Posted in Uncategorized on 06/01/2010 02:39 pm by Laurel
Houghton College has signed on a new food service company, here at the end of the year, and we are all celebrating! The old one was fine if you can eat anything, but they made very few concessions for special diets and were often not even pleasant about it. I would listen to parents telling about the special meals prepared for celiacs at their student’s school and try not to feel bitter about Esther’s cooking for herself in the tiny kitchen in her dorm and eating alone in her room, or subsisting on multiple pieces of fruit on weekends when the kitchen did not cook gluten-free pasta or make rice. She abandoned meat altogether, since they could not cook her anything plain.
She called today to say how great the new food service was, how they came looking for her and asked her to come in and talk to them about her needs. They promised to cook her plain meat, and whatever she needed, because they did not want her to go hungry. I could have cried for sheer thankfulness, remembering all the days she has done just that. For the couple dozen special needs diets on campus, life just got a whole lot better!
Posted in Uncategorized on 05/08/2010 10:52 am by Laurel
A friend passes on piles of women’s magazines to me after she is finished (she’s a grandmother who supports her grandchildren’s fund-raising efforts conscientiously), and I love the luxury of skimming through them, spending as much time or as little as I want, since I did not pay for the subscription. The recipes and the features on fashion and home-decorating are great, but mostly I like the glimpse of trends and ideas in society– those magazines provide a graph line of modern opinion on everything from health, to world-perspectives, to child-raising.
In the latest pile of February-April, an interesting thread emerged. Every single one of those magazines contained an article about or recipes for gluten-sensitivities. I have to say, “It’s about time!” considering that statistics say 1 in 100 people are now being affected by celiac disease to some extent.
Most obviously the rise in gluten sensitivities is caused by the saturation of wheat-based products in our diet, but there also seems to be a genetic trigger– though it isn’t confined to any race or age or gender– and any number of other unidentified environmental factors. An article in the Saturday Evening Post (March/April) suggested the “hygiene hypothesis” that is linked to the rise of other allergies and asthma. Basically it says that our obsession with cleanliness has hindered our immune systems in the long run. That, coupled with the over use of antibiotics, has left us vulnerable to environmental and dietary sensitivities.
It makes a lot of sense to me. And it joins in the rousing cry for a simpler lifestyle: plenty of physical activity and fresh air, eating natural whole foods, living at a slower pace, building relationships with other human beings, and sleeping the night through with peaceful dreams.
