Tag: food intolerance

I get the feeling that most failsafe advice is geared to children and families, and definitely not to adults who share living, cooking or work spaces with other independent people and who have jobs or study with requirements that have to be met.

I cook for myself only, share with one housemate who does his own cooking (I do miss pre-FODMAP when we shared cooking), and I am towards the end of my PhD which means a lot of late nights and sometimes working on weekends. I am also quite social, so a couple of evenings a week are spent out at soccer practice or choir rehearsal which restricts cooking. I like to be a part of events with friends even if they are centred on food. I find I need to cook main meals about 4 times a week – at least two nights a week and twice on the weekend – as well as bake one sweet thing a week for snacks and a batch of bread every 1-2 weeks. A weekend away requires planning at least a week in advance. I bring leftovers to Uni every day and bring dinner as well if I think I might work late. At the start of the week I make a rough plan of when I’ll cook to make sure I have enough to eat. It is a shame to turn down social events because you need to cook, but making sure you have time aside to do the cooking and shopping (including sourcing those difficult to find large white brushed potatoes and getting to the failsafe butcher) does help reduce stress. I just realised I am writing this as I should be doing the shopping. Hmm.

It helps to have some fall-backs if you don’t have time to cook or do the shopping. Keep some green beans, Brussel sprouts and hash browns (most these days have no antioxidants – but check first) in the freezer because they won’t go off. An extra frozen meal in the freezer can make a world of difference if you get home at 9pm after an 11-hour day and need to eat before you cook. Have a look at my last-minute recipes (to come) for what to make when you really have (almost) nothing. These are also good at Saturday lunchtime when you should have done the shopping but haven’t left the house yet! Going shopping on an empty stomach is never a good idea. My absolute last resort when stuck at Uni working late with no prepared food is a large bag of Kettle or Red Rock sea salt chips. It’s not healthy and you may feel sick from that much oil, but it is one of the few things that can be eaten straight from the shops, and is available in vending machines late at night.

In terms with dealing with sharing spaces with other people and not having control over your environment (as the failsafe books tell you to), I don’t necessarily have a solution but I can sympathise. As a chemist, I work with amines all the time, and I have had to teach practicals with both amines and salicylate derivatives – and you don’t necessarily trust students to keep their reactions inside a fumehood where they can’t be inhaled! I have done my best to minimise exposure and not do challenges when I know I will be exposed. Work with gloves and within safety procedures, impress on the students the need to keep the salicylates away from you, close the door to the co-worker’s office when they are wearing strong perfume and keep your food separate in the fridge. I brought in hand soap to the lab that doesn’t irritate me. At home I replaced the detergent/soaps/cleaning materials with ones that were failsafe and my housemate has been happy to use those. Luckily, as I’m not a coeliac, I don’t have to worry too much about contamination of cooking materials, or having a separate gluten free toaster. My housemate cooks “normal” food and I just make sure everything is washed before it is put away and then trust that it’s clean. My general advice would be to try and be self-sufficient, provide alternatives (with cost to yourself) and not impose on others as much as possible, but if something is really affecting you (say there are lilies inside the house giving you headaches), you have to say something.

Explaining my combination of intolerances is always difficult, and I usually find it easier to provide people with a list of foods I can eat. It is particularly difficult for those foods whose chemical content depends on how they have been treated (How old is the meat? Were there antioxidants in the oil used to fry the chips? Were the chickpeas tinned and how well were they rinsed? Did you thickly peel the potatoes? etc.) The other thing is low *insert chemical* doesn’t mean no *insert chemical* and it’s all about the threshold, which can be different for different people. For people who are familiar with peanut allergies or dairy intolerance, it is confusing to have a diet where there are not just allowed and forbidden foods. The questions above do matter and it can be hard for people to understand that whether you will react will depend on what else is in the meal and what you have eaten in the last week, days, or three hours. It’s also hard for them to understand that the reaction can be delayed.

It can be hard to trust others to cook safely for us. Once I said I could have a small amount of tinned rinsed chickpeas and ended up with the equivalent of half a can in a salad (high FODMAP). Another time I said I could have peeled carrot and cucumber (moderate salicylate), as long as there wasn’t too much and I ended up with the equivalent of 4 carrots and 2 cucumbers on a plate but with little bits of dark green peel left (definitely high salicylate). Someone bought plain salt chips for me but it was one of the brands that has unlisted antioxidants (under the 5% rule) and I only realised after sneaking in the kitchen and looking at the packet in the rubbish bin. I’m so grateful to people for trying, but sometimes I think it hurts them even more to have to turn down the food they have or bought made especially for you.

To be perfectly honest, I usually don’t trust people to cook safely for me unless I am supervising or they have experience in low salicylate/failsafe cooking and have consulted me. Instead I bring my own frozen meals if I go out or away. A bit of preparation before, a small esky and asking about microwaves/freezers ahead of time can really help. In January I cooked 34 meals in one day (see photo) and froze them all so that I would be able to attend a choir festival for two weeks without having to cook. It can help to bring a small container of instant decaf coffee on a plane flight or a bottle of maple syrup and citric acid to a family friends’ house so you can take part in the tea/coffee ritual. If I don’t have time to prepare but have space, I will put a whole packet of sakatas, a packet of rice thins, a jar of cashew paste, a jar of rice malt syrup and a knife in a green bag. Then I can prepare snacks as required and am much more self-sufficient. If I’m going away for longer I can add my cereal boxes, psyllium husk container, container of sugar and litre or two of SoGood soymilk.

A word of warning that shopping at the beginning, and whenever you are looking for a new product can be a draining experience – best done when you are not under time pressure or hungry. Shopping with a list in a familiar shop, and putting the hard to find items (choko, mung bean sprouts, rice crumbs) into an ‘if available’ list can reduce the stress, and likelihood of you wandering the aisles searching and mourning the foods you used to enjoy.