Allergies and Intolerances, missed opportunities?

In our family we have multiple food allergies (Blueberries, Bananas, Fake Sugars, etc) and a child with Milk Soy Protein Intolerance (MSPI). Why does this matter at all? For one thing restaurant's and fast food joints are missing out on our business. If we can't identify at least one product on the menu that our MSPI child can eat, we don't eat at the location.

The typical scenario goes something like this;

My wife or I are too tired to cook something for dinner. We would consider going out, but since none of the local restaurant's or food joints can tell us whats in their products we can't go to them. Instead, one of us sucks it up and makes something for dinner.

It would be easy enough for most food chains to at least provide the information that we need to make our decision (the government makes all those primary manufactures distribute ingredient lists with their products). Simply take the listing on all of the primary ingredients used and cross reference it with the top 10 allergies and intolerances, then use that information to generate a listing.

In fact, a few companies already do this; Yum Foods places ingredient listings for all of their companies (A&W, KFC, Long John Silvers, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell) as a downloadable word document (as long as you have MS Word installed your ok) and Churches Chicken places a listing of "Potential Food Allergens" on their website:

Unfortunately, all that this does is make it known to us that we can't eat at these locations (notice that Milk or Soy is in just about everything).

What these companies fail to realize is that they are missing out on a very large market share of people that would become buyers if they could. It is a well known fact that most families will eat out 2-3 times a week when there is a provider of foods that they enjoy near by.

For an Allergy Aware family this drops down dramatically (about once a month if not less). Why, simply no one wants little Billy barfing all over the place or worse yet having to make a mad dash to the hospital because their peanut allergic child ate fries cooked in peanut oil.

Many establishments have changed their cooking oils to a Vegetable Oil instead of Peanut Oil, but this only resolves one of the major allergy groups. Most Vegetable Oil contains Soy and even though "common belief" is that Soy Oil doesn't contain active proteins that affect MSPI individuals, it does in many cases (it all depends on what protein your allergic/intolerant to).

There are some solutions though, if food providers would switch to using Canola Oil or Vegetable Oil that doesn't contain Soy this would take care of many of their products. In the listing from Churches anything marked X** (in the Soy column) would be safe for my child to eat (as long as it doesn't have Dairy in it).

Up till this point I've talked about my family and our points of view. The fact is that we are strong members in Allergy and Intolerance groups online and in our community and we hear the same stories over and over again.

We are taking a trip to [Insert Destination] and would like to know where we can eat along the way. Our family has the following list of allergies/intolerances: [listing]

The group then has several responses depending on the listing of allergies/intolerances. If, say for example, only peanuts are listed you will see many locations listed. If MSPI, Milk, or Soy are listed then the listing is usually in the range of "your screwed unless you know specifics".

There are some good restaurants out there though. Best in show (in my mind at least) is Texas Roadhouse. We have been to Texas Roadhouse's across the country, and the story is always the same:

We tell the waiter/ress that we have a son who is allergic to Milk and Soy (always followed by some sort of what does he eat dialog). He/She realizes that since Texas Roadhouse makes ALL of its food on site they can accommodate the issue and we place our very specific order for the youngest on a separate ticket so it gets attention: child's Steak no Seasoning AT ALL, Steamed Veggies with no Oil/Butter, Side Salad with vinaigrette (please check the oil type first and let us know) and Juice.

The food always comes exactly as we ask for it, and we have never had a problem. This means that when we go out, we eat at Texas Roadhouse. We spend a LOT of money there, and we tip our Waiter/ess and the cooks very well (usually in the range of $15 since we are a family of 4 on our $30-40 ticket).

If you think we are crazy, just remember, its the only place in town we can go out to eat. Problem is, we would love to be able to go out to more places and have a few fast food joints added to our listing.

Enough ranting for now, hopefully someone up the food-chain reads this and understands what I mean :).


- Jeremy

Smile, it makes people nervous?

I've heard this time and time again, and truth be told I don't agree with it one bit. In fact, I'd say that you have two choices in this world; Laugh or Cry. I find that when I smile at someone their reaction varies. They either smile back or wonder what crazy scheme I have up my sleeve.

This, I use to my advantage. Any time I walk into a meeting (client, internal, personal, any meeting) I try and remember to smile. If I don't get a pleasant response I walk back out of the room and try it again. Usually after the third try people are smiling back at me or laughing because they can't figure out the joke.

If their is a party in the room that still doesn't get it, I hit them with a comment such as "Did I kill your dog in a previous life or something?" After a very bad experience I stay completely away from statements like "Who died?" You can fill in the blanks on that one.

By this point they have figured out that I'm going to be happy even if they are not. This has worked to my advantage on many occasions and only once has it got me into "Sensitivity Training" (apparently one member of the room though I was "too flirty", my though is screw them).

Many clients and people that I've heard referred to as close minded or strong willed suddenly become open to suggestions and interested in what you have to say. Obviously if your so happy all of the time you must be doing something right.

This isn't to say that I'm always happy, quite to the contrary I find myself aggravated or disappointed especially when I fail to make a connection with a person. Many times when I feel the worse is when I put this practice to work the most. Getting the people around you to enjoy their day will most times improve your own view of how your day is going.

After all, if you can't laugh about something then you simply have no choice but to cry about it and no one likes a cry baby :).

Mac's Blackberries, and more... OH MY!

So, I'm up to day 3 (or 4 depending on how you count) at Barkley. I must say I'm more than impressed with the company overall. There are few companies that you walk into on your first day and it feels like you have been their forever. There are even fewer that after a few days have past you really feel like your at home walking into the office. Barkley is one of those few, making you feel at home immediately and giving you a growing sense of that feeling over time (at least so far).

But, thats not what this is about. On Monday we got our laptops. These are lean and mean machines, duo core Mac based on the Intel processor, or at least thats what they tell me. Honestly I don't know how MS can compete with this so far. It's running a Windows distro faster than any of my machines at home and stability is really amazing.

Thats not to say I haven't had problems, oh boy have I had problems. To start getting Lazarus and other tools I'm used to installed has been anything but fun. In fact its been a hair removal process from hell. I now have almost everything installed and running, but can't figure out how to build any Lua or SDL applications and get them to run :(. Oh well, its not exactly part of my day job so IT isn't going to make the pain go away anytime soon, I'll fight it out and figure it out.

Yesterday (Tuesday) we got our Blackberries. This is one of those phones that comes with everything but a roll of toilet paper, and I'm pretty sure thats an option that you can get for it. Honestly, I hate this thing. It has more buttons and options then you can shake a stick at, it vibrates all the time (Voice calls, e-mail, text message, the time of day) and I can't figure out how to change it back to the default look and feel that they taught me how to use in class. Don't ask me how I managed to get it to a different look and feel, I don't know, all I know is nothing is where its supposed to be.

Thats enough ranting for now, look for more in the future.

- Jeremy