Say Cheese

Guest Post by Henry Ehrlich one of the authors of Asthma Allergies Children: A Parents Guide


Say Cheese

By Henry Ehrlich

A new friend from the food allergy world recently wrote to me that her son had a severe bout of hives after she inadvertently gave him the wrong burrito, the one with cheese; he is dairy allergic and his sister isn’t. The first indicator of her mistake was not allergic, it was sensory. Simply put, he had never eaten cheese, and the burrito tasted funny.

My first reaction upon reading this story was, “I don’t know which is worse: the terrible hours of itching, hives and Benadryl or the fact that he had never tasted cheese.” An hour later, I wrote back to her that I hoped she wouldn’t interpret that as flippancy. She assured me to the contrary.

In the days since, I have decided that both are equally disturbing because while the threat of allergic reactions is terrible, so is the inability to enjoy the routine pleasures—not to mention nutritional benefits--that good food can provide. I had asthma when I was a kid, as well as allergic rhinitis so bad that I would often sneeze violently and painfully for half an hour or more. I am convinced that this was responsible for many things that were wrong with my life. My younger son had an asthma attack at camp and spent three days in an upstate hospital.

But none of this prepared me for the ordeal of the food allergic family that I encountered when I started going to meetings of the support group at the office of my cousin/co-author Dr. Paul Ehrlich. Long after we wrote our first book with Dr. Larry Chiaramonte, my familiarity with this phenomenon was largely third hand. I began to take it more seriously when I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for my peanut-allergic nephew. I suddenly saw his always-picky eating habits as something more profound than before. As I wrote in my own year-end guest editorial at AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com, “Life-threatening food allergies are somebody else’s problem until they are your problem, and then they are all-consuming.” Even now, some of the best cooks I know lump the food allergic together with vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and those who somehow think that food is medicine, and therefore not to be enjoyed except insofar as it fits nutritional parameters—the full cast of types who complicate the task of cooking for a dinner party these days. (Just so you won’t think I lack any quirks, my own bias is reducing my carbon footprint by cutting way down on meat, as well as a family history of heart disease, although I would never say so to a host.)

I look at the allergy literature, lay and scholarly, all the time. The “cure” isn’t around the corner. Life has to be lived by the rules, although science and informed treatment can lift some of the burden; better testing makes it possible to distinguish food to which you are truly allergic from those to which you are mildly reactive, giving greater latitude in the diet. Still, many patients can’t enjoy in the things the rest of us take for granted, like a good grilled Swiss sandwich or peanut butter, to name just two of my favorites. Grandma and Grandpa have to be restrained from the most natural thing in the world: spoiling the kids rotten. Backpacks have to be loaded up with EpiPens as well as books and pencils, and schools have to be educated. However, I am greatly heartened by those experienced food-allergy Moms who have found ways to accentuate the positive, who shop carefully and cook imaginatively, who can make this into a family cause without depriving the non-allergic kids (and Dad) of an equal measure of love.

Henry Ehrlich is editor of asthmaallergieschildren.com as well as co-author of Asthma Allergies Children: a parent’s guide. His other books include Sleep to Save Your Life, written with Dr. Gerard Lombardo, The Wiley Book of Business Quotations, and Writing Effective Speeches. He also blogs occasionally on global business for newgeography.com.