Care in household food labeling

[trents]

I'm sure many of you are in the situation where a celiac is living (and eating) in the same house with non-celiacs. 

Last night I was reminded of how important it is in these situations to extra care in packaging/labeling foods in such a way that celiacs don't accidentally consume gluten containing foods that may look very much like their gluten free counterparts.

My wife made a batch of biscuits using wheat flour for herself this week and also made a batch of gluten free biscuits for me. They looked almost exactly the same after coming out of the oven! She put each batch in a zip lock bag but wrote her name with a sharpie on her bag. She also told me where she was storing hers and where she was storing mine to keep them physically separate. However, I was only half listening. I'm sure that never happens in your home!

So about 9:30 PM I got the hungries and a saw this ziplock bag of biscuits on the kitchen counter and I just had to have them. In my haste to satisfy my hunger I failed to notice that my wife's name was written on the baggy. I took a couple out and spread some jam on the top. Down the hatch. They were delicious! I thought to myself, "Boy! These gluten-free flour mixes are getting better and better. 

About 20 minutes later my wife noted that her biscuit baggy was somewhat depleted and then it dawned on both of us that I had been glutened and not just a little bit. We went to bed but about three hours later my body began to purge itself of the gluten invasion from both ends. 

The lesson from this experience is that extra pains need to be taken with visual clues to distinguish gluten containing foods from non gluten containing foods in the fridge and cupboards, especially if they look alike. I have asked my wife to put food coloring in my biscuits from now on.

[cyclinglady]

Wow!  I missed this.  

I am sorry that this happened to you.  I like the idea of putting food coloring in your food.  

[kareng]

We use red for gluten free- so a piece of red tape or red pen calls out attention to things.  But mostly everything is gluten-free 

[GFinDC]

You can also try putting all gluten-free foods on the top shelf of the refrig.  Or get a separate dorm size refrig for your gluten-free items.

[Ennis-TX]

This is the kind of nightmare that made me move to a dedicated gluten free house. Seriously some of those incidents left me with PTSD and I am still paranoid and have some odd habits.

[trents]

On 11/26/2019 at 4:35 PM, GFinDC said:

You can also try putting all gluten-free foods on the top shelf of the refrig.  Or get a separate dorm size refrig for your gluten-free items.

The problem with this is it requires the cooperation of everyone in the house and total consistency or it becomes unreliable and risky. 

[Ennis-TX]

Amusingly this is inspiring me to write up a new post about managing in a shared environment.