Online Ingredient Reading

[jaten]

While browsing (gluten-free) restaurant menus online, I just had one of those...."Why didn't I think of this sooner?" moments, and thought I'd share.

First, let me say, I do not eat out often. CC is a big issue and not often worth the risk to me. But I work out of town and sometimes, like most of you, am in a situation where I don't have my own food with me and have to find something (hopefully safe) to eat. Many chain restaurants have posted ingredient and/or allergen information vs. a strictly gluten-free menu online, right? But geez, reading all that fine print is a huge eye-strain.

• Using your browser's "Find" and "Find Next" feature is useful for online use. (If you're not familiar with this, it's in the "Edit" menu of your browswer). Useful, but not overwhelmingly WOW! because you can't take it with you.
  
• Better still! Save the info and still have wheat etc. pop out. 1) I copy/pasted the ingredient info of a restaurant into MS Word 2) I used Word's "Replace" feature from the Edit menu to automatically find all instances of wheat etc. and replace them with WHEAT In less than 2 seconds, every occurrence of wheat popped off the page for me. Click "Save," and the new eye-catching format for wheat (etc.) remains.
  

Print them, load them to your PDA, whatever method you use, but now I have ingredient listings that don't take 5 minutes/item to read.

Hope this helps someone else. It's funny how those simple "Ah-ha" moments can often make your day. This one did mine