Intolerate this!
Another weekend, another story about self-diagnosed food intolerances. Just when I thought I couldn’t be less fond of Body + Soul (nothing against the writers, but the army of beautiful people regularly featured in that supplement does a great job of chipping away a piece of my self-esteem every Sunday), they go and jump on the “food intolerance-schmolerance” bandwagon. The reason why I find this more annoying than the phrase “no variations” on restaurant menus is because I am legitimately lactose intolerant and every time a story like this appears it casts doubt over all of us, giving disgruntled waiters even more reason to spit in our pasta (hold the parmesan). All I can hope is that in my new local eateries here in the Eastern suburbs, the overwhelmingly British and Irish waitstaff are too busy being carefree backpackers to read Body + Soul.
It’s true that many people who say they are dairy/gluten/seafood intolerant aren’t. I have met a lot of them, who offer their sympathies and then launch into their own tales about how hard it is to eat out or buy groceries when you can’t eat Food A or Food B. Generally the experiences that these tales are based on are about as true as Katy Perry’s song lyric “I kissed a girl and I liked it / the taste of her cherry chapstick”, which is to say that they’re not very true at all, because we all know that cherry chapstick tastes bloody awful. How do I know that their stories aren’t true? Because when you actually are intolerant, and have just spent hours reading labels in the supermarket simply to do your weekly grocery shopping, the last thing you want to do is talk about it (yet will happily write a whole blog post about it). You hate drawing attention to it in restaurants because it makes you look like a diva and as you tell the waiter why you want a pizza with no cheese, you can practically hear the other diners thinking “oh I’ve heard about these people, they think it’s fun to pretend they can’t eat dairy products”. Sir, if you want to see how fun this is, I will eat the pizza with cheese and you can come by my bathroom later tonight to see the result.
Apparently, some of the responsibility for the rocketing numbers of people claiming food intolerances lies with celebrities, whose own confessions of intolerances or allergies have made it trendy to have one. It’s not trendy. It makes going out for dinner a pain, as I have alluded to above, because some places are openly displeased about having to make changes to their menu and others flat out refuse to do it. While as a paying customer I have some right to request a meal adapted for my needs, I can also understand the immense frustration on the part of a chef who has slaved to create the perfect combination of flavours and a diner comes along and asks him to leave a bit of it out. It’s like asking an artist to change a brushstroke on a painting.
Outside of restaurants, in this age of highly processed food, dairy is everywhere. Those lime and black pepper potato chips that taste so good? You know how they get so limey and black peppery? With flavourings made from milk powder. Most items on the dessert menu are off limits, not to mention all the usual suspects like yoghurt, ice cream and chocolate. ”But Lisa,” I hear you all bellow. “What about the alternatives? Like soy milk? Surely it’s easier than ever to avoid dairy?” I have one response: “Have you ever actually tried soy milk?”
Now as I can feel the “holier than thou” hat slipping ever more firmly onto my head with every paragraph I write, I admit that I could have it a lot worse. As the article explains, there is a big difference between an allergy and an intolerance. A severe allergy can mean life-threatening reactions like anaphylaxis, whereas an intolerance usually just means discomfort after eating those foods. My own intolerance was a leaving present from a parasite that made itself at home in my intestines after a stint overseas. It got a nice warm place to stay for 18 months, I got an inability to properly digest dairy foods. Fair trade, huh? But the bottom line is that the odd piece of cheese or square of dark chocolate won’t kill me, so I still can and do enjoy these foods from time to time.
Next time you’re flicking through the papers in your local cafe and come across one of these articles, spare a thought for those of us who avoid dairy because we have to, not because we want to. We’re the ones in the corner trying to choke down soy cappuccinos.
Picture via http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeetzjones/466703351/.
