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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t eat at Mexican or Oreintal restaurants as I don’t care for the over food. Preference. Restaurants I’ve had bad service from don’t get repeat business...ditto goes for those who serve nasty tasting food, or food at the wrong temps. If it’s supposed to be hot in temperature, it best be, if it is supposed to be cold it best be. I don’t do repeat business.
We eat at Chilli’s a lot, as it is the better of the 2 sit down restaurant, Applebee’s is the other, food is always COLD no matter how busy. We order Ribs with a double portion of french fries, thus avoiding the broccoli neither of us like. Have to ask them to leave their over spiced pickles off a hamburger plate. Just as I order my FF’s with no salt, that way I get hot FF’s and none of the over salted ones that may be soggy from sitting to long and are usually kind of cold, or barely lukewarm.
Now I totally avoid sea food restaurants as I am allergic to sea food. When we do eat out I make sure it a place that will sub a food I dislike. Now when it comes to dairy, I know how much I can tolerate, and order accordingly.
Food served in a hospital is left on the tray as inedible. Hubby, brings me a Subway sandwich or a Croissant from BK’s. Solved that problem. Raid the nurses station for COFFEE. What comes out of dietary is lukewarm colored water.
What is so hard about that?
That's kind of stupid. Gluten is not in everything. Do they add gluten to the foods that don't normally have it.