Three Revelations about Living Gluten Free

Being diagnosed as having Celiac Disease was the best thing ever to happen for my sympathy quotient. By which I mean the aggregate of personal afflictions which determines the condolence felt by your peers, where eg. 0 means you're perfect (and everyone probably hates you for it), and n means you're missing several limbs (and people love you despite it). Clearly, there's an ideal quotient in there where your life isn't particularly hampered, but your friends feel strongly for your trials. And I suspect that Celiacs are close to this golden number.

My cynicism comes from both the putative contention that not eating gluten is a great nutritional challenge, and the phenomenon of a great deal of people voluntarily going gluten free, for health (and possibly stylistic) reasons. I'm going to risk my sympathy quotient here to challenge both ideas.

When I was first diagnosed (pity! alms! backrubs!), my physician went all serious, looked me in the eye, and told me I was in for a trial. "Eating gluten free is...<pause>...hard" he said.

Revelation 1: It's really easy to not eat gluten.

His tone scared me. I wondered: "Has a long and halcyon period in my life suddenly ended? Is this act three?" I thought about Jacob, and The Man in the Iron Mask, and Joaquin Pheonix, and how they could all drown the sorrow of their fates by eating a cinnamon bun, or perhaps some really crusty baguette. Solitude is, after all, best palliated by eating starch.

Dr. Scarypants, however, was being over-dramatic. Gluten is in flour, and flour is generally found in things that are floury. Does the food you are scrutinizing seem "bready", ie. is it composed of (fucking delicious) light chewiness that sticks together as if by magic, or at least by the bonding aptitudes of proteins? ("Glutinous" is both evocative and etymologically pertinent) Then it probably has gluten in it. Don't eat it, unless you are doing this just to join the gluten-free-feeling-good club, in which case, you should eat it and like it. But if you must abstain, then take heart:

Revelation 2: Lots of food doesn't have gluten in it.

In fact, most of it doesn't. Put that in your blue steel bad news stance and vogue it, Dr. Scarypants. Eat the rest of the food groups (that's at least 75%), and indeed, in the grains quarter, eat GF varieties, like quinoa. Quinoa is delicious, and on the subject on health trends, it is soaking in positive vibes. It is the golden grain of the Incas, cruelly disregarded in favour of the domestication of maize, which has been incestuously bred to embarrassing, elephantine proportions. Give the black sheep grains some love; it will probably up your sympathy quotient.

And then there's rice. Sweet, unpretentious, ubiquitous rice: you are way better on the earth than soybeans (but you do drink a lot of water). Celiacs (and GF trendsters) should all take a break in Asia--you will come home sated and happy, feeling no malice for the cruel porridge-packing West. Rice can even yield flour, and the odd enterprising alt-baker creates all sort of rice-powered, gluten free breads and confections. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all. Rice flour, being without gluten, is--surprise--utterly not glutinous. So what you get when you bake rice bread is a maddeningly brittle slab of dryness, which tends to crumble into matzo meal before you get it to your mouth. Believe me, I have tried quite a few of them. I tried a few more after my trip, and with the clarity that a gluten free odyssey allows, I came to

Revelation 3: Bread is made from flour.

It just is. There is no "rice bread", just as there is no tofurkey; there are merely (fragile) cakes made from rice, turkey-shaped tofu steaks, dealchoholized fermented malt, rabbi-checked vegetarian sushi, etc. Which isn't to say that you or I shouldn't eat and enjoy any of these mashups. But perhaps we should be thinking of them as alternatives, rather than replacements, lest we get completely egalitarian. Because, look: the chief function of bread in our culture is to act as a tasty horizontal platform on which to pile all sorts of deliciousness. If you attempt a Bumsteadian tower on a piece of rice bread, you will end up with crumb-casserole. It just doesn't work the same way, and I have come to realize that the short period of my life where I was trying to substitute (rice-) crabapples for juicy (flour-) oranges was making me feel like an impostor peering into a happier world; a club-footed troll trying to run with gazelles. (I suspect that one would encounter similar results from carving a thanksgiving tofurkey, or attempting to enjoy kosher kappa maki. But I shouldn't generalize) No longer. Celiac siblings: life is not that different for us than the rest of them. Just don't eat bread.

So why the solidarity from the breadies? "You can't eat gluten? I stopped eating wheat a month ago, and I feel great!" Right: wheat is out, hunger strikes are in. But are you really trying to make an empathic connection, or was that a just a trick to shift the conversation over to you? And how often do you hear: "You're a cleptomaniac? I stole a watch last thursday!" or "You have Tourette's? I love swearing at people!" Not so much! It only works if it's hip (and socially condoned). And health trends bedamned: it's not trendy if it's a congenital disease. We like to watch you eat bread the way elderly couples rhapsodize about young love. Don't deny us our voyeurism.

What I end up not getting to eat--mainly at work (where my sympathy quotient is definitely the highest)--are pizza, burgers, hot dogs and teatime treats. Which I miss, but I'm probably better off without. Indeed, trendsters, I am persuaded to think that it might be that which is what is piled, melted, baked on top of bread, which is the principal agent of ill health, if any. What I'm trying to say is: bread is a delicious gift for you normal people. In the interest of best health practices, I reckon that there are plenty of more toxic agents out there from which one might flirt with abstention. In the interest of asceticism, one's sympathy quotient would likely be boosted higher by giving up liquor, or Facebook, or Lost.