Ugh. We are officially the parents of a child with food allergies. Well, we knew all along that she had a dairy allergy, but we finally got an appointment with the pediatric allergist and got the tests to confirm it.
Parents with non-allergic children usually just don’t get it. Most of them are reasonable people, but there’s always one idiot saying that you should just give it your child anyway to build up immunity (if you don’t know, repeated exposures make allergies WORSE) or whining because they can’t give their kid a PB&J at school (F-U lady, your kid won’t die without peanut butter, but the other kid may die with it).
On the other hand, you don’t want to make your child’s allergies an undue burden on everyone else. Demanding a parent not serve ice cream at a party because your kid has milk issues is ridiculous. Same thing with demanding ALL allergen free options, etc. at schools when just one option will do. The world isn’t going to be as accommodating when your kiddos grow up, so it’s much smarter to teach them how to make good decisions now.
Me, I usually take the approach that our Jewish friends did back on Long Island. If they kept a kosher home, they just brought their own food whenever possible or ate before/after if they couldn’t. Sure it can be a pain, but why should put our burdens on someone else’s shoulders? (That said, I do have a collection of egg/wheat/soy free recipes so I can make at least one option when our allergic friends come over. It’s only polite as a hostess.)
Anyway, I actually made this post to whine about how stupid companies are about labeling their foods with potential allergens. I’m usually very good about obsessively checking ingredient lists for ALL forms of dairy (milk, dry milk, cheese, butter, cream, whey etc.) but occasionally I screw up. It’s gotten to the point where I buy organic almost exclusively because most of the organic producers are good about listing the allergens and even potential contamination issues.
I got caught recently on two products recently. Soy yoghurt and a Gerber fruit product. The soy yoghurt had a milk starter that was only mentioned in one teeny warning, and Gerber snuck in whey without a milk warning. Thanks, assholes. I spend a good amount of time in the soy ‘dairy’ section rejecting products for adding casein (caseinate) into their products, just in case.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget the expense of all this dairy free food. You would think it wouldn’t be that expensive, but dry milk is in a TON of products that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, so we have to buy special allergen-free products. And soy milk is twice as expensive as cow milk, even when we buy it in bulk at BJs. Fortunately, most kids grow out of the dairy allergy, but in the meantime it costs as much to feed one one-year-old as it takes to feed two adults.
