agonyaunt | Ask Amy:Hosts struggle turning home to gluten-free zone

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Ask Amy:Hosts struggle turning home to gluten-free zone

Dear Amy: Every year my husband and I host a holiday get-together for several of our friends and neighbors. We provide the main dish, a couple of sides and drinks. We ask friends to fill in with other salads, sides and desserts.

This year, with little notice, my friend "Barb" reached out to me via text, saying, "This year, I will need you to prepare my food differently" -- due to her recent diagnosis of celiac disease.

She explained to me that "even a crumb of cross contamination" will result in her not feeling well. She instructed me to check all of my spices and ingredients, and to thoroughly clean all of my cooking and serving utensils before preparing food for her.

She even provided me a list of online resources I could use to learn more.

Amy, I was shocked speechless -- and my husband was livid.

I responded that I would check ingredients and try my best to accommodate. My husband said that if the disease was so dire, she would need to pack her own plate of food.

He said I should not reach out to our other guests and provide any instruction on Barb's behalf.

I was considering moving mountains for Barb when the final straw came: She asked us to thoroughly clean our grill grates, should there be any gluten left on them from when we last grilled.

Is our friend being ridiculous here, or are we being insensitive to her disease?

How far does a host couple need to go out of their way to accommodate a guest in this situation?
-- Gluten-free Hosts

Dear Hosts: You should not attempt to gauge whether "Barb's" disease is as serious as she indicates. You should simply assume that it is. I agree, however, that she is not communicating about her needs in a way designed to inspire such a Herculean effort on your part. In fact, her requirements seem quite overwhelming and are coming off as demands. She is also attempting to shift responsibility for her health from herself onto you. Don't take it on.

Instead of you communicating her needs to your other guests who are bringing food, you should suggest that she contact them. With such specific requirements, she should not trust anyone else to communicate her exact requirements.

You should assume that your best efforts might not be enough to completely decontaminate your kitchen to Barb's standards, and you should tell her so: "Hi, 'Barb,' I worry that I can't guarantee that all of the food and the kitchen area will be decontaminated the way you might need. It would definitely be safest for you to bring your own food this year. If you feel you also need to bring your own plates, silverware, etc., I assure you we won't be offended. And don't forget to bring a dish to share with the rest of the group. Looking forward!"

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oh boy. I mean, if anything Barb is underplaying how serious coeliac disease is -- like, exposure to ppm-level concentrations of gluten might not make her obviously, immediately ill but will cumulatively add up to massively increased risks of osteoporosis, cancer, & cardiac trouble, among other things. So the request to clean the grill plates is absolutely proportionate to the severity of the disease, but with my coeliac friends we just accept that I'm actually not going to be converting my entire kitchen to adequately gluten-free, so when I'm hosting I make sure to (i) get them sealed packets of coeliac-friendly food that they 100% get first dibs on, (ii) explain very clearly what I have and haven't done in terms of minimising gluten content of any prepared foods, and (iii) know what the local delivery places that are Coeliac UK-certified are so I can offer to buy them something in.

like I think Barb could in fact have approached this better ("following this diagnosis I know it's dangerous to both my short-term and long-term health to consume any gluten at all, even in trace quantities. This means I won't be able to eat food prepared by other people unless conditions XYZ are met. How would you prefer to handle this for the upcoming event?") but also given it's a long-standing social engagement I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to assume people will want to continue hosting you...

Yeah, I think a lot of this comes down to wording. If Barb had stated her problem and asked what ideas the LW had to deal with it, I think the LW would have been keener to take reasonable steps. I mean, I honestly don't think I could guarantee that my kitchen was de-glutened no matter how much I cleaned, but I'd certainly be willing to buy some sealed gluten-free food and perhaps even a few utensils that were kept in plastic or washed with a new sponge and kept between new towels. But I'm pretty sure that if spouse were told he had to scour the grill, there would be issues.

Which is of course a bit miserable given that Barb was plausibly trying to apply the technique of bright-and-breezy not-giving-people-a-chance-to-be-awful, without adjusting appropriately for size of ask...

As I've said up and down the Arcamax thread, I'm pretty sure that Barb is just adjusting to the new diagnosis. Presumably if she was always a huge drama queen, her friend would be expecting this, so my assumption is this is pretty OOC. Well, new diagnoses that are scary and require major lifestyle changes will cause people to get pretty intense for a while. Treat it like a death in the family and give your friend some leeway as she comes to terms with the new normal.

Yeah. Celiac is not something to screw around with.

"I was shocked speechless and my husband was livid that our guest told us the minimum necessary requirements for not poisoning her and provided sources of further information"

Like, I cannot meet those requirements in my home (and er, also I mostly don't host gatherings of people at home for other reasons right now). But I would respond something like "I don't think I can meet those standards, what else can we do" rather than get all shocked and livid.

To be fair, I think the shocked and livid reactions were to Barb's attitude and presumptuousness. It's one thing to communicate her needs and ask whether the hosts can accommodate them. It's another to demand the hosts go far beyond normal hosting duties. It sounds like Barb did the latter.

I have a food allergy, and I do think it's appropriate to make reasonable requests for accommodations, with the understanding that a genuine request leaves open the possibility that one might receive an answer of no. I agree with the columnist that Barb is making a demand, not a request, and is pushing the boundaries of reasonable.

For the LW, the columnist's suggested response seems pretty good. It's one thing to make a couple gluten-free dishes and wash utensils (doesn't one do that anyway?), but I'd feel apprehensive guaranteeing a complete decontamination. I'd drop the line about bringing something to share. If a guest has to supply all her own food, she can reasonably skip the contribution to the communal table.

*takes notes*

This makes sense to me, as someone who loves providing food for others. I think a conversation could be held, in a spirit of cooperation (so, make the husband not bring his belligerent attitude), about how to compromise and if that means Barb brings her own food this time.

I don't have a remove-every-particle food allergy, but a friend's spouse does, and we've talked about whether I could, for example, bake them a cake given that my stand mixer might have been used to mix something with peanuts sometime in the past ten years. (Traces of the protein can get into the mechanism in ways that are very difficult to clean out.) It's really, really challenging to cook for someone with that degree of sensitivity when your kitchen has been thoroughly contaminated.

It's also really challenging to be diagnosed with something like that and try to figure out how you live in a world where everything is dusted with a fine layer of poison. I don't blame Barb for flipping out about it, and I wish the LW were a little more sensitive to that. Barb's still thinking like she gets to do what she's always done, only with an additional layer of accommodations. It takes some time to grasp the extent to which you have to change a lot of how you live your life and get used to doing things that would otherwise be seen as really rude, like insisting on bringing your own food to the house of someone who wants to cook for you.

I think it would be kind if the hosts provided lovely fancy paper plates and sturdy disposable utensils for everyone to use so Barb doesn't feel singled out once they're all at the table.

I have celiac, and this person went about this issue in entirely the wrong way. I suspect that she may be really freaked out about a new diagnosis and not handling that well, which I totally get. Going gluten free is really life-changing and a huge deal and a big pain in the ass until you get the hang of it. She also may have already had bad experiences with people being unwilling to try to work with her diet at all. My paternal extended family is such an ass about gluten free; both my mom and I have celiac, and yet they refuse to even try at all to understand or accommodate in any way, and I can tell you right now that packing your food to eat at Christmas while everybody chows down on some awesome shit is very, very sad. It is so alienating how much you get left out of--the potluck at work, just blithely accepting dinner invitations to people's houses, even going out to eat means you have to choose a restaurant where you can get a gluten free meal. So I suspect that she is still in the anger portion of the grief of being diagnosed with this kind of disease.

What she should have done is tell them that she's diagnosed with this disease, ask them what they're going to make, and then offer some suggestions for ways they could make it okay for her to eat some if not all of what they're having while realizing that she's probably going to have to bring her own food. She could say, "Ooooh, do you mind not putting croutons on the salad and serving it in a glass bowl? I'll bring a dressing I know is gluten free." Etc.

I am so lucky that I have friends who invite me to their houses and serve gluten free meals to me and that when we host they bring gluten free side dishes. I would be lost without them. But I never demanded anything from them; they volunteered and took the effort to do so.

They need to forgive Barb, because Barb's demands are medically necessary and she's coping with what sounds like a very recent diagnosis. This is the sort of thing that brings out the worst in people. (I'm assuming by the fact that Barb is a friend at all that this behavior is not normal for her.)

However, they're very likely not going to be able to ensure a house free of cross-contamination, and they definitely need to say that to her, in a nice, judgment-free way.

I find it baffling that Barb *wants* to risk her health on whether or not her friends (who are completely inexperienced with cooking for allergies and intolerances, it sounds like) are able to decontaminate and cook with sufficient care. I would not want to trust my health to inexperienced and resentful cooks, and my food issues are not as severe as celiac disease! I'd bring my own damn food and tell the hosts it's not them, it's me.

Barb is also being way too aggressive and demanding - asking if someone is willing to try to cook to your specifications is reasonable, especially if they're an old friend and you know they like to feed people, but demanding that someone rearrange and clean their entire kitchen and replace their spices and ingredients is too much.

If you're such close friends that you eat at their place all the time, then it merits a serious discussion about whether or not they're willing/able to change their kitchen practices to make their food safe for you. For a once-a-year holiday gathering, on short notice? No.

Uh, yeah, this.

I'd take the "I have to bring my own food because of cross-contamination purposes; please don't take this as an offence against your cooking" route, because a) even if they think it's completely clean, there's really no guarantee, b) this is pretty short notice for a Christmas event and kind of hard on everyone else.

Could have been handled better on all angles, though - from Barb, LW, and Amy all.

From the LW's side, though, her response also seems a little overboard. I could explain it by just being offended by the manner of the request (demand), probably... but a willingness to make accomodations for invited guests' food requirements at parties seems logical and polite to me, from my experiences as a child. I didn't even have food allergies, but surely everyone knows some people who do?

And the way Barb and the LW present the food prep rules seems to inflate how difficult they would be to follow, to my mind. I mean, you don't have to use a grill or any particular surface that is difficult to de-glutenify to make gluten-free food - you can just say the grilled thing isn't safe but X, Y and Z, which you prepared in dishes and with utensils that went through the hot cycle on the dishwasher, are! It really doesn't seem like such an extraordinary amount of hassle for the host, compared to the whole-kitchen decontam you'd have to do if someone allergic was living with you. Why wouldn't she just pick a few dishes that can be prepared safely to label as such?

Cleaning for a coeliac-safe kitchen is a bit more involved than that? Chopping boards and any porous materials (e.g. wooden spoons) are of particular concern. See e.g. http://angelaskitchen.com/2008/04/16/clean-up-for-a-gluten-free-kitchen/

Cleaning to make the kitchen celiac free is a lot harder than I think Barb or LW really made clear. What Barb is asking for really *isn't* that far out of line (other than contacting other guests, which is), despite the oh-so-shocked reaction of the LW and the ArcaMax commenters, though I bet she phrased it a lot more forthrightly and bluntly than was appropriate. (And I'm chalking that up to new-diagnosis-syndrome.) What Barb ought to be asking for is quite a lot for such short term notice, and may be too much to ask always depending on how good a cook and how good a friend LW is.

Edited 2018-12-09 20:29 (UTC)

It's also an especially bad time of year to make sudden unexpected de-glutening demands. You never know who already has a list of holiday baking planned out, with dates and times arranged to fit events, and is going to have to rearrange or scrap all of it if they have to fit a full decontamination in there.

Nut and peanut allergies, you can adjust what recipes you'll use and when, but fully removing wheat flour dust if someone entertains from scratch? Particularly on short enough notice they've started doing the grocery runs?

You'd practically have to make the request well in advance of Thanksgiving, just on that count.

Yeah, this last-minute demand thing is not cool. Again, though, unless Barb has a history of such behavior (in which case why are you friends with her LW?) I'm blaming the recent diagnosis.

Oh, interesting. This is a lot more than the other dietary concerns I've been exposed to. And that would take some careful thinking and, like, choreography involved in the prep of the food, especially since you probably shouldn't even try to do it at the same time as the other food... it seems terribly unlikely that a big festive meal could be re-jiggered to be completely safe at the last minute like this. You'd have to go back to the planning stage, and possibly further if you need to rethink preparation tools and pots and pans... Barb seems inordinately optimistic about LW's organizational skills as well as how much trouble she'll want to go to.

Yeah, celiac's awful. My guess is Barb is still adjusting to the new normal and thinking things can be the same with a little work.

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Ask Amy:Hosts struggle turning home to gluten-free zone

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