I feel a bit wrong writing about this topic at all, as to the best of my knowledge, I am not allergic to any foods. (I feel intensely queasy if I smell artificial butter popcorn, which is a problem in movie theaters, but this is not the same.) But I do have a kid with food allergies, and am obviously thus grocery-shopping with this in mind. We’re at a strange juncture with this where, thanks to allergy treatments (that are challenging to access and implement on all levels, and whose effects require sticking with a protocol), we can now suddenly buy things that have sesame as a may-contain, leading to such previously impossible to fathom scenarios as purchasing sesame oil (a very different product than tahini, I have learned, protein-wise), buying bagels in a place, and eating out as a family at a Chinese restaurant.*
But we’re still doing full avoidance with walnuts and pecans for a couple more months (?) and you might think, how often do you encounter a walnut or a pecan, but you’d be amazed at how many foods might have walnuts or pecans in them, as in the place selling the food won’t promise you otherwise.
What I’m talking about are the signs: ‘the food in this establishment may have come into contact with’ and then they list every allergen, or the ones that randomly popped into their heads. (Sesame is a priority allergen, leading to anaphylaxis like the others, but rarely mentioned, including on menus that have huge notices about peanuts or wheat.)
These are signs you don’t think about unless you have reason to, and once you do, my god they’re everywhere. ‘In this house we believe’ except instead it’s ‘in this facility we process’ and on and on. Everything in this or that gourmet or not-so-gourmet grocery store should be treated, they want you to know, as if it is a puréed mixture of milk egg shellfish soy etc.
It’s frankly a bit nauseating if you imagine the things actually all being in what you’re purchasing. But you also know they’re not, and that a piece of gruyère in plastic wrap is exceedingly unlikely to contain enough of any non-gruyère foodstuff to cause a reaction. Do you buy meat or fish at the counter, or prepackaged from the store? May contain. (My ‘favorite’ are the signs at one supermarket where they phone it in and just say “may contain allergens.”)
There are levels, I guess, of how careful to be. There are forums online where people discuss phoning companies to find out whether their olive oil may contain egg and it’s like, anything might, but it almost certainly would not, and that’s why the olive oil bottle doesn’t explicitly say it’s free of egg… or the people who see the ‘no egg’ label on that one bottle of olive oil that has maybe thought to do this and nevertheless phone the company because you can never be too sure. There are also people who disregard may-contain statements entirely.
Also some horrific story of a young man in England who knew he was allergic to almonds and figured why not and got a dish he knew contained-contained almonds and this did not work out well for him. The stereotype of people with food allergies is that this is the anxious kid—bookish, sensitive, bullied—and therefore one who wouldn’t take a risk. The reality is that this is a health condition distributed throughout the population to people with alas all the different personalities. This is, I cannot emphasize this enough, a reason why if you have a kid who likes climbing to the top of whatever it is in the playground, you want to look into desensitization treatments if—among many other ifs—you think your kid could stand them.
The parents who gravitate to forums tend to be the more cautious, which is why you get a lot of posts from people terrified of sending their kids to school or letting them play in playgrounds and then I get to feel very non-helicopterish about such matters despite having obviously taken this seriously enough that we have only now for the first time bought regular (not sesame-flavored, just may-contain) crackers from the supermarket.
But back to these signs, because they drive me (should I say it should I say it no but I will anyway) nuts. I get that it’s some sort of ass-covering in terms of being sued for your gruyère accidentally containing a shrimp cocktail, but as a practical matter, even people with food allergies need to eat something. Do you really imagine a child allergic to some nuts and sesame (and milk for a few years, so it still seems odd to me that this is again a normal ingredient at home) is never going to get meat or fish from a supermarket? You can’t disregard, not if you know what the epi-pen and ER situation is about, but you also have to if you want your family to ever eat anything.**
I thus got in an extremely Larry David/Victor Meldrew situation, as in I was in the right but seemed in the wrong, at a bagel shop. It had the sign, and I asked whether they specifically used walnuts or pecans and the woman behind the register kept telling me that there were almonds present and I said that’s not the concern and we went in circles about this, and got the bagels, and it was fine, but still unpleasant.
I got into this as well at a different bagel shop where I was warned that they serve peanut butter and had to explain that this was not the issue, that I know they mean well but peanuts and pecans are different things, and that unless there is a walnut/pecan cream cheese situation (not impossible) I am not concerned about this. All of this is picking up precisely because we are now buying food from the outside, kind of. The things you are spared, doing all your baking at home, or failing that, getting English muffins, or this one sourdough that costs $8 for what is clearly an ever-smaller loaf of bread.
I just cannot with the signs. Does the food have the ingredient in it or doesn’t it? This isn’t even getting into the truly evil thing where, in the US, they made sesame a priority allergen and food companies started labeling it as an ingredient as a kind of just-in-case measure, making it impossible to know whether various breads could or couldn’t be eaten that were fine the week before. Whenever I spontaneously buy some garbage scone or whatever because I’m hungry and it’s there, I think of my privilege, to be able to do this. All the absolute trash I have eaten over the years, most of them spent not giving this a minute’s thought.
*I cannot explain how surreal this is, and that’s not even getting into the initial post-pandemic strangeness of eating inside restaurants. A part of me wants to have us eat all our meals out at high-end Japanese restaurants. Another part of me remembers such things as ‘money is finite’ and even more to the point, ‘a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old.’ We have yet to eat at any Japanese restaurants since this became possible, but I live in hope.
**Where you really have to is the modern-science-of-such-things requirement that you keep allergens in a kid’s diet that they can eat, which as a practical matter means serving large amounts of nut butter. These almost always have may-contain statements, but there’s no other option. You’re also meant to have the sibling not allergic to whichever foods eat those foods, somehow, even though they can’t be kept in the house, which I sometimes think isn’t The Science about preempting allergies from forming but rather a plot on behalf of toddlers to get taken out to shawarma places.
Yes to all of this! My son is also allergic to sesame and I so relate to every word!
I’m in a somewhat similar situation and share your frustrations with eating out. I have an almost-4-yo who is severely allergic to milk, egg, peanuts, cashews, pistachio, and hazelnut. And a very messy almost-2-yo who outgrew a bunch of allergies and is now only allergic to eggs. Keeping toys, children, and surfaces clean after the 2yo eats his prescribed preventative Bamba and yogurt is … challenging.