‘Do You Want My Family’s Business?’

SO, YESTERDAY WAS my debut into the (sorta) professional world of allergy. I was a guest speaker at a seminar for the catering industry on the upcoming changes to food labelling.

Despite my strong views on the subject, I wasn’t there to pontificate on the rights and wrongs of the new labelling legislation – I reckon that would only confuse the catering delegates even more, and I can tell you after yesterday that many of them are already confused enough about existing, never mind impending, allergy regulations.

I was invited as an ‘Allergy Mum’ by the organisers FATC to speak about the daily struggle to find safe places to eat, and food to buy, for my child.

So below is my presentation. It wasn’t slick, and my PowerPoint skills are rudimentary, but I hope it got some people thinking about the struggle we face to find allergy safe food. It is, as fellow speaker Michelle Berriedale-Johnson of Foods Matter succinctly put it, a “pain in the balls”.

The Children’s Allergy Guru answers your questions

GOT A MILLION allergy questions buzzing around your head, and your little one’s next appointment is months away? Join us on Twitter tomorrow night for ‘Allergy Hour’, when London-based paediatric allergy guru George Du Toit will be the guest expert on hand to help.

Consultant paediatric allergist at Guy’s & St Thomas’, Du Toit is also co-investigator on the LEAP study into the prevention of peanut allergy in young children.

Follow @allergyhour and tweet your questions using the tag #allergyhour – it’s on from 20.30 to 21.30 GMT on Thursday 24 October. See you there!

Allergy Show my $*@!

Okay, so I’m being a bit facetious. There are some good things about the Allergy & Free From Show – not least that it exists. Plus there were some great keynote speeches (which I’ll post about soon) and fine foodie finds among the cacophony of crap.

It’s the cacophony of crap that concerns me more, though, I’m afraid. It could be my expectations were unduly high. But I had hoped that this would be the one place I might take Sidney and actually feel free to buy him food to eat, safely.

I had visions of a cafe laden with wheat free, egg free, nut free treats – sandwiches made from Dietary Specials bread, maybe (I say DS only because it’s one of the few wheat free brands that doesn’t also contain egg); gluten free pasta with a simple tomato sauce; nut and seed free snack bars. Fruit. Anything. Just somewhere I might actually be able to order lunch and know it had been carefully prepped with allergies in mind.

Fat chance. My irritations are so manifold it’s probably best if I list them:

1. No allergy friendly food in the cafe

Astonishingly, while the hot dishes served up by Leith’s were gluten free, there stood, on the counter, the omnipresent warning: “May contain traces of nuts”. Sandwiches, meanwhile, were bog standard fare – nothing wheat free at all. Pasta and couscous pots were of the non-gluten free variety. Biscuits and snacks either contained nuts and seeds or were made in factories were they were present. And the catering ladies were impeccably trained in the art of not giving a shit. In short, thank god I’d brought (as always) a packed lunch of homemade food for Sidney.

I’ve since been told there have been complaints about this in the past; it’s beyond me why a show supposedly devoted to allergy should offer nothing suitable at the very least for those suffering from the so-called Big 8. I don’t expect pea free, banana free and chickpea free – that would be pushing it. But, for heaven’s sake, try to provide at least one or two things that don’t contain nuts, sesame, egg, dairy or wheat. Never mind soya and the rest.

2. The freebie bag on offer to all vistors…

…contained a sesame-packed bar. Need I say more?

3. The dodgy DIY tests

So what was the biggest and most prominent stand upon entering Olympia? An outfit offering ‘testing’ for a whole catalogue of allergies and intolerances. There isn’t the time or space here to explain the many levels of wrongness, but I refer you to the very experienced and knowledgable health journo Alex Gazzola’s blog here for some of the reasons this offends me so very much. (Not least that if you genuinely suspect an allergy, see a qualified doctor. FFS.)

4. Gluten free rules OK

Now, I have nothing whatsoever against gluten free foods. It is absolutely right, and vital, that Coeliacs are properly catered for and there is a huge market now in pre packed and fresh foods providing for this very important sector.

But it seems to me that ‘gluten free’ has become the easy fallback for ‘free from’. Supermarkets seem to think slapping ‘gluten free’ on a few packs of pasta and some bread covers the allergy issue. It doesn’t. As Saturday’s keynote speaker Dr Adam Fox pointed out, studies from Australia – which are among the most robust to date – suggest 80 per cent of food allergies in children relate to dairy, egg and nuts. Egg is in fact the most common, affecting more than 10 per cent of all kids, followed by peanut at around three per cent. And that’s just accounting for children. So why are these very serious, very prevalent allergies not catered for? A case in point – the M&S ‘free from’ stand had the following sign on prominent display:

It would be funny if it didn’t make me so furious. I could say exactly the same for all the big name supermarkets, who are equally culpable. There’s a whole blog post in me about this issue alone.

The same could be said for very many of the stands. There were some fine and good and dedicated small businesses trying desperately to offer the tastiest possible foods to a gluten free clientele. But more often than not the perky cupcakes and puddings either contained, or had the potential of traces of, nuts. Now I can’t blame the people making these foods but my point is that the organisers should surely have tried to ensure a balance in provision rather than whacking anything without gluten in and ignoring the rest. It was not the Coeliac and Gluten Free Show. The clue should surely be in the name.

(P.S. I might also add that gluten free does not necessarily signify suitable for wheat allergy sufferers: a great many of the foods were gluten free but contained wheat starch)

5. The appalling lack of understanding about cross contamination

One of my fellow Twitterers, the lovely Annie’s Supperclub – a gluten free underground eatery in Kent – pointed out to me yesterday that one of the stands offering curry had a choice: gluten free or normal bread. Yet they were using the same knife in the same butter pot for both.

Elsewhere, nutsome cookies were among the free samples being chopped up and handed out; egg-free cakes sat beside eggless varieties. And that’s before you even attempted to ask exhibitors about the presence of things like nuts in their foods. Some, I hasten to add, were very helpful and very knowledgeable. Others were an absolute disgrace: one woman insisted her cereals were nut free, and 100 per cent free from cross-contamination – until I checked the packaging and found a ‘traces’ warning.

I’m told this happens every year: another fellow Tweeter tells me she once found a milk free chocolate bar for her kids… with a ‘may contain milk’ warning on the label. So it was no surprise to me when I returned on Saturday to spy the following note on exhibitors’ tables:

6. The loose definition of ‘allergy’ and ‘free from’

Vegan does not constitute free from. ‘Free from’ is a term intended to define foods that are free from common allergens and intolerance-causing ingredients. Veganism is a lifestyle choice, not a medical necessity. Veggies, don’t shout at me: I’m a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian by choice. I am happy with my choice but if I accidentally ate a bit of cow I might very well flail about melodramatically but I don’t think I would die. I am also very well catered for, thank you, with the Vegetarian and Vegan Society labelling that exists almost everywhere these days. By all means pop up at a foodie market or a veggie fayre. But your nut and seed and soya-packed foods have no place at an allergy show.

Well, that’s got it out of my system, for now. I’m certainly not suggesting that organisers make the show an allergy free zone – patently that is impossible and impractical and unreal. But pursuing basic standards of care and guidance, providing adequate allergy friendly foods and excluding the free distribution of the most allergenic (i.e. nuts) might be a start.

Next up in a day or two: some of the good stuff about the show, including Dr Adam Fox’s very good keynote speech.

Scrambled eggs on Mother’s Day

It was a perfectly innocuous Mother’s Day breakfast that booted us into a new way of life. And the morning had started so well: just a couple of night-time wake-ups and a respectable 7am start from our five month-old baby boy. Flowers (pink and yellow) delivered to the door. Cards. A cup of tea in bed. And scrambled eggs on toast.

Then, not long after, we noticed an odd rash developing on his little stick legs: white, bumpy, like nettle stings. Within minutes the lumps had spread to his throat and chin. My husband was quick to act: he carries an EpiPen for a ridiculous list of food intolerances that transform him into Elephant Man when combined with vigorous exercise. He recognised the hives straight away and, taking no chances, got on the phone to the out of hours doc.  They said: “Call an ambulance.”

So the rest of my first Mother’s Day was spent, memorably enough, languishing in a Hackney A&E. A syringe full of antihistamine saw off the lumps and bumps but we were baffled as to what had caused this reaction when he was still solely breastfed. Was it the flowers? Pollen in the early spring air? Something in his eczema creams? The paediatric team couldn’t say, really: just go straight back to the GP or A&E if it happens again.

Barely a month later it did, and this time the cause was blindingly obvious. I gave him his first taste of banana. Within minutes there were red splodges where the mash had touched his skin, and soon hives had spread across his face and neck. So, another dash to the doc for antihistamines and a request, now, for specialist referral.

We were due to go on holiday to Greece just a couple of weeks later and the wait to see an allergy specialist on the NHS would be at least three months, we were told. Panicked as to what might have caused it, and worried about whether the next reaction would be more serious, we booked to see an NHS consultant privately.

He asked us to run through exactly what had happened on the morning of the first reaction. We blathered on about pollen and flowers, skin creams, floor cleaners. He asked what we had eaten. Scrambled eggs, we said. ‘That’ll be it’, he said. He hadn’t even eaten any, we protested, stupidly.

But the results of a skin prick test confirmed it: our baby was quite definitely allergic to egg. Apparently even the tiniest trace on our hands, unwittingly transferred to his skin when we were applying his creams, would have been enough to trigger the hives.

Of course we weren’t surprised when banana threw up a positive (though who the hell had ever heard of banana allergy?). Possibly wheat and latex, too, though the results were borderline. And the trump card – peanuts. Crap.

What’s it all about?

I’m Mum to a fully paid-up food allergic, EpiPen-toting tot. Current tally: egg, wheat, nuts, sesame, chickpeas, green peas and, yep, banana. Arrrggh.

It’s early days and we’ve just started tiptoeing around this new, weird world of food allergy. Amazingly, while there are some great resources out there, there seems to be very little practical advice on day-to-day living with a food allergic child.

This blog is an attempt to share my experiences and findings about everything from allergy-friendly recipes, products and places to go to the latest news and research. We live in London so it’ll be from a London perspective but I’ll try to chuck in any other info I find.

One thing I promise is no handwringing here – it’s totally disorienting, of course, but the aim is not to let food allergy rule our lives.

P.S. In my other life I’m a former newspaper journalist turned freelance writer working from home (with baby underfoot).

Alexa Baracaia