Oh dear… It seems that Vanessa Feltz has been fanning the flames of fury already ignited in the allergic and Coeliac community by Rachel Johnson last week. On Monday’s This Morning she complained about the inconvenience of accommodating a Coeliac at the Christmas table and, by extension, accused all gluten free food of being unappetising, if not inedible.
A great deal has now been written about how both Rachel Johnson and Vanessa Feltz were wrong on almost every point they made (see Coeliac UK’s response to the Feltz piece quoted in the Mail on Line here and the various posts linked by Alex Gazzola in his excellent Allergy Insight post here).
So I only want to add two points – the first of which applies not just to allergen free or Coeliac safe food but to life in general.
If you wish to give an opinion, get your facts right
If you wish to opine on a subject it is really a good idea to find out something about that subject first. Not only as a matter or courtesy to those to who actually do know something about it, but in terms of preserving your own reputation. If you don’t you will almost guaranteeably get it wrong and end up with great deal of egg on your face.
Gluten free food is delicious!
Over the last 30 plus years I have served many hundreds of gluten free (and milk free, egg free, nut free, celery free) meals to a relatively small number of allergic or Coeliac people and a great number of those who pride themselves on being ‘normal’ and eating anything.
I will always tell the allergic or Coeliac person exactly what is in the meal so that they can enjoy it in the knowledge that it will not do them any harm. But I never tell the ‘normal’ people until the meal is finished and they are telling me how delicious it was and how much they enjoyed it. I then tell them – not because I want them to tell me how clever I am but because I want them, should the opportunity arise, to tell other people that, surprisingly, gluten/allergen free food is not only not disgusting, but actually extremely tasty.
Back in the day when I first got involved with food allergy, achieving this was relatively hard work as you had to create more less everything, including the recipes, from scratch. But that is absolutely no longer the case. There are now hundreds of companies out there, including all of the major supermarkets, making excellent bespoke gluten/allergen free foods. And, among both manufacturers and home cooks, there is a much greater awareness of how much food (such as Christmas dinner for example) is largely gluten and allergen free anyhow and can be made totally ‘freefrom’ with very minor adjustments – thus hugely increasing the number of safe foods available for those living on allergen free or gluten free diets.
As is proved to us every year now when we judge the FreeFrom Food Awards. Not only is 90% of ‘freefrom’ food as good as non free from but in a gratifyingly large number of cases, it is actually better.
A food fad won’t kill you – an allergy will