Posted on 10/20/2015 3:36:07 PM PDT by dennisw
This intervention is not aimed at those with life-threatening food allergies or similarly grave medical conditions. I would never question people whose faces will balloon if they ingest trace amounts of shellfish. Or people who risk going into anaphylactic shock with a whiff of peanut dust. Those problems are very real, and everyone who is afflicted with them has my sympathy.
I’m talking about the rest of you. Those of you who don’t eat garlic because you detest its smell or avoid cauliflower because it makes you fart or have gone gluten-free because you heard it worked wonders for Jennifer Aniston or Lady Gaga or Dave, your toned instructor from spin class.
When you settle into your seat at a restaurant, don’t be shy about telling your server your food preferences. By all means, ask if your dish can be prepared garlic-free or cauliflower-free or gluten-free. You’re paying good money, so you should get the meal that you want, not one that leaves you riding home in a foul mood and a plume of fetid air.
But for the love of Julia Child and the sake of every other soul in the restaurant, particularly the underpaid line cooks sweating their way through another Saturday night shift, please, please stop describing your food preferences as an allergy. That is a very specific medical term, and invoking it triggers an elaborate, time-consuming protocol in any self-respecting kitchen. It shouldn’t be tossed around as liberally as the sea salt on the house-made (gluten-free) breadsticks.
I know you want your dietary preferences to be taken seriously, and you think invoking the A-word is a harmless little white lie. But you have no idea how much trouble you’re causing and how much you’re helping to erode hard-won progress for people with genuine allergies and disorders.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/opinion/this-column-is-gluten-free.html
I was in Venice a few weeks ago and friends reported seeing a restaurant menu with the following important message emblazoned it: “We do NOT serve gluten-free food.”
It was easy to imagine an exasperated Italian proprietor, driven to frenzy by repeated requests from Americans for gluten-free pasta, finally deciding to cut short such exchanges with this blunt pre-emptive blow.
Rough translation: My way or the highway. If you don’t like my pasta the way la Mamma has always made it, try someplace else.
Some years ago I was told about the experience of a London caterer who had provided the food for a birthday party for Lord Carrington, who is now 96. The caterer asked if any of the aged crowd had special dietary requirements. There were none among the many octogenarian and nonagenarian guests. They were happy to eat anything.
More recently, another friend told me of her sister’s experience with a large house party in Scotland last summer. When the sister inquired about any special dietary needs, many requests came in, particularly from the younger crowd. Hardly anyone aged between 18 and 25 was up for eating anything. One young woman wrote: “I can’t eat shellfish but I do eat lobster.”
Right.
If people over 80 will eat anything, yet people under 25 are riddled with allergies, something unhealthy is going on — and it’s going on most conspicuously in the most aggressive, competitive, unequal, individualistic, anxiety-ridden and narcissistic societies, where enlightenment about food has been offset by the sort of compulsive anxiety about it that can give rise to imagined intolerances and allergies.
Overall, I’m with the Venetian restaurant owner making his stand for tradition, la Mamma and eating the food that’s put on your plate. Gluten has done O.K. by humanity for upward of 10 millennia. It’s bad for some people, but the epidemic of food intolerance has gone way over the top.
Who are we to argue with success?
I will often say I am allergic to broccoli, but I say it with a winsome smile so they know I’m kidding and could they please do their best to get all ... or at least most ... of the broccoli out of the vegetable medley. Or just give me more potatoes.
The food allergies have killed off all those people over the years. That’s why there aren’t older people with food allergies.
Time and time again, I find that with women especially, that whacky diet demands, i.e. being a vegetarian/vegan variant, or on Atkins, Pritikin, Weston A. Price Foundation, “Paleo”, Friutitarian, or whatever... that what is underlaying is a mental defect, or minimally control “issues”.
I saw one girl on a first (and last) date pick off every sesame seed off a hamburger bun. Another would simply not eat... and make me pick what she ordered. It’s a big deal.
Take a girl out, if she is unwilling to eat regular food, GET OUT NOW.
My SIL claims to be allergic to onions and garlic. I've made food for my MIL that contains onions and garlic. When my SIL visits her mother and eats that food, she suffers no ill effects.
I know a proprieter of an Italian restaurant. He told me that someone came into his place a few years ago and told him they needed gluten free. He replied “What’s gluten?”
or just tell her to close her trap, and hold her nose
Watch 30 minutes of TV, you’ll see at least 5 prescription commercials. Admittedly they aren’t usually food allergy related, but it’s an example of the current mentality that there’s always something wrong with you.
“I would never question people whose faces will balloon if they ingest trace amounts of shellfish. Or people who risk going into anaphylactic shock with a whiff of peanut dust. I’m talking about the rest of you.”
Oh, you mean the rest of us who have actual, real, documented, tested, food allergies that seriously sicken us even though they DON’T cause anaphylactic shock or our faces to ballon?
I guess if you were a doctor, you’d be of the school that unless you could see an actual part falling off, or red stuff squirting out under high pressure, then all is well?
Yeah, I’d say their digestive issues have more to do with the additives and chemicals in the food or mixtures of it all reacting with each other than gluten. But, that is just my layman’s guess.
I feel so sad for my daughter. I’m a Celiac and so are both of my kids. (medically tested, thankyouverymuch)
Her little girl (21 months old) just isn’t growing so she insisted on an allergy test. (There is more than the fact that she’s so tiny. There’s the eczema and the diarrhea and the choking and vomiting.)
Sure enough, she’s allergic to eggs and milk.
I bought her some camel’s milk. (Saw the research out of Israel and thought it would be worth a shot.)
We’re on day four and the kid’s skin is almost totally cleared up. No diarrhea at all and she’s not choking any more. Today is the first day in her young life that my granddaughter has had an appetite and she’s eating the house. Finally.
We’ll see how it works in the long run.
Food allergies are hell.
Chelsea Clinton had a gluten free wedding, IIRC.
As someone who will occasionally tell people that I am allergic to peanut butter, I can tell you that in some situations it seems to be the only way to get some people to stop trying to build meal around that food. I literally cannot swallow anything that tastes of peanut butter, fortunately I think it is just a psychosomatic reaction to aflatoxin exposure as a kid. My problem was a boy scout troop that seemed to want to serve peanut butter sandwiches for lunch on camping trips.
The overwhelming percentage of the time, all I need to do is check labels for peanut butter. Strangely enough, I actually like to eat peanuts.
I deal with this kind of crap every day. patients who are “allergic” to a particular medicine when it’s really a “preference,” like they prefer the high from Vicodin and don’t like Ultram so they’re “allergic.” Uh-huh.
Or - this is one of my favorites - “amoxicillin doesn’t work for me” meaning they demanded an antibiotic for their head cold once then got a secondary bacterial infection BECAUSE they took the amoxicillin (which wiped out all the sensitive beneficial bacteria in their face leaving the bad enteric bacteria behind) now the only thing that “works” for their 4 hours of intense sinus pain, sneezing, sore throat and sniffles is Cipro, or Omnicef - which I don’t prescribe, I just tell ‘em they have a head cold and will need to wait another week to ten days - taking COLD medicine - before I’ll even consider the possibility that what they have MIGHT be a bacterial infection, I don’t care what their history is.
Authoritarian? One of us needs to be the adult in the room.
The wider problem -- the increasing rate of claims of food allergies and intolerance -- is in part due to the difficulty of diagnosis of celiac disease and other food issues. Blood tests and skin patch tests are useful, but tedious and lengthy food elimination diets by the patient are necessary.
Most people are a bit careless in such efforts, or they may get false positives, as when poor food prep or lapses in sanitation leads to bacterial or viral contamination. Thus the lack of simple, cheap, and reliable medical tests for food allergies and intolerance often leads patients over-diagnosing themselves.
On the whole, I find it hard to blame those who in good faith make such errors. And I feel little sympathy for restaurants burdened by customer requests that the food they are served not make them ill. Restaurants are in the customer service business, after all.
Our babysitter’s family has had great luck with raw cow’s milk for a young one with a milk allergy.
If you eat gluten-free, dairy-free and/or soy-free, you can’t eat ice cream, doritos or sticky sweet wing sauce.
When you cut out processed foods like that, you will naturally lose weight.
Then you call it a food allergy when in fact you just got fat from eating crap food.
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