News Flash! Allergy Hour, the supermarkets and what to do?

If any of you lovely people are on Twitter tonight from 8.30pm it’s #allergyhour – the topics for tonight are allergy safe Hallowe’en treats and the biggie: strategies for ensuring supermarkets act on our needs.

It comes after I discovered to my horror that Sainsbury’s (at the very least the stores near me) have discontinued DS-gluten free bread in favour of their own brand stuff – so NO egg free, gluten free bread at all now on their shelves. In this pic not ONE bread product is egg free.

A response from the Food Standards Agency…

SORRY IT’S taken me a while to post this – here’s the response I received from the FSA on my allergen labelling gripes. I’ve highlighted a few bits in bold but, in short, I think our next step is to write directly to the European Commission. Sigh. And all I wanted to do was buy a few bits in Sainsbury’s…

Same old, same old pt II

JUST a quick follow-up to last night’s post on Sainsbury’s ditching the Dietary Specials Mozzarella and Tomato pizzas for their own rubbish version.

I’ve spoken with the exceedingly helpful folks at DS today who confirm that, yes, Sainsbury’s was their only major stockist and that they may now have to discontinue the line completely if no other big supermarket steps in. Deja vu – exactly what happened with Kinnerton milk chocolate. So do give Sainsbury’s a call on 0800 636 262, option ’5′, and ask them to reconsider.

Same old, same old

IT’S THE same old story. Every time I find a decent free from product and leap for joy, some supermarket chain or other decides to discontinue it. And so it is with the Dietary Specials deep pan cheese and tomato pizza I discovered only last week.

Sidney’s pizza debut

A BIG, BIG day today – Sidney’s first ever pizza. It’s big because Sidney is one quarter Italian and his mother couldn’t bear to imagine a world without pizza. The horror.

Sadly, his debut was not a taste of the pizza a taglio I wolfed down on the street as a child in Rome, or the huge, crisp, paper thin versions, bubbling with sweet tomato and mozzarella, served up in a proper pizzeria. In an ideal world it wouldn’t have been a cook-from-frozen special. But beggars can’t etcetera and thank god, in that case, for Dietary Specials.

It’s all of them

RECENTLY I posted about how the ludicrous blanket “nut, sesame, blah” trace warnings on just about everything in Sainsbury’s had driven me to tears.

Well, in the interests of fairness I’ve just come across the exact same thing in Waitrose. I can understand it on the baked goods and cakes, and even the olives and deli bits. But, again, I ask you: fish?

I nearly got kicked out of the bloody shop for taking this pic. Can you believe it (big security guard hulking over to tell me to cease and desist)? But I told him to bugger off.

Risk it for a biscuit?

I have a dilemma.

I know most ‘may contain’ food labelling is about arse-covering more than anything else, but do we let our nut, egg and sesame allergic Sidney eat pre-packaged foods that, on the face of it, are fine to eat, but contain the rotten little addendum: “Produced in a factory that handles egg, nuts and seeds”?

Our doctor, who we like very much because he’s sensible yet sunny, says those ‘may contain’ goods are most likely fine to eat if they’re from a major manufacturer or a household name supermarket. But, as he puts it, it depends on how risk averse you are.

I’d like not to be risk averse. I don’t want Sidney to go through life fearing travel, or eating out, or even eating in. I don’t want to deny him foods that would actually be fine to eat out of some vague sense of panic and because the brand’s lawyers said ‘stick that on there just in case someone sues’.

Today at Sainsbury’s I hovered over the baby snacks aisle, and two packs I hadn’t seen before: Plum’s ‘Strawberry Oaty Chomps’ and Ella’s Kitchen ‘Strawberries & Apples Nibbly Fingers’.

At the moment, his only between-meal snacks are fresh fruit, rice cakes, those full of air sweetcorn puff things and yoghurt. It would be lovely to let him have something different and these new bars seem all good: fruit, oats, quinoa…

But they are both produced in the bloody factory that also produces nuts blah blah. I have to confess, it annoys the hell out of me. The foods they make for younger babies have no such warnings; I assume it’s because controls are far stricter for the under-1s and that, once they’re past 12 months, it gets more of a faff, and more expensive, for the manufacturers to continue to be so rigorous.

So I hovered, and I picked them up, and I bought them, and now they’re sitting in our special allergy drawer in the kitchen (yes, we have one). But I’m too nervous to let him eat them. Yet.

What would you do?