it is the largest octopus ever recorded
Originally posted by Chris to http://photodingus.m0unds.net via email.
it is the largest octopus ever recorded
Originally posted by Chris to http://photodingus.m0unds.net via email.
it is the largest octopus ever recorded
Originally posted by Chris to http://photodingus.m0unds.net via email.
the title says it all. food allergies are annoying as hell. i’m allergic to eggs, but it took me a long time to realize it. for years, i’d regularly have lots of bouts of stomach problems and always assumed it was related to stress, until i realized that every single bout of discomfort followed eating something with eggs in it.
my allergy is pretty mild, i just get sick to my stomach, feel hot, feel a little short of breath and then after cramping and stuff subsides (after dosing myself with pepcid or something) i feel like my innards are bruised for around a week after. it’s not pleasant, but accidental exposure has yet to kill me or anything. it took a long while for me to get used to checking labels for eggs, and realizing that in a lot of cases, when a company prints food allergies, they will leave eggs out of the bolded text. that means i have to actually read whole ingredient statements to ensure i’m not going to unwittingly eat some eggy deliciousness and feel like death for a few days.
there is an upshot to this particular food allergy though- a *lot* of the stuff with egg ingredients in it is really unhealthy. things like hot pockets, mayonnaise, salad dressings, pastries, doughnuts, lots of pies, quiche, most everything served at denny’s, pancakes, waffles, candy bars with nougat, TONS of stuff. by being forced to cut egg ingredients out of my diet, my diet improved a lot, i’ve lost a lot of weight and i do generally just feel better. i think that last part is twofold – one is obvious, no eggs in my diet, i feel less shitty. the other part is that i eat fewer shitty things, so my body is happy more often.
aside from the obvious, it also has some negative factors to it as well. i’ve never been a huge dining out kind of person, but the lack of allergen disclosures from many restaurants, and unwillingness for lots of bigger places to disclose whole ingredient lists makes me too nervous to want to eat at any more than a few trusted places. state and local governments all over the country have been worrying about trans fats (which very few companies still use as an additive anyway due to all the negative press) outright banning their use, but totally neglecting encouraging restaurants to disclose common food allergen ingredients on menus or in other easily visible places. this is also irritating as all hell to me, and i’m sure to others with allergies significantly more severe than mine (nut allergies especially, since those seem to cause analphylaxis reactions pretty frequently…)
on saturday, catherine and i went to jason’s deli. i’m not a huuuge fan of jason’s, but i do like some of the things they serve, especially the vegetarian sandwiches and whatnot. i ordered some zucchini grilled panini type sandwich on whole wheat bread because it sounded awesome. ordinarily, i’d consult my phone and look up their allergen chart and double-check that it’s safe. reading what they stated was on the sandwich – red pepper hummus, muenster cheese, zucchini, tomatoes, i figured i’d be alright and didn’t bother to look. when our food arrived at our table, i had a moment of apprehension and consulted the allergen chart on my phone. it indicated eggs as an ingredient for this particular meal. i was dumbfounded and annoyed. i investigated further and noticed that the bread of all things was the culprit.
in all the years catherine and i have been grocery shopping to avoid egg ingredients, we only really encountered eggs in bread a handful of times:
- gluten free bread (duh, eggs are a binder here)
- sweet bread (duh again)
- croissants and other flaky breads (duh once more)
so ultimately, by dumb luck, i happened to check jason’s allergen guide, only to find out that i could have made myself sick eating a sandwich that seemed totally innocent and free of eggy-ingredients.
yup. food allergies suck.