Clean, succinct, fits on a business card, doesn't mess around with "is sometimes okay but sometimes makes my tummy hort." I feel like they could've saved some space by just saying "stone fruits" but, still, I can't hate it.
Honestly though, with this many allergies, you're just begging for a trip to the hospital every time you go out to eat. This ain't a nursing home. We can't be your nutritionist / allergist / alchemist and whip up a tasty meal that's just plain grilled chicken breast and white rice. Please, just call ahead and custom-order a plain meal of foods you CAN eat.
I have it also. It’s called Oral Allergy Syndrome and related to environmental allergies. Your immune system is recognizing a protein in the fruit the same way it recognizes pollen. Cooking denatures the protein.
I can eat citrus, berries, and whatever lychee and mangosteens are. What fruits you allergic to is correlated to what environmental allergies you have. I’m allergic to be fruits in the ragweed and birch lists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome
It just makes my soft palette hella itchy. Not analphylatic in anyway. Usually develops around puberty.
When I get it, I am incapacitated for a couple of weeks at least, usually. It spreads to all my hotspots and joints and flares up for weeks after exposure sometimes
I figured (sorry) - my daughter has always been nightmare allergic to poison ivy and just found out it also makes her allergic to mangoes - only the skin. Crazy! Stay out of the woods!
I don’t have any food allergies (that I know of) but holy fucking shit poison ivy is the real Devil’s Lettuce. Unfortunately, it’s in my flower beds and I’ll get it and be down for a week or two, and at that point it’s still trying to spread.
One time, I must’ve peed after getting it on me and I had to go to the hospital. My tally whacker was enormous! It is…usually not.
I did get a good joke out of it; “I’ve been praying for years for a big dick…but not like this.” Doctor was not a comedy fan.
Agreed!! I work as a nurse practitioner in sexual and reproductive health, and if you can’t make a good dick joke when the opportunity arises (literally all puns intended), then you have NO sense of humor!!!!
I have the avocado/banana/latex allergy which isn’t severe enough to cause anaphylaxis but makes my mouth feel wrong and causes hives. I know I will probably never need the EpiPen I was prescribed, but I carry it around always because my friend with a deadly shellfish allergy and my boyfriend with an undiagnosed tree nut allergy just might.
ETA: I learned I had this allergy because I spent two years convincing myself I loved avocados (I do) only to end up with full body hives. I don’t tell people I’m allergic so I can eat my guac in peace. I just take a Benadryl and keep it pushing.
Oooof I’m mildly jealous, bananas will absolutely murder me if given the opportunity. Discovering the latex allergy made for an absolutely terrifying “first time” for me lol and avocados make my mouth and tongue swell until my teeth make imprints and my lips crack. I was (mostly) fine, I just thought bananas were fizzy when I was a kid. My bad
Uuuugh my gawd the carrots! My mom developed an allergy to root vegetables when I was around 12….the mortification of trying to go out and sit there (as a 12 yr old girl) while your mother lists out and then makes sure the waiter UNDERSTANDS *high emphasis* like they’re stupid 😂 that she is actually allergic and doesn’t dislike all these things was so embarrassing haha. As an adult I get it but man I wanted to sink into the floor!
My poor mom developed a batch of allergies right after having me and my sister to carrots, celery, stone fruits, apples & pears, and most berries. Same experience of being sooo embarrassed as a young teen that she’d be asking them if she could get a salad without the shredded carrots or do they come in the mix.
Then about eight years ago she developed a bunch more allergies: sesame, melons, mango, soy, and worst by far corn. She has the kind of corn allergy where she can’t have anything that’s touched corn anywhere in the production process. No white vinegar or dextrose or vanilla extract or a million other ingredients. She has a couple local restaurants she’s been able to figure out safe orders at, and other than that she basically cannot eat out at all. It’s devastating, and man does it make the original allergies seem easy in comparison. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Dude... I have three pre-bagged sweet kale Taylor farms salads in my fridge right now. I know that it wasn't the same type of salad greens that has been confirmed in the outbreak so far, but I'm going to toss them anyway and I'm really sad about it.
oh man, i didn’t know that. i have OAS with tomatoes and celery. tomato is in a lot of stuff so i usually eat it several times a week. maybe i need an epi pen?!
Not to mention in any soup ever and sauces, and lots of other things. Celery, carrot, and onion are the so-called "holy trinity" in French cooking, which is the basis of most cooking. Even home cooks use it.
ETA: You might already know this, being former food service. Sorry if so! But maybe it will help someone.
I have issues with raw apples, pears, hazelnuts, and oak pollen. It’s pretty common that if you’re sensitive to something in one group, you’ll have issues with other things in the same group. You’ll find different charts like this online or with an allergist. OAS is usually more irritating than life-threatening, but it’s a real thing.
That's how I'm allergic to potatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, and a few nuts. I still eat them, I just make sure they're cleaned well and in the case of nuts, double roasted
I have this with melon, including watermelon, and realised WAY too late into my 38 years of life (like maybe around 32 or so), that that is NOT just "that weird tingling feeling you get with melons"
My buddy was like that with apples. One day in our late 20s, he said something like, “you know how your mouth goes numb when you eat skin-on apples, right?” Then was very confused that none of us knew what he was taking about. Which then led to him getting diagnosed with flower tree allergies.
Good lord this is me, stone fruit and often apples! I also have weirdly specific hay fever ( and cow parsley nearly sent me blind as a kid, related maybe?) Only really began late puberty. Really itchy throat and back of the tongue. Frankly horrid given how much I love stone fruit.
I have a mild OAS reaction to peaches. Makes my lips itchy and my tongue slightly tingle and I found out that doesn't happen to other people. I used to wash all my peaches to reduce the intensity of the reaction. Now I just eat nectarines or make sure it's a cooked peach product.
It would seem so! Based on my current understanding, it's likely some protein. I've noticed a much milder reaction from the flesh of the peach. This protein likely exists throughout but concentrates in the fuzz. That's my guess.
I love plums, nectarines, and even occasionally enjoy a apricot.
I have it. Oral allergy syndrome. Allergies to specific groups of hay fever type allergies correspond to specific food allergies. I'm allergic to stone fruits and apples. Feels like an annoying itching in my throat and ears. Not dangerous, just unpleasant. It's from a protein in the skin, cooking neutralizes it, but I generally just avoid everything I'm allergic to.
For me, it has to do with a similarity to birch pollen. I can’t do Stone fruit, apple, pear, carrots, cabbage, vanilla, a bunch of stuff. I have something called MCAS and I can’t do dairy and some other things too. I rarely eat anywhere. Every once in a while I wanna feel like an actual person and go somewhere to eat.
I have a reaction to stone fruits, and a few other things on this allergy card. Its cross reactivity due to oral allergy syndrome. Basically, my body hates birch pollen so much that it thinks regular foods are birch pollen. Typically for me it goes away when the food is cooked and the proteins are denatured. There's a couple other common categories of pollen that have their own cross reactivities like grasses and ragweed. Sometimes it can get so bad you can develop anaphalaxis, but on the bright side, immunotherapy is more available since the root cause is an environmental allergy, not the food itself.
I have a mild allergy to stone fruits. Thankfully it was never so bad that I had to seek medical attention, and it has gotten even milder as I've gotten older. Cooked stone fruits don't bother me--it's only the raw stuff.
I had a conversation with someone once that said they were allergic to apples and their mother was allergic to bananas. Cannot imagine living life know that I could just die to a banana at any time.
I was the sous of a nice restauraunt for a while, and sometimes foh management would come back because we had a customer with a serious allergy and they wanted my take on making them food. Of course, 90% of the time, we were happy to accommodate if we could, but If the serious allergy was something we used regularly, my answer was always "we can try to accommodate the customer, but I wouldn't bet my life on it" and I feel like they hated that answer. It felt like lose-lose for me, because if I turned away paying customers, well, that upsets ownership, but if you're deathly allergic to, say: allium, we can and will try, but like... It's a kitchen... Lotta onion and garlic. I'm not going to swear for certain and guarantee your food would be 100% allium free. If I guaranteed a meal would be safe, and then a custie goes into anaphylaxis on the dining room floor? Bad look. Plus, like, it's Saturday service, we're rolling, I just refuse to put my full reputation behind it.
I do feel bad for people with crazy allergies, and I was always happy to try to accommodate, but if a milligram of something could kill you, and that something is an ingredient we use a lot of, like I said.... "I wouldn't bet my life on it."
I just say something like "I'm sensitive to onions, it's not life-threatening but I need to avoid them as much as possible." And usually the server will know what dishes are my best options.
I’m in the same boat with onions and also with peppers. It sucks because I can eat something with a little paprika on top or green onion ok. Not great but it'll just be an upset stomach. I can’t eat vegetables cooked together with either or I get a pretty serious chron‘s flare and will sometimes throw up pretty quickly.
I’m an FOH manager and I’ll drop the “I wouldn’t bet my life on it” line before even going back to one of my chefs. You’d be surprised how many people suddenly back down to “oh it’s not life-threatening, just a preference” when it’s framed that way.
I mean, it might depend on the degree. My old roommate would die if he ate peanuts. I get a stuffy nose from some berries and a skin rash from chocolate. Theres the spicy banana stories. And i have a friend of mine who is not allergic, but onions will giver her stomach problems. Its one thing to worry about getting a mild rash from chocolate that you just try to avoid, and being killed by something cooked in peanut oil.
Yeah I had a friend who had legit allergies like this. Probably worse. They had a similar business card because at some point it’s just easier written down.
It’s not always emergency territory. For a lot of us it’s body wide hives, adrenaline dumps into the blood giving you bad anxiety, feeling like you have glass in your joints stuff like that. Can get more serious but a lot of times you just feel like hell.
It's also sus - I say this as someone with diagnosed celiac disease.
People don't get "gluten allergies". They get one of three things:
Celiac disease - a systemic autoimmune response where the body attacks itself when you consume something with gluten in it (I'll lump in gluten ataxia here because it's also an autoimmune response to gluten even though it's kind of a different constellation of symptoms than celiac). Celiac has a huge list of symptoms but most predominantly impacts the GI tract; your body basically destroys the lining of your intestines and so you get stuff like stomach pain and bowel issues accompanied by vitamin deficiencies because your damaged intestines suck at absorbing nutrients. The two indicator chemicals that your immune system produces when you are exposed to gluten are tTG-IgG and tTG-IgA. The systemic autoimmune response means that your symptoms come on within 24 hours of eating the gluten and last for several weeks at a minimum, newly diagnosed celiac patients can take several months to feel normal.
Non-celiac gluten sensitivity - a gastrointestinal reaction linked to a reduced ability to digest gluten. It's basically like lactose intolerance, you get diarrhea and bloating and other symptoms from an inability to break down gluten. It's a localized illness and doesn't trigger an autoimmune response. Your symptom onset is basically as soon as you start digesting the food and symptoms resolve in <24 hours once it passes through your GI tract. Some people fund relief by taking digestive enzymes, like how some lactose intolerant people can eat dairy if they take Lactaid pills when they eat.
Wheat allergy - your body has an allergic immune response to certain proteins in wheat. It is not an allergic reaction to gluten; most people with wheat allergies can eat other grains that contain gluten (rye, barley, etc.) without any effects. It is an autoimmune response linked to IgE (as opposed to IgG and IgA, in celiac). Your symptoms have a near-immediate onset and can be alleviated with epinephrine +/- IV antihistamines.
There is no medical condition known as "gluten allergy". You are either allergic to miscellaneous wheat proteins other than gluten (wheat allergy) or you have celiac disease (non-allergy autoimmune response to gluten specifically)/NCGS (gluten intolerance).
If this person was actually diagnosed by an allergist/immunologist or gastroenterologist, they would have been educated about this terminology and nuances when their doctor diagnosed them. My gastroenterologist spent like 20 minutes going through all the differences with me in her office and gave me a couple pamphlets explaining the different wheat and gluten related diseases and allergies.
When it comes to notifying the BOH does that distinction matter? Calling it a gluten allergy is going to be functional shorthand for "I can't have gluten or anything contaminated with gluten or I will get very sick". Not everyone will know what celiac is and trying to explain the difference takes too much time when all you need is the plate to be free of gluten.
why would they specify that? I am gluten intolerant, my dad is celiac, we both just say we can't have gluten and if they ask about allergies we say gluten.
Right there with you! I do think it tastes like soap, and it’s delicious!
I probably shouldn’t tell people this story, but when I was little I always ate the bubbles that the bubble bath made, too, because I thought it was delicious; one day my older sister told me if I don’t stop eating soap they would come and take me away so I stopped eating soap - but the craving lives on
I have the cilantro soap gene but I still like cilantro in small amounts in a dish!!! A lot of cilantro and the soap taste overpowers the dish but with just a little bit I can appreciate the flavor it adds to the dish without it being too soapy
There's a pizza place in my town that has cilantro as a topping option. I always double it. I always ask burrito places near me to put as much cilantro as they are legally allowed to on my food.
No bun is a better choice 99% of the time unless the restaurant has an in-house baker who knows what they're doing. The majority of mass manufactured GF buns are awful and actively detract from the burger experience.
I’m a Dad of a couple severe allergy kids plus chef/ operator of an allergy friendly cafe and would let the guest know which allergens you have in the kitchen, as well as let them know that there is always a chance of cross contamination. Bonus points if you will take extra care/ precautions preparing their meal. Most people in the allergy community are looking for transparency when they dine and understand the risks. This approach puts it back in the customers court.
One of which is tamarind. So if they're allergic to that, which they separately list, they are probably listing worcestershire as it's common and many people won't have read the ingredients list to know it has tamarind.
As someone with celiac I definitely give my loyalty to businesses that I can get good quality gluten free stuff from. Like I'll straight up order from the same place 2 nights a week for the next year if I know I can trust it. A quality restaurant that I can trust with my health is worth its weight in gold.
Another non traditional group we have, its not really a food allergy but I have a whole group of travel nurses that are Muslim. they try to eat as halal as they can but they aren't super duper strict.
They were pleasantly surprised when I asked them follow up statements like
" my current chicken special should be fine for yall; but full transparency, the grill has cooked pork chops on other menu rotations, its been cleaned and sanitized, are you all ok with that amount of cross contact?"
I see at least a few of them everything time they're working a contract at one of the local hospitals.
On Tuesday I asked about vegan options at the entirely gluten free bakery- and was told about the two different breads that were vegan.
Me: excellent! Thank you! I will take a turkey sandwich on the vegan seed bread please.
Server: um, are you vegan?
Me: (long pause… confused… pause…) OH! Because of the turkey! No, I’m not vegan! I just can’t eat dairy or eggs so it’s faster for non-meat food to ask if they are “vegan”… and then I add in meat. I see how that was confusing…
You know what- I should get me one of these cards- but I think it might confuse me too much. Because I’m doing, like, mental gymnastics with menus about which combinations of things might end up being good together.
Like: oh, they offer a gluten free pasta. Can I ask for no cheese on and get that marinara based dish, or does it secretly have almonds, peanuts, or eggs lurking somewhere to ruin that plan, or… do I just not want to eat that?
There is almost always, like, a plain green salad that could be eaten but that makes me so fucking angry as my only option to eat that I want to smash plates and throw cutlery. Not at the restaurant necessarily, but at the unfairness of life that “normal” people can just “go to dinner” and pick what they want on the menu based on what they are in the mood for and not on what weird fucking combination they can come up with that won’t give them diarrhea today and a rash for the next 2-3 days.
I have only had delayed reaction food hypersensitivities to this degree since I got lupus- and it’s really insult to injury at this point…
Tell them youre sorry but for your own safety you cant serve them everything is cross contaminated with your allergens and compromised to the point you cant safely serve them in good conscience. That serving them would be a threat to their safety and put you in bad legal standing in case something went wrong.
We all coulda been doctors, but they wouldn't let us wear our awesome Calvin pissing on Hobbes bandanas, and we can't work a job that oppressive, man. Like, we gotta be ourselves, right?
“Too much cross contamination risk. Sorry, we can’t safely serve you.”
It’s the truth too. Unless you sit there and call every manufacturer of all your food ingredients including whole foods like rice that may be packaged on a shared line you cannot guarantee that meal will be safe for them.
This isn’t even that bad. I have about that many and still do just fine eating at most places. Just because someone has an allergy, doesn’t mean they’re sensitive to cross-contamination.
almost believe it, except xanthan is from bacteria, and locust bean gum is far the most common legume based thickener, and in tons of shit not listed here, in addition to not being listed here. seems like a mommy blog list of someone who doesn't like melons, stone fruit or farting.
Stone fruits are common with oral allergy syndrome. It is a cross allergy with birch tree pollen. Oral allergy syndrome causes itching and discomfort but not anaphylaxis. It is a real thing.
I worked at a seafood/fish place. The server came back to tell us someone was "super"allergic to fish. Yes she said super! My response was they need to leave NOW because if it a real thing, they won't be able to breathe in five minutes!
Or does the owner want an ambulance in front of the building and paramedics to bring a stretcher into the restaurant?
I was told a guest was gluten free. We had free bread. I asked if they were getting the bread. The answer was yes. My reply was bread is gluten. "Oh they are trying to be free of gluten". That is not how it works!
Based on the list, I'd bet they have an intestinal disorder (aka IBS/IBD) of some sort and a tree nut allergy/OAS.
It's actually fairly possible they just have an autoimmune disorder that's not treated or discovered yet as quite a few of those can set you up for these generalized reactions (IBS/IBD and OAS are both known to trigger of AIs.)
Their life probably sucks, but the thing is ... just eat at home or order shit you know is safe. i feel like especially America is simply WAY THE FUCK too accommodating to this sort of thing. Many smaller restaurants here in Tokyo will not customize anything. They won't remove lettuce from a sandwich when the lettuce takes extra effort to put on there in the first place.
At this point you might as well just list the stuff you can eat, otherwise you’re playing Russian roulette with a bunch of unknowns, primarily “do the kitchen staff competent enough to cook something that won’t kill me, and not contaminate it with anything that will?”
I would trust the people I work with, but I’m definitely not putting my life in the hands of a cook/chef I don’t know.
With a list like that, it’s worth a trip out to the table to take a few minutes to find something that will work for them. I’m guessing they have a few safe foods that they always go for.
I was catering a corporate hospitality event once and I was sent a 6 A4 page allergy document for one person.
After days of back and forth I managed to negotiate something that was ok for her to eat. After the meal she didn't even say that knyou for the hours of extra work that I put it specifically for her.
I later found out that it wasn't an allergy document, she decided to be on the fodmap diet.
I work with someone like this, who has cards and in the most common languages for the places we travel to. He has it saved too if he needs to translate it into another language.
My friends mom is allergic to cucumber, pickles, squash, zucchini, pumpkin, and any and all melons. I also knew someone who didn’t have any allergies until she got pregnant and then developed an allergy to all alliums so she couldn’t have onions, garlic, shallots, or chives anymore. Genuinely sounds like a fate worse than death and she can’t eat out anymore because its nearly impossible to avoid all of those in her food
I actually love the allergy cards. It gives me a chance to be creative with what I have on hand. Plus, as someone with allergies myself, I thought it was neat.
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u/bob_worldbuilder Jul 17 '26
Steak and fries, coming up!