Gluten-Free Adventures

I may...or may not...have recently experienced my first full blown gluten reaction. This, kids, is why you listen to the doctors and nutritionists when they tell you that you're going to go off of gluten for 4-6 weeks and then expose yourself and see what happens. That last step is, in fact, important as it turns out. Otherwise when you abruptly experience abdominal pains that last for days, people tend to panic and say things like "it could be all sorts of things" "appendicitis" and "we need a CT scan."

Suffice to say, I have recovered. My insides appear not to have exploded. I even avoided expensive exposure to radiation. But my doctors and I are none the wiser about precisely what happened. If, as I suspect, this was a gluten reaction then my entire side trip into an episode of some medical drama could have been avoided had I actually purposefully exposed myself under more controlled conditions. Now I shall have to wait a sufficient length of time to allay any fears that I am suffering a "relapse" and then go back to the plan of purposefully exposing myself so that I can compare symptoms and find out for sure. There is just some part of the mind that revolts against the concept of penciling into one's calendar "abdominal cramps: 3-7 days" no matter how logical one knows it to be.

On a side issue of the gluten-free adventures--admittedly a more trivial one, I suppose, I've been trying to decide how risky I feel like being about the Scottish oats question. Oats grown in the US are almost always cross-contaminated with wheat unless they come from specific dedicated gluten-free farms & processing plants. Scotland doesn't grow hardly any wheat. So there is far less cross-contamination. And yet people in the gluten-free community get really edgy about actually considering them "safe".

I know that in Scotland there is now certified gluten-free haggis. But you can't import it. US Food Safety gets really touchy about things like ground up sheep lungs for some strange reason. The favored American producer of haggis doesn't do a gluten-free one. But they *do* import their oats from Scotland. So, that makes them a lot less risky than Quaker, but still more risky than Red Mill Gluten-Free Oats. Sigh.

Well, once I actually expose myself to gluten and see once and for all what my reaction is going to be, then I can just try things that are hopefully safe and know afterward whether they were or not. There aren't a lot of foods that I would risk three days of misery and four more of discomfort for, but haggis may well be one of them. What does it say about me that I would rather role the dice on that one than learn to make haggis? Well, if you knew anything about making haggis, you might understand.