For KC
What I built to survive dinner.
I read your book early on. Before I had language for what was happening in my house, before I had a framework, before I had any of this built. You were one of the people who helped me stop treating the kitchen as a moral test I kept failing.
You wrote: “For a lot of people, finding a method that bypasses the most executive functioning barriers or that makes a task a little less intolerable is better than what’s ‘quickest.’”
I want to tell you what I built after I read that.
The household
Four people. Every meal, every day.
I have Celiac disease. Cross-contamination from a shared cutting board means days of symptoms. My son has ARFID. He won’t eat rice, noodles, or most grains. Won’t eat cooked vegetables. His acceptable foods are neurologically fixed. My daughter has ARFID with the opposite profile. Won’t eat meat. Acceptable proteins: cheese, black beans, hummus, eggs on a good day.
Both kids have ADHD and ASD. By 5 PM the executive function I need to make a single decision about dinner has already been spent on the hundred smaller decisions that started at breakfast.
You said on the Take Control podcast: “I honestly probably require a higher degree of executive functioning when I’m taking care of my kids than I do when I’m working.” That’s my house. Every night.
Two apples, no tree. Both of my kids are diagnosed. I’m not. But the therapists have asked. And when I look at the systems I’ve had to build to get through a day, I think the answer is obvious to everyone except the person who never got tested.
What I built
I stopped treating dinner as a willpower problem and started treating it as a design problem. You wrote that “any task or habit requiring extreme force of will depletes your ability.” I was depleting mine every night trying to hold four constraint profiles in my head.
The batch cook runs like a build process. Rice and beans go into the Zojirushi for my daughter. Proteins prepped to my son’s specs. Sous vide bags at their target temps. Each appliance is its own isolated environment running asynchronously. The countertop runs synchronously: if I’m handling gluten for the kids, that operation blocks everything else until it completes. Gloves on, handle the bread, strip the gloves, sanitize, back to my zone. The separation is spatial so I don’t have to hold it in my head.
My son eats with an iPad in front of him. The screen is an accommodation. The distraction lets him get food in. Without it, the sensory experience is front and center and the whole thing stalls. I spent a while feeling guilty about that. A kid eating dinner in front of a screen looks like lazy parenting from the outside. From the inside, the iPad is the thing that gets 400 calories into a child who would otherwise eat nothing. I stopped caring what it looks like.
That’s your philosophy applied to a problem you haven’t named yet. Care tasks are morally neutral. So is the iPad at the dinner table.
Where your work stops and mine starts
You’ve covered feeding a family when executive function is limited. You appeared on “Didn’t I Just Feed You” to talk about it. You’ve covered food shaming with Dr. Karla Lester. You’ve covered the closing shift. You wrote that “nothing you ate yesterday, said today, or have left undone for tomorrow can take away your right to be fed.” These reframes changed how I think about what I do every night.
But there are rooms you haven’t been in yet.
ARFID from the cook’s side. Not the clinical definition. The night-by-night reality of two kids with the same diagnosis and opposite restrictions, where hunger makes it worse and pushing makes it worse and the cook has to solve a four-variable problem before executive function runs out.
The cook who falls through the system. The person running the accommodation is the one who needs it most. I get everyone fed. Most nights there isn’t enough left for me. The system was designed around my limits, and some days those limits are lower than what I planned for.
AI as an executive function prosthetic. I use an AI assistant through the cook. Here’s what I’m making, here’s what I have, give me the task sequence. The AI holds the sequencing so my working memory doesn’t have to. The tool holds what the mind drops. In the kitchen, what the mind drops is the order of operations, and the cost of dropping it is burned rice, a missed step, dinner thirty minutes late, the kids hungrier, the ARFID worse, less food eaten. The stakes cascade.
I’ve written about all of this. Three chapters published, free, on my site:
Everybody’s Got a Plan The prologue. Four profiles, the batch system, what Tuesday does to the plan.
The larger story
The kitchen is one room. The same problem shows up everywhere.
I spent ten years collapsing under the weight of parenting two neurodivergent kids while being neurodivergent myself and not knowing it. Every system in my life was designed for a person who doesn’t exist: someone with unlimited working memory, consistent executive function, and a household where everyone processes the world the same way.
So I started building tools. For the kitchen, but also for how I work, how I think, how I write, how I hold the thread between one idea and the next. And those tools are what made this series possible. For the first time in my life, I’ve been able to assemble my own thinking into something coherent and public. Ten years of scattered insights, half-finished ideas, rabbit holes that went deep but never got documented.
The tools are free, published, and open. They work in any AI conversation (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini). I put together a free series that walks through setting them up. Paste a text file into your AI’s instructions, and it starts breaking tasks into pieces sized for what you actually have left, marking where your thinking was so you can find it tomorrow, letting you dump raw ideas and organizing them after. Your audience could be using these today. No code. No account. Thirty seconds to set up.
What I’m asking
I’d love to talk about this on your podcast. The ARFID kitchen, the cook who falls through, AI tools that bypass the barriers your audience hits every day. Nobody is talking about this from the inside.
I also built tools your audience can use the same day they hear about them. If sharing the free series with your community makes sense, or if a deeper conversation about AI as an executive function prosthetic is interesting to you, I’m here for either.
Peter Salvato petersalvato.com ptsalvato@gmail.com