Joe was allergic to nuts before it was cool. He has been dealing with a nut allergy (peanuts and tree nuts) all of his life -- long before nut-free schools, nut-free lunch tables, Sunbutter, and allergy information printed on every food package. I’m definitely not minimizing the importance of those things for people with allergies, and there’s no denying that allergies seem to have increased in frequency and severity in the last decade. But I can say that we have a fair amount of experience living with with food restrictions. And I haven’t even mentioned the years we had to adapt to dozens of kidney-related dietary restrictions.
So, why I am writing about this topic? I read a lot of food blogs and articles and forum posts and I have seen a distinct trend that has followed the uptick in numbers of allergy sufferers and voluntarily restricted diets. A majority of the comments on any recipe are all about things that the commenter can’t have or can’t do. For instance, pick any King Arthur Flour bread recipe at random, and you will find multiple comments like, “I can’t have wheat. How can I make this?” Or any recipe with eggs, “I’m allergic to eggs, so this won’t work for me!” The absence of suggested substitutions they have tried or constructive criticism is notable. I have two problems with this approach to food restrictions.
First, we live in the best time ever to cook for allergies, food restrictions, and special diets. There are hundreds of products out there to allow cooks and bakers to substitute for nuts, eggs, dairy, wheat flour, cornstarch, and anything else they cannot eat. And there are more recipe sources and YouTube instructional videos available than ever before. King Arthur Flour, for instance, sells a well-reviewed gluten-free all-purpose flour and they develop and share recipes that use it. So, for all of those commenters, I want to say, “Gee, have you tried their gluten-free flour or any of the dozens of recipes they have provided already?” And for the dairy- and egg-free folks, don’t they already have substitutions they know and use in their own cooking on a regular basis? Why wouldn’t they try those in recipes that look appealing, or find one of the thousands of recipes out there already written without any number of allergens?
My second issue with the commenters who focus on what they cannot have is that I learned from experience that it is far more satisfying, simpler, less frustrating, and probably even better for my mental health to plan menus based on what I can eat and cook rather than what I can’t. No matter the food restriction (unless one is allergic to everything but water, I suppose), there are many recipes, and possibly whole cuisines, that don’t feature your allergen(s). Meaning you can cook with ease and few substitutions as long as you start with the right recipes. Of course, most cooks I know regularly modify recipes anyway, for all sorts of reasons, which is fine, but that’s another post.
This “can versus can’t” way of thinking isn't just my response to all the negative commenters (I am calling them that because the gist of their comments is wholly negative, without anything constructive to offer; obviously, I am not saying that all people who comment about food restrictions are negative people), but it is truly a philosophy I learned while cooking for Joe during his years of kidney failure when the list of food restrictions felt miles along. Before he started dialysis, he had to severely limit his potassium intake. You know what has potassium? Oh, just milk and nearly every fruit and vegetable. When we first learned about this, we received pages of low, medium, and high potassium items from his nutritionist. I’m not going to lie; it was depressing and overwhelming. But because I am a doer, I jumped right into cooking within the limits of those lists. That worked OK some of the time, but I kept bumping up against the outer limits of our low potassium cage and getting frustrated.
So after some trial and error and a few wrong turns, I decided to sit down and list everything we could eat* and use that list as the basis for menu planning. This led to a horizon-opening-up, clouds-parting moment for me. By starting from the “yes” list and going forward, rather than beginning with the “no” list and working backward, meals and cooking felt like fun again. Food and cooking for others is definitely my “love language”, so it was vital for me to find a way to navigate cooking during those difficult years leading up to Joe’s transplant with good humor and grace, which I could not have done if I kept looking at everything through the lens of his restrictions.
This personal attitude adjustment had much broader consequences even than surviving kidney failure without starving and with our relationship intact. Internalizing this way of thinking carried me through the budget-tightening years that started with our own personal recession and continued into the national one. Focusing on planning menus based on foods we could afford and just ignoring or automatically modifying recipes using expensive ingredients contributed to our health, our bank account, and helped feed my creative side at a time when we had few resources to spend on entertainment, travel, or other hobbies. I promise to share more on food budgeting in a future post.
Today, Joe has only a few remaining restrictions (nuts remain on the banned-for-life list), but the lessons and tools I learned to use during that period still serve me today. They form the foundation of my cooking style and even helped me name this blog. I am resourceful and our lives are all the richer for the restrictions we have been dealt.
*I didn’t personally have these food restrictions, but since I did most of the cooking and I didn’t want to cook two separate meals, I decided to make meals we could both eat. I certainly still ate things that Joe couldn’t, but I kept them to rare meals out (ooooh, give me all of the mushrooms and tomatoes and spinach and potatoes on the menu!) and side dishes.
