Adventures In Allergic Living

Due to Danny's nut allergies, nearly everything we eat is made at home. Bread, pasta, sweets-all homemade from ingredients I can (try to) source as nut free. This isn't really as difficult as it sounds, as I'm home anyway, and I know how to cook and bake. What precious few convenience items we buy, we've researched to be nut-free and made on dedicated equipment...until without warning, it no longer is. Such was the case this week with soda crackers.

Sure, I could make my own soda crackers, but it was nice being able to purchase them to keep on hand as a staple. Danny was the one that noticed the change, reading labels as we went through the grocery store. I was glad he caught it, but I could have done without the glaring look, and third degree from him as though accusing me of trying to kill him. Still, there's a good lesson in there-read the labels each and every time as manufacturing conditions, and ingredients change. Well, that and teaching your kids to read as soon as they develop a life threatening allergy.

I've lived with nut allergies since I was three years old, and I've taken a pretty relaxed attitude toward it. We didn't have eppi pens when I was a child, nor was there liquid Benadryl. To this day, I can remember the taste of chewed chloritreimeton tablets, which was enough to keep me cautious about any potential nuts for some time after. My parents didn't purge the house of nuts, and I have pretty clear memories of picking over cashews from a tin of mixed nuts and eating the filberts (I wasn't allergic to those) but you'd have to be out of your mind to take that sort of an approach today. We didn't know about repeated exposure risks back then, or increased severity. I'm perfectly willing to take a chance with my own allergies, but not the kiddo's.

I suppose if there's a silver lining to all this, it is Danny eating a whole lot less processed food than the average American kid, and learning to prepare it. The person that marries him is gonna have one hell of a home cook for a husband.