The Medical Explanation
Weird, maybe, but not rare. Up to 2 million children in the U.S. have food allergies, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Many others have intolerances—lactose intolerance, for example, which occurs when the body doesn't create enough of the enzymes required to digest the natural sugar in milk.
In essence, allergies happen when a hyperactive immune system mistakes a certain food (or pollen or animal product, like pet hair) for something dangerous and generates a specific immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibody to combat it. The IgE, in turn, sparks the production of histamines and other chemicals that cause either swelling or constriction in the eyes, nose, throat, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and skin, which manifests as hay fever, hives, eczema, or asthma. In more heartbreaking terms, my boy gets rashy and swollen because his body is trying too hard to keep him safe.
In the most severe allergic reactions, tissues throughout the body swell, blocking airways and making blood pressure drop. This process, known as anaphylactic shock, causes unconsciousness and can be fatal. Every year around 150 people in the United States die from food-related anaphylaxis. Peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, and shellfish are among the most likely foods to cause this reaction. It's recommended that people with significant allergies to any of these foods avoid them entirely, even in trace amounts, and that they also carry a preloaded injector of epinephrine (Adrenalin), marketed as EpiPen and EpiPen Jr, which can improve circulation and ease breathing in the event of an emergency.
So ... What's for Dinner?
I started keeping one EpiPen in the stroller and one in the food bag. But what else could I put in the food bag, since everything it used to hold had turned out to be poison? Not only could I not feed my son any of the things he was allergic to, I also couldn't feed him anything that contained milk or wheat or eggs or soy or any of their hundreds of derivatives. Foods marketed as wheat-free often had eggs. Milk-free products were made of soy or rice, both strictly verboten. The boy was eating instant oat cereal for breakfast, refried beans for lunch, and more refried beans for dinner—not sustainable, if only because an all-bean diet means an all-bean diaper.
Exotic grains entered my life. Amaranth! Buckwheat groats! How you disappointed with your odd flavors and tendency to clump! In the end, I embraced quinoa, a nutty South American export renowned for its utter healthfulness. This I whipped into quinoa-and-vegetable pilafs, served alongside steamed yams and tiny turkey-lamb meatballs. Goats' milk and sheep's cheese filled in for normal dairy. With the help of egg substitute and gluten-free flours (tapioca, sorghum, potato flour, and more quinoa), I devised alternative pancakes, complete with blueberries. The kid was doing great—much less rashy, and growing like a weed—but the going was still tough on the parental end of the equation.
The Big Adjustment
Let me preface this next bit by saying that my child does not have cancer or some other terrifying condition that I don't even want to contemplate. He's a healthy boy who happens to be allergic to almost everything. But, as with so many things in life, perspective about where we fit on the overall scale of human suffering—way up at the happy end—doesn't entirely eliminate our troubles.
Even as we began to cope with the avoidance diet, all the social and emotional aspects of eating remained topsy-turvy. My son would want to taste something my husband and I were eating, and we would refuse. Not sharing your food with your child feels worse than mean-spirited, but one time I gave him a mushroom from my breakfast plate and he turned red and puffed up in front of our eyes—it had been contaminated with egg from my omelet, I realized, so no more bites after that. All my dreamy fantasies of bringing him up on what we were eating, whether pasta puttanesca or take-out sushi, went straight out the window, and with them one of my few certainties about how to do a good job as a mother.
Time Is on My Side
This unsettling state of affairs persisted for about a year, until we took the kid in for a second round of tests at 24 months. Some of his numbers had come down. While our Big Five—peanuts, eggs, wheat, cows' milk, and soy—were still on the forbidden list, we got back rice and corn and a whole passel of lesser offenders. This is typical: Most research suggests that food allergies subside significantly as children age and their immune systems mature, with most kids able to eat most foods by the age of 5. (Peanuts and shellfish are the big exceptions—those allergies are usually lifelong.)
The easing of my son's dietary restrictions coincided with the explosion of his language skills, and as he began to talk, it became clear that he was a happy kid. In a lot of ways, that took the pressure off: I fed him stuff that I never would have chosen, or even imagined, but he assumes that we love him, even if there's never any chocolate cake on offer.
I still worry, of course. Preschool is a new minefield—will the teachers really police that plate of snack-time crackers? And how am I going to get my act together to provide a gluten-free cupcake every time one of his classmates has a birthday? But those are my issues. The boy takes his allergies in stride, and he has developed a typical kid's affection for all things bland, starchy, and cheesy. I cook him dinner most nights, and if the grilled cheese is made with rice bread, sheep's cheese, and goat butter, as far as he's concerned, it's pretty wonderful.
