by Leslie Stewart
Ville Voice Eats Correspondent

It seems that every time you turn around, there’s some new food allergy alert – peanut butter now actually has to come with a warning label that says “contains peanuts” (yeah, I guess some of us are actually that dumb).  Wheat gluten allergies are no longer even treated as allergies, but as Celiac Disease.  People who are allergic to aspirin are warned not to eat strawberries, because of their natural salicylic acid content.  I have a chef instructor at Sullivan who’s deathly allergic to avocados, of all things.

Nobody ever really had to tell me that one in every 25 Americans has some sort of food allergy.  I was lucky, as I only experienced minor lactose intolerance (which I still have), and a chocolate allergy which disappeared after my diseased tonsils were removed at the age of six.

I grew up with a little brother who had approximately 42 different allergies, many to common foods such as soy, apples, and cinnamon.  Trips to the ER for allergy-related asthma attacks were commonplace, following school lunches with hidden triggers or meals eaten in restaurants that didn’t list ingredients.

Today, there’s a heightened sense of allergy awareness, and menu planning and design has had to evolve as a result.  That’s one of the reasons the National Restaurant Association (the other NRA) is supporting the 12th annual Food Allergy Awareness Week campaign of the  Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN).  If there’s one thing a chef or restaurateur doesn’t want to see, it’s one of their customers going into anaphylactic shock!

You might be surprised to learn that a mere eight foods are responsible for 90 percent of allergic reactions here in the U.S.  Milk, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts (walnuts and pecans, for example, which are true nuts, while peanuts are legumes), fish, and shellfish are the primary offenders.

There are plenty of doctors and researchers who resoundingly dismiss the whole nut allergy phenomenon.  People immediately panicked about eating pork when the H1N1 virus was inappropriately nicknamed “swine flu” (my fellow Sullivan culinary students have taken to calling it “hamthrax”).  Comedians joked about whether or not one could treat the avian flu with the traditional chicken soup.

On a certain level, I think we do ourselves and our immune systems a disservice by trying to remove all traces of “offending” foods,  because, hey, terrorists might think to use peanuts for their next big attack on America!  Having sat beside an allergic family member on a Bennett machine in the ER, however, I also know how serious food allergies can actually be.  And as someone who plans to work in the catering field and also as a personal chef, it’s an issue I have to take seriously, no matter how funny the punchline might be.