JUNE 5 — It’s too easy to judge people when they state their food preferences, to wrinkle your nose at people saying, “Oh, I don’t take gluten” or “Does this come with a soy milk option?”
That was me until I discovered my genes had gifted me with both an autoimmune and digestive disorder.
It never occurred to me there was a specific reason my mother would never buy me scratchy clothing material or why she never pressured me to finish my starches.
Finish the meat, eat your vegetables, she would say.
Only later when I became an adult I found out the hard way that certain cloth fibres would trigger painful, sometimes debilitating rashes and that apart from meat and most vegetables, eating everything else was a roll of the dice.
Having both psoriasis and intestinal bowel disorder is profoundly annoying but I’m lucky that while there is no cure for either condition, they can be managed by watching my diet, clothing choices and emotional health.
I am also lucky that I can afford to be picky about what I eat or wear. Imagine being someone who can’t.
Bread, for instance, is cheap and filling but I eat it very rarely due to an 80 per cent chance of it ending up with me in bed feeling as though I was being stabbed in the stomach by a thousand invisible assailants.
It seemed silly to me, once, that modern eating establishments catered to so many eating preferences.
Yes, some of it is faddish, and it does irritate me when people who can digest gluten just fine avoid it because some quack wrote a dodgy book.
Now I give people the benefit of the doubt and try to be more accommodating of people’s food choices.
It’s also OK to just not like something for whatever reason — few people are as amusing as the anti-coriander squad.
The upside to the modern fixation with fad diets is when I fill up my plate with meat people will assume I’m going low carb.
No, Deidre, I’m avoiding the alternative which is wishing I was dead after eating something that disagrees with my choices as vehemently as Malaysia’s race supremacists.
What’s not so great is that apparently psoriasis gives me a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes, so I must watch the diet and exercise.
Stress and emotional distress can also trigger both my disorders so I also need to manage those.
In short, like every other human being I really need to be looking after my health.
That goes for all of us really — the human body is a fascinating thing but so much of it is still a puzzling mystery.
Still I’d like to think scientists have a better handle on keeping it in good working order than most.
So the next time you see someone ordering the soy option, allow them their freedom of choice and be grateful we live in a world that facilitates that freedom.
We all have our private struggles, some annoying, some amusing, some really quite sad.
I’ll just be happy that for the most part I’m fairly healthy and hopefully some day that will be a reality for everyone — not just for the people who can afford better healthcare and alternative food or lifestyle choices.
In the meantime, I’ll be pondering the reason why sandwiches are out to get me.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
