior, making him more compliant, and teaching him simple language. At Noah's first session, a therapist named Laura asked Noah to look at her. If he came even close to looking at her, she rewarded him with a tiny sliver of a Frito and a pat on the head. During the lengthy session, any attempt to comply with one of her commands earned him a piece chip. If Noah's attention wandered, the therapist yelled. If he showed signs of discomfort or distress, she ignored him. Laura explained that it was imperative that Noah obey her commends, explaining, "you must never let him determine when you must stop working." 63 Because Noah was, by Greenfeld's account, an enthusiastic eater capable of ingesting "prodigious amounts of food," his father was hopeful that the Frito incentive plan would prove to be effective. 64

Food was, in fact, such an important motivator in the Lovaas method, that the children he chose as his early experimental subjects had to enjoy eating. This requirement was so well-known that the parents of one picky eater brought a bagful of their child's preferred fast-food hamburgers to an initial consultation with the Lovaas team since they knew their son was unlikely to be motivated by unfamiliar foods. 65 Ultimately, under the Lovaas method, the client's enjoyment of and dependence upon food became a vulnerability for the therapist to exploit.

Making eye contact, clapping hands, and using the toilet were among the behaviors that could elicit a treat. Failure could result in punishment. Lovaas warned that "some children are very lazy." Those who would not respond to a command should be yelled at or spanked. 66 Punishments needed to be harsh because, he speculated, autistic children "hurt less than I do. You get kids who can't even feel pain." 67 Lovaas believed that children should "work for what [they] want." 68 Work, he believed, could overcome neurology, and he believed that his methods could even teach the nonverbal to speak. 69

Since he regarded children who did not make progress according to his measurements as incalcitrant, lazy, or irresponsible, Lovaas advocated for extreme measures to motivate this group. Some of these techniques—such as using electric shock as a punishment—have understandably garnered a great deal of attention and condemnation. 70 Less infamous but equally chilling, was his slow and deliberate method of starving children so that they would comply. Children would be more willing to work for the reward of food, Lovaas coolly concluded, if they were hungry. Thus, he deprived some of the children in his laboratory of all food except for the scraps they earned by learning to follow their therapist's instructions. Lovaas's ideal food deprivation regime was unrelenting and enforced around the clock. He described working with a hungry child as "a pleasure…because that is a child who is motivated to learn." 71

Although Lovaas became the most well-known practitioner of food deprivation in the therapeutic context, he was not an outlier. For example, the training manual for the CBS told employees not to give the children they were working with anything to eat or drink unless specifically directed, arguing "in order to keep them working for food, we don't want to let them have any when they are not working." 72 This method could prove to be particularly trying for children who were strongly food motivated, but even those with less hearty appetites were, of course, vulnerable, too.

Lovaas used food simultaneously to reward and to inflict punishment while working with Noah. 73 Greenfeld's articulated hope was that Lovaas could transform his son into "ten percent of a normal human being." 74 However, Noah's hoped for progression toward normalcy moved too slowly according to the standards of both his family and his therapists. At the end of February 1971, Lovaas informed Greenfeld and his wife, the artist Fumiko Kometani, that in order to make progress, they needed to deprive Noah of food for thirty-six hours so that he would, theoretically, work harder for rewards. Greenfeld and Kometani had qualms about the plan and suggested that Noah simply skip breakfast or lunch before therapy. This would be ineffective, Lovaas argued, explaining that the fast would not produce the desired results until the child passed the state of being merely "dazed and dizzy" and reached a state of desperation. 75 They settled upon a compromise where Noah would go without food between dinner time one evening and 3:30pm the next day.

When Greenfeld brought Noah to UCLA at 3:30 the next day, the therapists were disappointed that the scoops of ice cream and pieces of bagel they displayed as rewards did not seem to inspire Noah to behave any differently than during a typical therapy session. It had not, as Lovaas had hoped, "put a firecracker up his ass," so his parents took him home and deprived him of dinner. Noah's brother, Karl, woke up the next morning to find him coughing, his sheets covered in yellow mucous that Karl initially mistook for grapefruit juice. The family pediatrician later explained that Noah had vomited bile because there was no food for his stomach to digest. 76 This experience convinced Noah's horrified parents to end the hunger experiment, but Lovaas was undaunted, suggesting that they check Noah into a hospital for a week-long fast. 77

Greenfeld and Kometani's ambivalence as they tried to balance their instincts to nurture their child against the advice of experts was shared by some therapists who engaged in practices that made them uncomfortable in order to comply with therapeutic protocols. For example, researchers treating a six-year-old autistic boy named Mike, a residential patient at the Langley Porty Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco in the late 1960s, held their operant conditioning therapy sessions during mealtime. The little boy was forced to eat apart from other pediatric patients and had to obey his therapist's instructions in order to earn bites of food. Those who were less comfortable with the protocol often gave Mike bigger bites of food than others to make sure he received enough to eat. A nurse at the facility reported feeling guilty when she was asked to limit Mike's intake at snack times so that he would remain hungry during therapy.

Mike's parents too were uncomfortable with what some of the professionals on his team described as only "mild food deprivation," believing that hunger actually exacerbated problems with his behavior. Intriguingly, although the proponents of the plan dismissed his parents' qualms, they felt uncomfortable enough with the program to open themselves up to self-scrutiny, at least briefly. They acknowledged that they were often "angry at Mike" for not complying adequately with their treatment scheme, angry enough that some were concerned that the food reduction regime might be more punitive than therapeutic. Using a set of rationalizations that were likely repeated in clinical settings throughout the country, the team was ultimately able to resolve their ethical dilemma by arguing that the scheme worked and concluding that the child's behavior had improved. 78

The treatment approach that justified cruelties like giving Mike fewer snacks than other hospitalized children also contributed to the creation of a warped autism archive. Both professionals and parents learned to focus on a child's actions and not their thoughts or motivations. For example, Noah was the subject of three books written by his father and one written by his brother, yet we know very little about Noah's subjective experiences. The family appeared on 60 Minutes in 1978, making Noah the most famous autistic child in the nation at that time. Rare, revealing footage shows Noah eating, jumping, holding his father's hand, and settling into bed. His movements and vocalizations are juxtaposed with interviews with his seated family members. While Noah appears agitated in some footage, much of the time he seems content and trusting. Among other things, viewers can see him, apparently, relishing a bath and savoring a bite of food, seemingly enjoying the life that his family deemed so disruptive. Those glimpses are the only clues the viewer has to imagine what it was like to be Noah. His family supplied the narrative.

Noah's younger brother, Karl, reported longing for a "normal" sibling, a word he later used seventy-three times in his account of growing up with Noah, Boy Alone: A Brother's Memoir. Somewhat similarly, their father, Josh, agonized about his inability to find adequate resources to support his son, but his primary focus was upon the effect that Noah had upon his family, not upon Noah's own experiences. When he appeared on 60 Minutes, Josh coolly confessed that he had often thought about murdering his oldest son. Death, he thought, could be preferable to disability. 79 Both Greenfeld and his son Karl were so accustomed to measuring Noah against their idea of normalcy that they could not imagine Noah living a worthwhile life on his own terms. Karl confesses, "I imagined the life I wanted for me, for Noah, for my parents. I conjured it, as therapy…What if Noah could talk? What if he were normal?" 80

Normalcy was something that Karl and his parents never stopped longing for. Karl recalled that during his growing up years, his entire family worked to "assemble a normal life around this abnormal center." 81 Their desire for normalcy stemmed from personal frustration, grief, and longing but was also attributable to largescale societal failings. Caring for Noah was as challenging as it was because they were unable to access adequate assistance from a society not designed to support or include people with disabilities. Furthermore, their desire for normalcy was inspired not only by their collective sensation of being burdened by the duty of caring for Noah but also by a desire to see Noah thrive, something that was not happening at a series of institutions where he was abused or neglected. The family could not imagine a world built for Noah, so instead they imagined a Noah built for the world as it existed.

The ideological power of the concept of the normal is so overwhelming that it has shaped the way autistic history has been recorded as well as how therapeutic interventions aimed at autistic people have been constructed. Access to food, the most basic of human rights, has historically been contingent for autistic people, whose full humanity has been routinely called into question. Attempts to imagine the experiences of those, like Noah or the eight-year-old from the CBS study, who were immortalized as case studies but not as people, is a small step in restoring their humanity and telling a richer, more inclusive history. Furthermore, the flaws apparent in the archive of autism from half a century ago are instructive because, if we are not careful, they could be replicated in the present. Thankfully, autistic self-advocates have made great strides in making sure they have a voice in contemporary conversations. Yet insider voices are not always heeded, and therapeutic interventions that discount autistic perspectives and demand that food be earned by performing rites of normalcy persist.

With Behaviorism the Past is not Even Past

Despite the fact than many adult autistics and a growing number of researchers regard ABA as problematic, if not abusive, today this is the treatment insurance companies are the most likely to fund and the one diagnosticians are most likely to recommend. 82 Although most twenty-first century practitioners of ABA have disavowed Lovaas's cruelest methods, many autism professionals still remember him with reverence. 83 In contrast, a 2021 whitepaper, circulated by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network condemns the intervention for never having "repudiated its roots." 84 Self-advocate Ari Ne'em points out that measurements for what constitutes a successful treatment plan are never neutral but "carry their creators' value judgements," a perspective that makes it challenging to disentangle ABA from the practices endorsed by its most prominent creator. 85

Food deprivation, one of Lovaas's cornerstone strategies, can still play a role—albeit generally a smaller one—in ABA therapy today. 86 Even newly minted researchers, who have the benefit of exposure to the critiques of neurodiversity advocates and others, are entering their profession with the mindset that enforced hunger is not a dehumanizing degradation but rather a vulnerability that could be exploited. In her 2020 dissertation for a doctorate in ABA at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Colleen May recommends that the "trainer may use the fact that an individual has not had anything to eat or drink for a long period of time and use food as reinforcer." 87 Behaviorists conceptualize of the need for food as an "unconditioned motivating operation" (UMO). Since human beings require food to survive, the substance is naturally motivating, particularly for someone who is hungry. 88 In his 2015 handbook Understand Applied Behavior Analysis, psychologist Albert J. Kearney explains how therapists can take advantage of food as an UMO, observing that "food or water is naturally reinforcing to just about everyone who is hungry or thirsty." He applies this observation to the hypothetical case of "Dick" with whom food had been used as a reinforcer to get him to engage in his math class. He argues that it would be best if Dick arrived at class hungry so that he would be "more likely to work for food." 89 Although most nutritional advice would suggest that students learn better if they are well nourished at school, in Kearney's point of view, Dick's perceived behavioral or developmental weaknesses make that standard advice less applicable to him. 90

The Judge Rotenberg Center, which was founded by Skinner doctoral student Matthew Israel in 1971, has engaged in food deprivation techniques since its founding. The institution has become most notorious for continuing to use electrical shock to discipline and coerce students long after most behaviorists disavowed corporeal aversive measures. Somewhat lesser known is the fact that the staff restricts the food intake of pupils viewed as recalcitrant or as not making adequate progress. Students on such a behavioral plan are scheduled to receive numerous small meals throughout the day, but they must earn the right to eat by meeting behavioral goals. If they do not (or cannot) comply, they are forced to forfeit their small meal then begin anew trying to earn their next potential bite. 91

Although these contemporary echoes of Lovaas's belief that hunger could be used to badger children into meeting therapeutic goals are often more subtle than they were fifty years ago, the intellectual and practical antecedents of this contemporary advice are apparent. Even if instances when therapists attempt to deprive their clients of food are rarer today, food rewards still abound. Children enrolled in this kind of therapy are routinely required to act out scenes of normalcy in order to earn a sought-after food treat. As M. Remi Yergeau points out, in ABA therapy, "a lunch is never fully, wholly a lunch: it is a series of discrete lunch pieces to be fed as a reward over a series of trials." 92

It is this focus on behavior, specifically behavior deemed desirable by the therapists creating treatment plans, that is an inherent part of all ABA therapy, whether conducted in a 1970s UCLA laboratory where children who did not comply were deprived of food or in a contemporary living room where a compliant child is rewarded for acceding to behavioral demands with an M&M. Daniel A. Wilkenfeld and Allison McCarthy's cogent critique of ABA makes clear that both depriving children of food or asking them to "act against their identity" by performing the social role of normalcy, is a violation of autonomy. Such approaches also distort the historical archive of autism by enforcing the idea that autistic-centered experiences are not worth understanding or documenting. 93

Therapeutic approaches that justify depriving young children of their right to nourishment or who force them to subvert their identifies and natural impulses to earn it, are inherently dehumanizing. It is then no surprise to find that the historical record contains so few and distorted traces of those whose essential humanity has been called into question. It is incumbent upon the enormous industry that has sprung up to meet a growing present-day demand for autism support to do so in a way that treats food as a fundamental right and not something that has to be earned, listens to autistic voices, respects the agency of autistic clients, and ensures that the future archive of autism is constructed in a way that captures complex, subjective autistic experiences.