Food follies, gluten-free edition
Astounding ignorance
When our host passed a platter of chicken with rice, another guest warned me, "You can't eat this--it's made with whole wheat rice." Say what?! Here's a person roughly my age who had actually never heard of whole grain/brown rice, and had to be told that there's no wheat in it. I'm still flabbergasted.
Wishful thinking
Another host had previously served dairy lasagna made with gluten-free noodles, but I was taking no chances. "Is this one made with gluten-free noodles?" "Well, it didn't say so on the package, but I'm sure they're all gluten-free." That's like saying that something's kosher just because you want it to be, an attitude that I've encountered before. I ended up picking out all the noodles and eating nothing but the cheese.
Gluten, standing on one foot
This explanation should be comprehensible to many of my Jewish readers: gluten = chametz. Yep, the very same five grains that a Jew is not permitted to eat on Pesach/Passover unless they're rabbinically certified to be free of leavening--wheat, rye, barley, spelt, and oats--are also the grains that contain gluten. (Oats are a borderline case--in theory, they don't contain gluten, but since they're almost always processed with grains that do contain gluten, and/or using equipment that is also used to process grains that contain gluten, one cannot assume that oats are gluten-free unless they're specifically marked "gluten-free.") All of the other grains and "starches," such as rice, corn, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, kasha/buckwheat (which is not actually wheat at all), quinoa, millet, amaranth, etc., are naturally gluten-free.
When our host passed a platter of chicken with rice, another guest warned me, "You can't eat this--it's made with whole wheat rice." Say what?! Here's a person roughly my age who had actually never heard of whole grain/brown rice, and had to be told that there's no wheat in it. I'm still flabbergasted.
Wishful thinking
Another host had previously served dairy lasagna made with gluten-free noodles, but I was taking no chances. "Is this one made with gluten-free noodles?" "Well, it didn't say so on the package, but I'm sure they're all gluten-free." That's like saying that something's kosher just because you want it to be, an attitude that I've encountered before. I ended up picking out all the noodles and eating nothing but the cheese.
Gluten, standing on one foot
This explanation should be comprehensible to many of my Jewish readers: gluten = chametz. Yep, the very same five grains that a Jew is not permitted to eat on Pesach/Passover unless they're rabbinically certified to be free of leavening--wheat, rye, barley, spelt, and oats--are also the grains that contain gluten. (Oats are a borderline case--in theory, they don't contain gluten, but since they're almost always processed with grains that do contain gluten, and/or using equipment that is also used to process grains that contain gluten, one cannot assume that oats are gluten-free unless they're specifically marked "gluten-free.") All of the other grains and "starches," such as rice, corn, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, kasha/buckwheat (which is not actually wheat at all), quinoa, millet, amaranth, etc., are naturally gluten-free.
posted by Shira Salamone at 10:06 AM
2 Comments:
do you ever read these posts over to yourself? Wow, are you judgmental. So, in the case of the rice, someone was trying to be helpful and you're flabbergasted at their ignorance. I'm flabbergasted at your attitude.
Good point. And so soon after Yom Kippur. :( Being judgmental is definitely a fault of mine that I have to work on.
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