Visiting Non-Gluten-Free Relatives

I'm going to try very hard to not use this post as my therapy for the week. I don't know about your family, but mine is challenging. And I'm going to stop right there from going any further in explaining. But I think many of us have faced the dilemma of how to eat and deal with meals at relatives homes. Personally, I've only dealt with needing to be gluten-free for seven years. Seeing as I have a grown son, that means my side of the family never had to deal with such things for me. When its not my kitchen, my menu plans or others' desires for eating out, having a real need to be gluten-free can be challenging for us and very annoying for others.

I think it's very normal for most family members to think we can eat most of the same dishes that have been beloved traditions, just minus a small ingredient or two. But when those ingredients are glutinous, the substitutions can often completely change a dish. AND a large number of those that are Celiac or gluten-intolerant are likely to have issues with other foods, most predominantly, dairy or eggs. Again, foods that can and will totally change the outcome of many dishes when substituted. You can see how you and your needs suddenly become a real thorn in others' sides when family favorites no longer turn out the same. Some people are very intolerant of Thanksgiving dishes varying from what they grew up with or the finger foods of Super Bowls or the fancy extravagances of New Year's. But there are a number of things you can try. You might not get it right this year or even next year. But, in time, you stumble onto things that work FOR YOU. Seeing that we are looking just ahead to Thanksgiving, let's think about this a bit now.

If you will be at someone else's home, TRY to talk with them but don't demand that everything changes or caters to you. Take a look at the menu items. Which ones are the sacred cows? Would they be easy to rework? If not, don't bother trying. Think through this some ahead of time and have a suggestion for yourself and anyone else that may want to try and offer to make it. The only things you need to concern yourself with then is the possible cross-contamination of the kitchen when preparing it and maybe a special way to label your gluten-free dishes when they are out on the buffet table. And label your utensil for that item also so no one uses it to dip something else. Maybe setting the gluten-free items off to the side away from the other items would be a good idea also. Pointing out that naturally gluten-free dishes that are simple, whole foods is a very good thing might spark ideas of how a meal could be enhanced. If the kitchen, suggestions, family members are just too difficult resistant, then resign yourself to doing for yourself as needed. We have enough options these days at a lot of grocery stores and online to not be hungry. And remember, after all, it's not REALLY about the food. It's not. Family is often a double-edged sword during the holidays. But they are family. Embrace that fact. It's about them. And it's about you as part of them. Be the bigger person, if need be, and let their resistance roll off. One thing I've learned about the gluten-free path is that it changes. We continue to learn and we adapt. Even when we think we've arrived, next year will have something new in our knowledge and ability to deal with it easier. I know it all seems much easier to me this year than it did last. And the same for the year prior to that. This may be a big thing in our life but in the grand picture of things, it's a small thing. And I've heard we aren't suppose to sweat those.

Need to change our FQ--Food Quotient

It's been a few months since Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution" was on television enlightening all of us about what our public schools are feeding our children every single day. It was also Jamie Oliver that pointed not only the schools, but the harried and brainwashed lives we parents buy into about jam-packed schedules and desire to feed our family, as well as ourselves, food that will soothes and comfort us.

We have are a society of 3 generations that grew up increasingly ingesting fast foods and having fewer and fewer home cooks. Our palates have increasingly become accustomed to smoother, greasier, cheesier, crispier, sweeter and more carbonated everything. We have had the invention and inundation of engineered foods, producing more and bigger things that were once completely healthy like vegetables, fruit, milk, cattle and poultry. Many would still argue their healthiness. I'm not arguing that point at all at this time. I'm not a militant vegan or vegetarian or stockholder on the beef council. I am simply a middle-aged wife and mother that enjoys cooking, eating and feeding my own small family. But after being hit, myself, suddenly with many food intolerances, I was unknowledgable and unprepared as to how to deal with it or cook for it. Fast foods and eating out, largely, came to a complete stop for us, as a family. Many, if not most restaurants have very little to offer someone like me. In researching, I learned that 1:130 are gluten-intolerant, if not an official Celiac, or one that cannot ingest wheat, rye or barley. Now, a large percentage of those 1:130 are also bothered by other foods/food groups. Now, no one expects restaurants to cater to everyone and all the different allergies. BUT, the first step would be to educate the food service industry about the new epidemics that are plaguing their customers. Educating chefs and staff is a start, but not only are professionals needing educating, the homecook needs a comeback along with new knowledge and confidence in providing foods for our families that are for health, not just comfort.

Where did alot of us that DO cook learn? Watching FoodNetwork, of course! The cornacopia of foods and ethnicities we've learned through the years have made this world and its food cultures a much smaller place as our palates have expanded and enjoyed truly great food. We all expect more from our dining experience. Now, with the explosion of obesity and diabetes in our country, I am looking to the FoodNetwork to step up and teach us what we need to modify our palates and how to put healthy moderation onto home tables again.

Now, FoodNetwork isn't to blame for the unhealthy conditions we have today, we DID forego exercise and the outdoors, choosing sedate activities such as video games, NetFlix and computers at the same time that processed and fast foods were becoming the norm. But what I'd like to see is the FoodNetwork have MULTIPLE programs geared to healthy cooking and programs for allergen-free cooking. Watching and experiencing explanations with the cooking educates very well. Home cooks would learn better ways and understand what we are eating for. Perhaps the stigma that is rampant amongst restaurant servers believing a gluten-free diet is only a trendy, Hollywood diet. Extended family of those that can no longer enjoy old family favorites at Thanksgiving will no longer believe we are only trying to be high maintenance or that "just a little won't hurt" really WILL hurt.

As much as I LOVE Paula Deen and want to eat absolutely everything she fixes, one show's worth of her "fixins" would kill me, as I'm one of the 1:130. I will still love watching "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives", watching all the wonderful fried, cheesy things that are "the BOMB!" And I will still tune in to other channels to watch never-ending contests of eating ginormous amounts of food in an hour. Its all fun and gastronomically enticing. But we need much more balance and Food Network sets the standards in teaching not only the basics of cooking, but what we should be eating and living.

Foods are Killing Us in Ways We Don't Even Know About

I grew up in the south on good southern cooking and mid west meat and potatoes. If my parents ever scrimped in their budget, the food budget was the last thing they would take from. The only time it was fancy fare was our annual "birthday dinner" to celebrate all our birthdays at one time, as all three of them spanned less than a month right at Christmas time.

Skip ahead a couple of decades and I have my own family and we all love good food and I like to cook. While living in Wisconsin, a place of the best foods in the world, cheese and frozen custard, I discovered the worst thing in the world. I had become lactose intolerant. Horrors! Unfortunately, I was unable to rein in my desires and occasionally I would still partake, I would just time it where I knew I would be home for a couple of days to suffer in private. Skip ahead another 15 years and we are living in Wisconsin a second time in our marriage but moving to Michigan, a move I was not happy about at all. But it was certainly not our first move, not even our second or third. It was more like our tenth move, so I thought I was taking it all in stride. I've read that some Celiacs or gluten-intolerant people have an event, perhaps traumatic, that becomes the trigger to setting off their sudden intolerances. About 6 months after the move, my lactose intolerance suddenly kicked into a whole new plane of seriousness. And getting more disciplined about staying away from dairy didn't seem to help much. It took several months to figure it all out, but in the end I discovered I had suddenly become intolerant of all things glutenous, rice, eggs, nuts, beans, along with my diary issues. Now, what does that leave me with? You would have thought I'd drop the weight like crazy. I think it counted for about a six pound loss overall. Unfortunately, I still love to eat.

It has been approximately 3 years since all of this transpired. I have not been diagnosed with anything officially. I do a lot of reading online and belong to some discussion forums for Celiacs, a disease that, believe it or not, affects about 1 in 100 people. It is a disease where the glutens in many grains affect people in various and very adverse ways. Many of those are still undiagnosed. We have become a society of digestive issues and not really understanding the foods that we are fed these days, how it's grown and processed and the cross-contaminations that are common practice and has affected our food supply over the past 70 years or so. Celiacs itself, seems to have been rooted mostly in the English Anglo-Saxon genes. I have begun to believe that drastically changing the diet we are so accustomed to is helping people with serious diseases such as Fibromyalgia and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Many mothers have been trying to gluten-free and casein-free (diary) diets on their ADD/ADHD kids as well as those that are autistic. There's a huge debate in the medical community about whether this can or is really helping these kids and many mothers and saying that it has definitely changed their children's conditions for the best. This is not a post about that debate.

I wish people would start realizing that the digestive problems, mood swings, headaches or whatever nagging health problem bothers them regularly COULD be something like an intolerance to glutens, or possibly they carry the Celiacs gene. And even though living with such a different diet certainly isn't easy these days, if more people knew they have that problem and demand that the restaurant industry and the food companies become more educated themselves and offer things that many of us would buy, the easier and less expensive that lifestyle would quickly become. I've read many people still are poo-pooing the gluten-free diets as fads that will quickly pass. But when you have numbers showing that 1 in 100 have issues due to glutens and that number has increased dramatically just in the past 20 years, I feel safe in saying it is not a fad and will only become more of a necessity. Often even unbenownst to ourselves, these digestive issues that may not even manifest themselves in digestive symptoms, can damage our intestines and cause polyps and lesions, both of which can be precursors to several different kinds of cancers. But even doctors in this country seem to be fairly clueless with this condition and they send their patients on a wild goose chase from test to test to test. Please, let's pull our heads out of the sand and take control over our health a little. Educate yourself, do what's necessary to make yourself feel better and then encourage your doctor to be more knowledgeable in this subject. Then let's cooperate our efforts in encouraging food companies to handle foods better. And let's take that cooperation to your favorite restaurants and learn to play Twenty Questions with the waiters and chefs regarding ingredients and cooking methods and help them realize its our health at stake.