Cooking From Scratch For Food Allergies

One of the major changes in my life when I first (finally) discovered that I suffer from food allergies was my attitude towards cooking. I always used to enjoy cooking really involved meals from scratch, but only because I did that very infrequently. The change after food allergy diagnosis was that I had to cook whole meals from scratch through necessity.

When you have to be examining every single food ingredient for traces of substances that you cannot tolerate, you get much more involved in the foods that you eat. The smallest wrong ingredient can make you very sick indeed. For me the culprit is gluten, so I'm always exceptionally careful to read the small print on every single thing that I eat.

Food labeling has come on leaps and bounds in the last decade. It is much easier to avoid foods that you don't want to eat these days than it was back when I was diagnosed. There is also a much greater awareness of what food allergies mean and what harm the wrong ingredients can cause. I remember trying to explain what celiac disease means to people who had never heard of it. Nowadays it seems that everyone knows or knows of someone with celiac disease or gluten intolerance.

Not only has food labeling hugely improved, so too have the available resources for cooking and eating gluten free. You can much more easily find manufactured gluten free products and specific manufacturers specialize in providing for the gluten averse. You can even find directories of celiac friendly restaurants to help you out.

I find the hardest challenge is traveling to a foreign country where I don't speak the language at all well and trying to explain to someone who's feeding me exactly what gluten is and what it can do to me. I luckily managed to find these little cards you can print out in a variety of different languages that explain the situation in a really polite manner and these are a real help.

But ultimately the best way of ensuring that you are eating the correct food allergy friendly ingredients, is to cook more for yourself, from scratch. You have complete control over every little thing that goes into your diet. Personally I found yourself being more interested in where my food comes from. How many miles has it had to travel to get to my plate. What type of life did that animal lead and how did it die so that I might eat it. I would definitely suggest that as a byproduct of my food allergies I have become a far healthier and more environmentally aware eater.