This week, our whole Her Campus chapter is writing about food. Our Sesame Street-style theme for this week is food. So, feeling that I would have little to contribute to posts about favorite recipes (since I can’t cook), or best local restaurants (since I rarely go out to eat), I chose to write about a different food-related topic. Since I have one myself, I decided to write about food allergies, which is a topic that I haven’t seen a lot of articles written about outside of health magazines or medical journals.
For my entire academic career, when asked to introduce myself and tell the class my grade, my major, and an interesting fact about myself, my interesting fact has always been that I’m allergic to strawberries. This is usually met with pitying looks and at least one person saying “That sucks.” I’m guessing that strawberries are good, and not being able to eat them is unfortunate for me? There’s no need to feel sorry for me though, friends. I can have strawberry flavored things (ironically my favorite), as long as they’re artificially flavored, and I don’t really know what I’m missing when it comes to eating strawberries. I know I can’t eat them without getting really sick, so I have no desire to do so. I’m not missing out on anything because I’ve never known anything different.
My family discovered that I was allergic to strawberries a little before my second birthday. My mother fed me a few cut-up strawberries as a snack, and a little while later, I was horribly sick until there was not even a trace of strawberries left in my stomach. The next week, I tried strawberries again, just in case my reaction was just a stomach virus, but the same thing happened. I haven’t eaten a strawberry since. I know this isn’t a pretty picture, and I don’t really want to think about it either, but I think it’s important to realize that allergic reactions aren’t always hives, or the person’s throat closing up. Just because your allergic reaction doesn’t threaten your ability to breathe, doesn’t make it any less valid.
So you might wonder, how do food allergies develop? In my case, it’s largely genetic. My maternal grandmother was allergic to strawberries as well. Another essential factor is that you have to be exposed to the allergen before you’re born. My mom has explained to me that she craved strawberries all the time when she was pregnant with me. After she found out I was allergic, she refused to eat strawberries when she was pregnant with my two younger brothers. They aren’t allergic to strawberries like I am because they weren’t exposed to them. In fact, neither of them has any food allergies at all.
Another interesting anecdote about food allergies is that you could conceivably have one and never know it. My aunt, whose mother is my grandmother from whom I inherited my allergy to strawberries, once took an allergy test and discovered that she’s allergic to shellfish. However, my aunt, like me, refuses to eat anything that at one point swam in the sea, so she had no idea she was allergic. On the positive side though, she also doesn’t feel like she’s missing out on anything either, by being allergic to a food she would never eat in the first place.
In recent weeks, people have been talking about allergy season, and complaining about their runny noses and their itchy eyes. Food allergies aren’t seasonal, they’re just something that a person has to live with all the time. People with more serious reactions need to be more careful than those with more mild reactions, and everyone should always err on the side of caution (I never eat fruit salad I didn’t make, or anything with just “berry” in the name without explaining what type, just to be safe), but the principle is the same: live your life as normal, just avoid whatever it is you’re allergic to, and you’ll be just fine.