For most of my life I have been able to eat everything I wanted (apart from pork and shellfish). I was an easy-to-please guest and always flexible about where I ate out as I could always find something to eat on every menu.
But in the past year all that has changed and I have had to accept that for the time being, my diet has to be gluten-free. I am also allergic at the moment to all grains – including barley and rye – and breads that have very little gluten in them such as spelt and amaranth and teff.
I go into restaurants now, choose what I want to eat (or rather what I think I can eat) and then I have to remember to actually ask whether it is gluten-free as there might be an ingredient in the dish that is not obvious from the menu description. However, all this has come at a time when restaurants have to know the answer and everyone is very obliging about checking with the cook in the kitchen.
We were invited out for a meal in a friend’s house today which is always lovely – and then my husband had to remind me that I can’t just accept invitations any more without remembering to say that I am gluten-free – which means that I am going to be a difficult guest – something I have always tried hard not to be.
10% of the UK population are currently sensitive to gluten and to wheat products and this is because the wheat that we eat nowadays is not the same strain of wheat that many of us grew up with. (The bestselling book Wheat Belly explains more on this topic). It is likely that I could travel to different countries and would be able to eat the wheat and gjrains there as it is a different type from the wheat that is supplied now in the UK, US, Canada and several other Western countries. But it will be tricky while I test that out – in case it doesn’t agree with me. However, as wheat and gluten sensitivity become more prevalent throughout countries in the Western world where the strain of wheat is engineered in a certain way, I am hopeful that restaurants and food manufacturers will widen the range of foods and food products that they offer as the market for wheat-free and gluten-free foods will grow. I am very grateful that I am not sensitive to dairy as well as a growing number of people are sensitive to both.
Passing the window of our local Oliver Bonas chain-store shop this morning, I saw an attractive range of cookbooks on display. Each one was about an aspect of healthy eating. It surely cannot be a coincidence that so many of us are now having to be mindful in every way of what we can and cannot eat. The challenge for me is to be conscious of it without it becoming too much of an issue and taking over my life. Food is about all of life and how we sustain ourselves. I feel hopeful that as interest continues to grow in what we actually eat and what is in it – and how increasingly poisonous many processed foods are (Joanna Blythman has written an excellent new book on that), – there will be a change in what is on offer in the public places where we feed ourselves and in the ready-made food section of our supermarkets. We need it to be easier to make wise choices about what we can and cannot eat, particularly in our UK society where increasing numbers of people are having to follow a different diet from what so many of us have always been used to.
There is a possibility that – as I have only become so hyper-sensitive in the past year – I may in due course be able to eat wheat and gluten again, perhaps in a couple of years.
Mindfulness has been an important part of my life for many years now but I was not always very good at applying it to the food I chose to eat. Now the challenge of learning to eat consciously has been thrust upon me and I have no choice but to accept it. I have to laugh at how the lessons we need to learn during our lives come in such strange and unexpected ways.