In-laws toy with woman's food allergy in horrifying letter to agony aunt

Because you are an awesome hostess with the mostest!

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It went away after 6 months. But then he got bit again. Its hanging around this time. But currently the strength of the reaction has tapered. Its currently “digestive” rather than anaphylaxis. Which is a good sign.

Its not all meat though. The allergy is specific to a carbohydrate in non-primate mammal muscle. So birds, fish, reptiles and cannibalism are still on the table.

We serve him a lot of duck and quail. Cause that motherfucker is sick of chicken.

Little bit. Some good science indicating thats a factor. But such sanitation is at least a century old. So it doesn’t account for the very recent spike in food allergy occurence. Especially specific food allergies (like nuts).

That’s increasingly pegged to medical advice starting in the 70’s and default by the 90’s advocating parents avoid exposing kids to common food allergens till a pretty late age. On the theory that early exposure was correlated with higher allergy rates. Unfortunately it kind of works the other way.

And then there have been some other specific causes. Like proliferation of lone star ticks upping the incidence of serious meat allergies. And taken together they account for rising rates. The rest is mostly awareness and better diagnosis.

Buuuuut the crash diet industry and alt med has locked in on a bunch of different foods as the devil the last 20 years. Think the gluten free fad. And they’ll frequently point to allergies as proof or label the mystical bad an allergy. So allergies were sort of a bunk fad for a long while. With lots of spurious allergy diagnoses from spurious medical practitioners, impossible allergies, and magic allergy cures or treatments floating around.

And there’s always been a bunch of people who will situationally invent allergies. Its not uncommon to see people advocate claiming an allergy to get something. Like if you don’t like a food you should tell people you have allergy to make sure they don’t serve it to you. I’ve known people who say you should tell restaurants that you have an allergy, because then they have to make everything fresh and pay more attention so you’ll get more for your dollar and better service. Working in the restaurant business we ran into a lot of people who would order, eat their entire meal. Then at the end throw a fit claiming they had an allergy and demand to be comped. Invariably that person showed up again, did the same thing with the same dish. But claimed a different allergy.

When I was a bartender I met people who were allergic to crunch. Allergic to browned food. Allergic to steak less than well done. Allergic to the onions in this dish, but not the identical onions in that dish. People allergic to sounds. People allergic to organic produce and “oriental stuff”.

That trend has tapered off. But it made a lot of people dangerously dismissive of food allergies and some other dietary needs in general. Which is why you see things like people with celiac pushing back on the gluten fear fad hard. Awareness is higher, labeling (somewhat) better and anyone with dietary restrictions has better options now. But paradoxically the way that’s happened often makes things significantly more dangerous. Before options were limited and you had to a lot of explaining. But you could be sure and people were more likely to believe you.

One of the reasons its important to call out horse shit.

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Shooting someone to “teach them a lesson” about the survivability of gunshots is still the malice of shooting someone. Just because the perpetrator of a crime is unwilling to acknowledge the scientific medical reality of the consequences of their action doesn’t alter the harm they’re inflicting.

I don’t give a shit if some willfully ignorant asshole claims they don’t believe in the reality of the danger in which they’re putting me.

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that individual’s stance just made zero sense (beyond just being a dick).

The biggest PITA allergy I find as a cook is lactose. Because it takes butter away from me as the chef and yes it sends me into fits internally. But it’s not that big of a deal. Many oils are completely interchangeable, and I use such copious amounts of butter it’s probably best I cut back :slight_smile:

But the idea that there are allergy enthusiasts making it up is just preposterous…and I am glad action was taken against that user at this point.

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Once is an accident.

Twice is suspicious.

“Since then, most meals we have shared at my in-laws’ house have had very limited options for me. Somehow, they manage to find a way to add mushrooms to almost everything.” and “They even added mushroom powder to the mashed potatoes at one holiday dinner.” is malevolence and IMO criminal.

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Here’s a great interview with a leader in the field. The interview starts at the 7 minute mark. It’s over an hour but full of fascinating information.

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You misunderstand. OF F*****G COURSE it is deliberate!
I called it “criminally irresponsible ignorance” because it’s not a deliberate murder attempt since they are CERTAIN that she’s lying (thus the ignorance) and that it won’t hurt her (thus the irresponsibility). It would still be criminal if they actually had managed to poison her, unless the local judge is an ignoramus of the same order.

Here’s a link to another testimonial of an otherwise nice grandma who kept trying to poison her grandkids. https://www.reddit.com/r/JUSTNOMIL/comments/67cdtp/allergies_arent_real/ Check the OP responses in the comments for clarifications on the old woman’s state of mind

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Really? I couldn’t find anything refuting it. Not saying it wasn’t a hoax but I just haven’t seen anything.

FWIW, Celiac Disease is far more common in women than men. Autoimmune disorders, in general, affect women way more often than men.

ETA: I want to apologize for my tone. I realize this comment may have read to others differently than I heard it in my head. I do not mean to be direspectful to @manybellsdown.

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I’m not saying it’s not entertaining or well-crafted fiction. But if you’re talking about Slate’s roster of “Dear Whoever” columns—now about 70% of its total word count—then it’s almost certainly fiction.

And when it’s not, it’s worse. Depressingly, Slate started moving towards a dozen little advice column clones in 2013 immediately after then-“Prudence” Emily Yoffe wrote her most successful column ever, blaming college rapes on college women getting drunk. Straight up “keep an aspirin between your knees” stuff, and not for the first time, either. And by “successful” I mean it generated a million outrage-clicks. Immediately afterwards, “Prudence” got her own little link-box in the center column of their front page.

Not begrudging anyone their click-through guilty pleasures. But I feel dirty even going to slate.com now, not least because they’ve really gone whole hog with the sexy clickbait “advice.” Surprisingly, it turns out there is such a thing as having too much contempt for your audience.

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Geeze, i presume he either lives out in the country, he works outside or does he hunt? All 3?

Also Ashkenazi Jews.

To the point where if you’re Jewish. And you’re lactose intolerant, you have to get tested for celiac.

Genetics is fun.

The current iteration is really perfunctory. Its always been a column more about shocking headlines than anything else. But there’s about 0 content these days.

The advice column is now manned by one named person again but it comes in 14 flavors many of them subscription only.

Their other material remained high quality until fairly recently. They’ve had a number of recent labor disputes that chased off their best writers and editors. Most recently earlier this year.

But the mushroom story comes from The Cut’s Dear Polly which is a much better grade of advice column with no reputation for publishing nonsense.

We all live in the country. I found a 2 foot long field rat sleeping in my barbeque a couple weeks back.

He works for an excavation company as a foreman and machine operator. Part of his job is staking out work sites for the surveyors before brush gets cut down. He twice stumbled into nests of lone star tick nymphs doing that, 80 bites the first time over 300 the second.

Weird thing about those things is they’ll feed on humans during every life stage, and they basically breed in big piles. Multiple couples laying eggs massed together under a plant, so you get these like balls of tick nymphs and if you step in one you get many, many bites.

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Did not know that. However I know it’s common in Italians; particularly northern. My friends who are celiac all dream of moving there. You get all kinds of time off and they offset the cost of the specialized food. Every place I’ve eaten at (aside from little bars or sandwich places) had a “free-from” menu.

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Is there any evidence that these stories are even real? I mean, with 7 billion people in the world you can always find an instance of someone doing something crazy, so everything is plausible. Whatever form of crazy is takes to do something evil and nuts, there are a some handful of people out there that could hypothetically do it.

The issue is that anyone can also just lie and make up shit. So we have rare events being publicized as if they are normal, or simply false events being spread in the same way, and your stupid monkey mind treats it all like someone in the house next door is doing this because 1 in 1,000,000 means absolutely nothing to a brain designed to only ever know or think about a few hundred people.

I just see shit like this and worry that anyone can basically tell any story, and it if it is vaguely plausible, you can’t just filter it out as bullshit like you can if a crazy person tells you about the UFOs. Our natural instinct is to just belief stuff we agree with, and doubt stuff we don’t. It is easy to doubt or believe a story like this with no evidence, with the only thing pushing you in one direction or the other simply being what you want to believe.

This is all harmless when talking about crazy dating stories, but this same problem is the reason why Q Anon and Pizzagate exist, when you follow it to the crazy conclusion.

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I’ve had people do it to me, both accidentally and on purpose because ‘they don’t believe that onion allergies exist’. When I have talked to friends with food allergies they always have stories about that one person who doesn’t believe them.

Even if some of these published stories are fake, deliberate poisoning happens often enough to be a known problem.

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Its one of many genetic disorders that are really common among Ashkenazi Jews. They spent a big chunk of their history genetically isolated from the broader population, and there was a certain population bottleneck in the 30’s and 40’s.

Tay Sachs is probably the most famous example, but there’s a whole host of shit my Jewish friends gotta watch out for.

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11th-doc-this|nullxnull

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Umm, I’m not sure if that’s what you meant - please tell me it is not. I do not think it is entirely preposterous. Coeliac disease (gluten sensitivity) is a real allergy. But many of the people wanting to follow a gluten-free diet because they think it is bad for them and claiming in eateries that they are allergic to gluten are indeed making it up. They have horribly blurred the lines between real and serious medical conditions and fashionable dietary trends. Like the boy who cried wolf. People with genuine coeliac disease find it more difficult to be taken seriously, sometimes, as a result.

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There’s a case to be made that peanut allergies are a freaking pain in the neck. Peanuts are a classically cheap way of provding protein. (Almond butter is, AFAIK, far more expensive).

And yet, it’s lethal at tiny doses.

I had a nasty allergy to brazil nuts. Probably still do. But brazil nuts are easy enough to avoid. Especially if you don’t partake in opportunities to try trail mix and read ingredients.

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I suppose that celiac sensitive persons might find it easier to shop-- provided that things are labeled accurately-- and not labeled so as to profit from trends.

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