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Allergy-free eating choices are not a question of manners!
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Photo by mconnors on Morguefile.com
Last month, Gwinnett Gluten Free Food Examiner posted an article about Dear Abby's advice to a hostess concerned about accommodating an allergic guests' dietary needs, wherein Abby said to serve the guest a salad or invite them over less frequently.
The summer volume of City Journal recently ran an article about "America's Food Revolution" that was by and large about the availability of fine foods and five-star dining in the US. However, almost as a parenthetical aside, the author of this article, Jerry Weinberger, makes a statement that suggests that eating a diet appropriate for one's digestive system is tantamount to bad manners:
When I was a kid, my parents taught me that if someone invites you over for dinner, you eat what they serve and—however disgusting it is—you clean your plate and compliment the host. Or if someone takes you to a restaurant, even Dutch treat, you say it’s terrific, even if it stinks.
Just try having a dinner party today. You’ll have to contend with perfervid vegans, virtuous vegetarians, persistent pescatarians, lamb-phobics, tongue-phobics, veal-rights advocates, the gluten-intolerant, the lactose-intolerant, the shellfish-intolerant, the peanut-intolerant, the spicy-intolerant, and on and on in an ever-fragmenting array. … All this has a lot to do with the decline of traditional manners and the rise of personal assertiveness and the yuppie belief that we can engineer our own immortality. Food matters so much now that it can make tyrants of our dearest friends and neighbors.”
This was not the main point of the article, but you'd better believe that this is the part that stuck in my craw.
There are two things about Weinberger's statement that really bother me.
First, an allergy or food intolerance is not a matter of choice, it's a matter of health. I'm certain that it is the height of bad manners to send a party guest into anaphylactic shock by sneaking ground peanuts into a sauce. The ruckus created by scrambling for an epi-pen or calling an ambulance will surely detract from polite conversation.
"We need to get people over this idea that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie." says Melody Mayo, M.S., N.C.C. Wellness Coach for the Life University Center for Health and Optimum Performance in Marietta, Georgia. "What may work for one person's diet may not work for someone else's. We all need to become more aware of what foods make us feel our healthiest as individuals."
The second thing about Weinberger's statement that bugs me is that it has been my experience that the vast majority of food-allergic and food-intolerant people are accommodating and polite when their allergies are present. More often than not, the food intolerant or food allergic individual is embarrassed by bringing his or her own food to the party, or even worse, not getting to eat anything at all while there.
For more info: Are you a gracious hostess stymied by a guest's food allergies? This article suggests easy ways to make sure everyone can eat together.
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