Convenience Foods for the Coeliac???

I would never have noticed if other people had not brought it up. It was something I never really thought about until they told me: "You never have to worry about eating right, do you?"

And they are, to some extent, correct. Most of the major fast-food companies (Burger King, MacDonalds, &c.) were never even options for me, as a child vegetarian, growing up. Sure I got the occasional milkshake from Dairy Queen or Seven-Layer-Burrito from Taco Bell (when I was feeling tolerant about the frequently wilty letuce), but it was never something that happened more than once or twice a season. Moreover, carbonated water made my tongue sting, so soda was out of the question, and with few exceptions I was never more than grudgingly tolerant of American pizza.

These foods were all on my hit-list, and they were gradually eleminated, first by lactose intolerance and then by gluten intolerance. I was happily removed from the world of public food, content to carry to school a little thermous with my home-made dishes of potatoes and beans or rice and tofu, which I usually ate out of doors to avoid the unfamiliar noise and smells of the public school cafeterias. I was so far removed from that sort of food that I was never even totted (with tater tots) until I mentioned it to my friends one lunch-period. (They missed.)

But what does it mean to be outside of the industrial food system? I have only recently begun to discover what it does mean. It did not take Supersize Me to show me that MacDonalds food is greasy and disgusting, or that Taco Bell's lettuce was fresh in the busiest locations and otherwise wilty and gross. Michel Pollan's book has uncovered much about the food system of which I was only vaguely aware. I had some idea of the amount of corn that was put into industrial food. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Johnson, is a fellow Coeliac who can have NO dairy nor NO corn. Needless to say, she has been having some difficulties in keeping weight. . . . I did not, however, know any of the specifics or how many things contain the stuff. I might have guessed as much: wheat is another thing which is used in virtually every packaged food, if only as a thickener. But compared to corn? -- hah, as though there were a comparison!

The specific information on feed-lot cows also came as something of a surprise to me. Being born vegetarian, it was enough for me to see the sheer amount of meat that is produced and never eaten, to know that the people going to those smelly meat-and-seafood booths knew very little about what they were buying or where it originally came from. And now, with these unknowns filled in, I think it is safe to assume that I will never support the meat industry, even if I do ever take to eating meat. And yet, in some matters, the way we have treated our cows has affected us all, even those of us who do not support the market. I was horrified to learn that strains of e. coli that our body was normally able to take care of have been rendered resistant to our stomach acids by our own strong-willed insistance on collective stupidity (for truly, among non-gov't. workers, it is only as a society that any one of us individually might be at fault for the situation we are in).

And yet, a sense of disconnect. This is not my fight, compared to most. Not yet. So very little of packaged food is intended for people with limited diets, and so those of us who have disorders find that they are limiting diets. Although there is a growing market (spurred by the Vegan food producers, who discovered to their delight that many Coeliacs are lactose intolerant), the sorts of convenience foods that are produced from these sources are mostly organic and sometimes completely unprocessed (the Lärabar, for example). It is something to watch, certainly, but having discovered some of the benefits of removing myself from that system, I am not likely to return to it anytime soon. In many ways, this 'disorder' of mine might be a considered a blessing, for I am treating my body more kindly because of it than many of the people who never discover the reasons for their statistically probable healthlessness.

What little more there is to be done is quite easily excecuted. Apart from my imported fruits (wax/oil) and spices (oil), I have all but severed my ties to the corn industry. I am also planning to take over that horrid, weedy corner of the local park that nobody has ever tended properly (though I have weeded it, inconstantly, since the age of twelve). It is shady and dark, but I can grow fiddlehead ferns, which provide not only food (I have heard that they are good, fried), but also large amounts of natural plant dye. I am also looking at planting native blackcap raspberries, which are healthier and less intrusive than the European brambles that currently infest that part of the park. They also produce a fruit which is incredibly healthy. I cannot remember all of the health benefits, but I know that there is a higher antioxidant count than European raspberries and some other, more remarkable property (I know not what) which has made them extremely useful to medicine.