Anyone who has been charged with the task of cooking for someone with a food allergy knows how daunting it can be. The fear that a small amount of an allergen might somehow creep into your meal and you may unwittingly be the cause of a life-threatening allergic reaction can be paralyzing. After developing food allergies myself, and watching family and friends struggle to understand what exactly I could and couldn’t eat, I decided to put my favorite recipes in writing. And that’s what you’ll find here, along with all of the information you’ll need to successfully read labels and helpful tips you may not have considered. But first, my story…

You cannot imagine how shocked I was when, at the age of thirty-two I abruptly developed an allergy to peanuts. I had taken to eating peanut butter bagels in the morning, because I often wouldn’t eat again for hours upon entering the hospital and the dense calories kept me from passing out on rounds. One morning I noticed that my mouth itched quite a bit after finishing the bagel. I didn’t think much of it. The next day, the itching was much more pronounced.

I ran into one of the allergy doctors and explained my symptoms, asking if he thought I might be developing a food allergy, which seemed very unlikely to me since I thought of this as a problem that mainly manifested in childhood.

His answer, “of course this sounds like a food allergy.” Adding, “you are a doctor, aren’t you? You know this!” He offered to do allergy testing in his office the next week, but suggested I get an Epi-pen in the meantime, on the off chance that I had a life-threatening allergic reaction in the meantime. I did not find this at all comforting. 

The next day, sitting in our department’s Allergy and Immunology lecture, eating my peanut-free lunch of tomato soup and rice, my neck and chest began itching. My friend who was sitting next to me, and had just written me the prescription for the Epi-pen, began looking at me quizzically.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“You are completely breaking out in hives.”

“This is ridiculous! I didn’t even eat any peanuts!!” I handed her the prescription she had just written me and said, half-hysterical, “Here, you may as well add ‘dispense one giant bubble for Rana to live in,’” thinking that if I was reacting to tomato soup and brown rice, I’d never survive out in the world.

Being in a room of doctors, one of them astutely pointed out to me that at some point I had probably had peanut butter in the same lunch bag I had carried my tomato soup and rice in. I was reacting to that.

“Is that possible?” I wondered. Had I really become that sensitive?

The next week found me getting pricked by toothpicks coated in antigens from every different possible offender. Within moments, my back was inflamed and horribly itchy. When the allergist came in to read the welts, his first comment was, “wow, peanuts are the least of your problems!”

I had reacted most intensely to soy, hazelnuts and sesame.

While eliminating peanuts from my diet had been relatively easy, avoiding soy proved a much more difficult proposition. Soy, I soon learned, was in 60% of processed foods, and the label rarely was straightforward enough to say “soy,” instead it might read, “tamari,” or worse, “textured vegetable protein.” There were months of trial and error. Eating at anyone’s home became a gamble with life and death. Eating out was out of the question. But, gradually I learned what exactly I had to avoid, and how to read labels to make sure food is allergen free.

Because food labels can be difficult to decipher, my husband painstakingly made small laminated cards to hand out to our mothers, so that when grocery shopping, they had something to reference.

The first grocery trip (for bread and cereal) literally took me an hour and a half. Reading labels was tedious and time-consuming. But, over time we found brands that we knew were “safe” and it became more manageable. We found we lost our tolerance and would not read labels that had too many ingredients, anticipating that ingredient number eighty would probably be soy-derived. So, we trended to more natural, organic items with fewer ingredients, limiting the odds that they would contain an allergen. Eventually this led us to our local farmers market, with fresh breads and limitless produce. That was a revelation for me, realizing that nearly everything in the produce section was safe (bean sprouts being the exception.  And this has influenced my cooking. Most recipes you’ll find here have very short ingredient lists. 

Of course, there have been slip-ups. I never thought to read the label on a bottle of diet Pepsi that I grabbed from the vending machine one day, until my mouth started to swell and I reread my “How to read a label” card and rediscovered that natural and artificial flavor can be soy or tree-nut derived. Dried strawberries purchased at “nutsonline.com” proved to be hazardous. I had been able to tolerate many foods made in facilities that process nuts, so had lapsed a bit in terms of my fear, but these gooey fruits must have been run down a conveyor belt coated in peanuts.

Of all the ingredients, the one I have found most difficult to avoid is “natural and artificial flavors.” It seems that permeates nearly every food on the shelves, from butter to jams and sauces. But, if you look, you’ll find brands that don’t use it.