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Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
My brother has a gluten issue (I don't know if it counts as a "sensitivity", but the doctors aren't 100% sure it's celiac, but is extremely similar so the distinction is moot), which causes him to be lethargic, messes with his digestive system and causes him to break out in red sores all over his body. The latter of which can last for weeks after having eaten nontrivial amounts of gluten in a single meal, and is the most obvious and provable evidence that the condition is real.
It's not like it's going to kill him (though the doctors say that it may increase the risk of colon cancer), but neither will drinking a small amount of bleach. It's basically literal poison for his body.
I understand that it's inconvenient to plan around. And it's especially annoying given that hypochondriacs and trenders and exaggerators exist and are difficult to distinguish from people with real biological conditions. But from the perspective of someone who actually has one of those conditions, if the choice is to be inconvenient to you, or eat literal poison in your food, they'll be inconvenient. And if you don't like it you don't have to invite them for dinner.
That's a good point, and what he usually does for work (which has free meals for employees, but is usually not gluten free). Though for a dinner it does decrease the utility for them to go in the first place. That is, some of the value of going is socializing, and some of the value is eating food, and so it's just more inconvenient for himself.
From what I've witnessed, the issue has never come up on his side. That is, he mostly only attends dinners with relatives, all of whom know about his condition and automatically volunteer to accommodate it without him having ever explicitly asked. Usually at like thanksgiving or something, one of our aunts will make an extra dessert for him that's gluten free, and then he can eat like half the food anyway because lots of foods don't have gluten and there's enough variety that he can pick and choose what he knows he can eat. So I don't actually know how it would play out if they were less enthusiastic about being kind and accommodating and/or had smaller meals with fewer people and less variety (it helps that pretty much no one else in the family has food issues, except one cousin who also has a gluten issue). But my suspicion is that his default would be to just not attend. If he's making his own food to eat all by himself anyway and not sharing with anyone, it'd be more convenient to just cook and eat it at home. But it also depends on how social you are.
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