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It’s Serious For Some of Us
April 4th, 2011 | caitlin | Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Gluten Free, Gluten Free Arlington VA, Gluten Free Cookies, Gluten Free Restaurants, Northside Social

Warning: This is a rant.

This post is a rant and nothing but a rant – so if you’re looking for product information and witty stories about Husband then please move on to the next post.

I was hesitant at first to write this because Glutastic is the place I go to laugh about my life. But this rant isn’t about the funny, it’s about my frustration. But it’s a frustration I’m sure some of you have so I figured it wouldn’t be fair to leave this out.

This last week has been a challenging one. I’m good with challenge, I thrive in challenge, but I don’t do well with challenge brought on by the ignorance of others. And the straw that broke me this week was a GF cookie.

So here’s the deal: Husband and I live and work from home, which means 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week  in the same place. We’ve done well with the ‘togetherness’ of it all, but sometimes we loose our minds over having to be  in one place all the time. As a way to mix things up we usually go to Northside Social at least once or twice a week. It’s a really nice coffee shop/wine bar near campus. We really like it there. It’s become our office away from the office. Sometime ago they started selling GF cookies. After having a conversation or two with some the staff, I managed to teach them the ins and outs of cross contamination at the counter when serving the cookies. They were really receptive to it and I was elated.

At least, I was elated until last week when the manager of the coffee shop told me that they really don’t make an effort to avoid cross contamination in the kitchen when they make them. They call them gluten free because they don’t knowingly bake them with gluten in them but that’s as far as their care and concern really goes. True to fashion, the first thing out of my mouth was “what the hell”. In all the conversations I had with staff before this point, they never made an effort to tell me these things. Turns out that they only mean to sell them to people who have chosen to go gluten free as a lifestyle choice. Again, the first thing out of my mouth was “what the hell” – why wouldn’t they be as clear and transparent as possible about this? Why wouldn’t they care what the possible issues are with taking this less then seriously.

And then I found out – Gluten Free is a fad.

It’s a fad that is putting my health in danger.

Gluten Free has become a ‘thing’ that people are choosing not because they have to, but because it sounds like the fashionably healthy thing to do. The bonus of this: it’s increasing the market demand and it’s putting pressure on companies to produce gluten free. The Pitfall: it’s degrading the industry and turning our disease into a fad. Instead of catering to the disease, companies are catering to the fad which means that their products are dangerous to us. The fad doesn’t care about cross contamination, the fad doesn’t care if some of the products aren’t fully gluten free – the fad doesn’t care that their lifestyle choices put the rest of us in danger.

And this is where the tipping point comes for me – I now have to be wary of everything and anything labeled Gluten Free. I have to ask more questions then I use to, I have to read labels looking for things that I never thought to look for before, and worst of all, when I find out that the GF product or menu is meant for the “lifestyle people” I have to go without and the company gets to keep selling products and making money.

I’d like to send out a huge shout out to the ‘lifestyle’ people. I’d like to say thank you for taking your ‘flash in the pan’ choices and using them in ways that make my disease more dangerous to me then it ever has been before. Thank you for playing roulette with my health and thank you for saturating the market with your crap. On behalf of Celiacs everywhere, I’d like to thank you for helping breed a new generation of food providers who are willing to take chances with me so that they can sell something to you.

If you’re curious how far this issue goes, here’s an article that sheds a little light on it. Got to love this chef, because I’m sure he’s not the only one.

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