I’ll cop to having a nut allergy, but I guarantee you there’s somebody who’s at the bull’s eye of this graphic:
Did he attend your Thanksgiving dinner? In any case, how was it?
Categories: Food and Drink, Holidays
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Don’t forget a warning about flash photography. I’m surprised some Thanksgiving households don’t consist of a writhing mass of sick people on the living room floor.
I wouldn’t invite that person to eat with me under any circumstances. And if somebody else invited them to a dinner along with me, I wouldn’t go.
A vegan, by definition, is somebody who is not thankful for the good things to eat that their Maker has provided. Not a Thanksgiving guest at all.
Anyone with this (targeted) set of dietary peculiarities can have an apple.
A relatives family is like this mess. One is Gluten intolerant, one is vegan, one has food allergies/intolerance, and I DON’T invite them to eat over. My kitchen is a household kitchen, not a Hospital Restaurant.
You forgot “Natural foods only, please.”
As someone on the original post commented, the Vegan is the only deliberate lifestyle choice. All of the others are clinical diagnoses over which one would have no control.
Also you could have an Observant (kosher) diabetic, soy-intolerant, recovering alcoholic.
The whole scene reminded me of the old New Yorker cartoon where a doctor says to a patient, “These tests indicate that you may have been intended for some other planet.”
If you made a pie graph of gluten intolerance and divided it by “people clinically diagnosed with a gluten-related disease” vs “people who saw something on the teevee/read about a celebrity/gossiped with a friend and decided they won’t eat gluten now” the first slice would be very narrow.
There was a British study that found incidence of parents who claimed without clinical evidence that their child had a peanut allergy was more than an order of magnitude higher in Britain than in Israel. If people don’t have real life-threatening dangers to worry about, they make them up.
Diagram makes no sense: Vegans don’t eat eggs or dairy.
Aww, go ahead and invite them. No need to make any special accommodations, though. Just let them pick out from the buffet whatever they can find that fits inside that intersection. Better yet, invite them to bring their favorite dish, so at least they have something they can eat. If they complain, then they are the boorish, unthankful, ungrateful jerks.
Those with true food allergies and sensitivities do not choose to be that way. Many would give their eye tooth to be able to eat ‘normally.’
This is why my whole fam damily doesn’t do the extended family Thksgvg anymore. For instance, my stepson’s wife hits 3 of these: vegan, gluten & egg allergies. My son’s dad’s next wife hits 2: lactose intlrnt & nut allergy. A cousin’s daughter is so allergic to EVERYthing that his wife actually has been known to inspect restaurant kitchens (said girl can’t even eat something *prepared* in container that’s held gluten, nuts, eggs, etc.).
Something’s wrong here. Where did all this come from? In years gone by (waaay by, more’s the pity), people just ate what was served.
I would never knowingly serve something that would cause a guest anaphylactic shock, but fer heaven’s sake, I’m sure there’s enough on any table in our country that people can just SHUT UP and not eat whatever might be suspicious for them.
In years gone by, like in the 1930′s, lots of people didn’t have enough to eat so they ate whatever was there. Then you have guys like me that grew up in the 50′s. Standard operating procedure was, “by God you better eat it or else you can have it tomorrow”! The times they have been achangin’.
One thing we seem to forget — children used to die when they could not survive on what was provided to them. (My grandfather had a young patient who died when a well meaning relative ignored the child’s food allergy.) So, while we are thinking about the many blessings we have to be thankful about this season, how about adding the wonders of modern medicine that allows people who would previously not have survived to be part of our circle of family and friends?
(My mother never made me sit over the same plate of food twice — but then she, as a child, had once faced the same plate of liver for several days running.)
Yes, it can be irritating, but oh, my goodness, surely the whole point of having a family dinner is that everyone can eat and celebrate together?
If someone is that allergic let them bring their own food, put it on a plate and everyone can eat together. Saves cooking, anyway.
I’ve gone to friends for Thanksgiving and everyone brings a dish of food to contribute to the whole. It works well, and if anyone needs to eat special food they can do so without embarrassment.
Is it really that hard to ask everyone to “bring a plate”, or bring allergy-appropriate food, especially now that you can mass-email people at the click of a mouse?
I thought the potluck idea was a mainstay of American feasts.
With the exception of “vegan,” these are all medical conditions. Not really fair to blame the poor dear for inheriting faulty genes. I do in fact know several people with extensive constellations of allergies. They have learned the art of eating ahead, inquiring discretely about ingredients, and politely demurring as necessary.
It is easy to laugh at food intolerances and allergies until you have one or someone close to you has one. People can get seriously sick or even die from eating foods they cannot tolerate. I am sure you will still be chortling the next day after a relative leaves in an ambulance and doesn’t return.
I cannot eat wheat, dairy, tomatoes, peppers, melons, peanuts, or onions. They all cause various bad reactions. At Thanksgiving dinner this year, which I made for family and friends, after many glasses of wine while cooking, snacking, and eating, I was persuaded to have a slice of my sister in law’s chocolate cream pie. I had the fun experience of having my lungs fill with fluid while my air passages closed off. Luckily it subsided and I made it, but it was kind of scary for a while.
Just for the record, I did make the full load, turkey with bread & cranberry dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and sherbert. I did not make baked yams because no one if the family can stand them, and we all are scarred by memories of mom insisting that we just try them year after year and having to choke down a helping of that revolting tuber to get dessert. I ate turkey meat and cranberry sauce.
Having people guilt trip or bully you into eating what you should not or cannot stand is no fun.
I have learned to not make a pest of myself nor to make my food limitations part of my personae. I simply skip the parts of meals that I cannot eat at friend’s dinners. I usually bring an appetizer that I can eat, like a big tub of cooked shrimp.
Growing up, mom’s packed lunch, half the time a PB&J & carton of milk. Did the peanut allergy and lactose intolerant kids die?
Actually, in many cases, they did, only it was called acute indigestion or heart failure. Anaphylaxis was not even reported in the medical literature until early in the 20th Century.
I sympathize with Old Guy, as I have a close friend who is clinically diagnosed with gluten intolerance. He is never a pest about it and I always doublecheck things with him, and I have never had to make a meal when he was visiting that wasn’t almost exactly what I would have made anyway. If there are one or two things he can’t eat, he doesn’t. I also, though, agree that veganism, as a voluntary and arbitrary thing, is annoying, something to which overeducated young women are particularly prone, and agree with Heather Radish that many alleged food allergies are probably overdiagnosed or just plain made up. I also regret that food culture has left the 1950s mode where you were expected to eat all or virtually all of what got put in front of you. It’s not much fun to entertain anymore. People won’t drink, they won’t eat dessert, they won’t have coffee or tea after a meal and they pick and choose way too much from what you serve. It’s your job as a guest to have a little of everything and smile and say you loved it, but people are lousy guests today.
A few weeks ago, we were told that an attendee of a training conference on the campus where I work had an airborne allergy to seafood, so severe that even the “presence of seafood anywhere in the building” could be a “life-or-death situation,” and thus we were requested to not bring in any sort of seafood lunches with us to work, for the duration of the training (about 5 days).
Which left me wondering… how does a person like that even live, just get through the day, without living in a bubble?
Traveling with some friends from SF in Mexico, wife is gluten free and constantly carping about food. Handed her a tortilla stuffed with huitlacoche once for breakfast in San Miguel. She marveled at the taste and flavors. It was so sweet to tell what it was, she blanched and gave me a cross look. Perfect ! Then she handed it to her husband- he loved it. It was glutenfree corn fungus.