So when I was diagnosed with all of these food allergies (a gluten allergy and casein allergy, amongst others) I thought, hey, how hard can it be to eat non-wheat/oat/rye/barley/dairy? Well, it’s hard. It’s very hard. SUPER DOOPER hard, as our five-year-old son says. Here in the good ol’ US of A, just about all of our pre-prepared foods have gluten and/or casein in them. For the first few weeks, I didn’t really change our going out habits – we’d still go out for a meal at LEAST once a day. I’d try to order the least innocuous menu items: salads, grilled meats and veggies… but would still feel super “full” after eating them from the allergic bloating reaction.
Slowly, over several months (December ’09 – March ’10) I came to the realization that eating out is just plain dangerous when it comes to being GFCF. Over the four months of trying/reacting/identifying offending foods & places, I began a “safe” list of places to eat. They’re few and far between, but I can regularly go to them and be reaction free. Which is SO worth it: the symptoms I get from eating dairy and (especially) gluten are just icky and uncomfortable, it’s not worth risking eating somewhere I might get cross-contaminated.
Now more and more places are realizing there’s money to be made through the perceived “fad” of being gluten free. They’re are offering menu items that they say are GF, but when I dug closer at the food handling practices in the kitchen (I put myself through film school as a waitress – I know my way around a restaurant kitchen and know all about servers and their habits!), I found that there were SO many opportunities for CC and accidental ingestion in many of these places.
So I figure I’ll start my “Safe List” here so you all can hopefully avoid the gluten/casein CC problems I’ve had. You should always double (and triple) check that everything is still GFCF before getting it (I certainly do on a fairly regular basis. It’s not worth the [literal] pain to not check!!), but this can hopefully get you started. So check out the “Restaurants” tab at the top menu.
Happy Dining!