must there be a title

One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they've been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody's going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!

You can just happily much on a plant, thinking "ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp", and it wouldn't cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.

This is sitting on the shelf of human experiences riiiight next to people who don’t realize they’re colorblind.

My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”

Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.

i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn't feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.

yeah... turns out it's NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe

STORY TIME!!!!!!!

My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.

It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.

Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”

No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.

One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age... wait... shit... what do you mean it’s genetic?”

It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are. 

They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.

We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.

Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’

I fucking love this family so much.

the uncommon allergy haver to anticapitalist pipeline

in January 2023, companies became required to label sesame on all products it was present in, and undergo rigorous cleaning procedures to prevent sesame contamination, after it was declared the 9th "major" food allergen in the United States.

so, instead of considering this a mandate to give a single shit about people with sesame allergies, almost all American companies decided to just add sesame flour to all their relevant products. because apparently that was cheaper.

it's almost impossible for me to find hot dog and hamburger buns without sesame now. and I am one of the lucky ones. I'm someone who just so happened to notice the label updates, not get caught unawares and have a severe allergic reaction. I'm someone lucky enough to be surrounded by multiple choices of supermarkets, and someone with the incredible privilege to have parents who'll help me search the shelves, and cover those costs that my allergies rack up. not everyone with allergies/other intolerances has all or any of those privileges to begin with.

most food allergies will never be prevalent enough that under capitalism, it will be profitable to give them the level of accommodation that they deserve. I speak from experience with a wide portfolio of hypersensitivity quirks when I say that the rarer the food allergy, the worse it gets.

and here's the thing: I can live without hamburger buns, with only superficial decreases in my quality of life. but sesame isn't my only rare allergy, and ever since this legislation hit, I've been lying awake at night, afraid of what I might lose access to next.

I've been lying awake at night wondering what I'll have to do to live, to obtain enough safe food to survive, if any of my other allergies get this same treatment. and I reiterate. I am one of the privlidged ones.

what these companies have done is completely legal. what these companies did has also cut off up to over a million people from what were previously safe, affordable staples of their diets. a system that has any incentive not to accommodate the dietary needs of any population is not a system that can be allowed to exist. this is the uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anticapitalist pipeline.

English added by me :)

Love the story, love the dance, love the drama

The woman in the video is speaking in Chinese.

Captions in English read:

Mama said that when I was little, after I ate egg custard, I would quietly and peacefully go to sleep. And then once I grew up, after eating egg custard I would get dizzy. After going to the hospital for a check up, turns out I'm allergic to eggs. When I was little I was just directly passing out, fuck.

End captions.

I can't stop laughing omg😭😭😭😭😭😭

Sound on

They're brainstorming anti-spice legislation in the notes 💀

They really are brainstorming away down there. However, I like this note, so I’ll share it. 

“lightcycler:

Anyone even mentioning why you shouldn't do this, has likely stolen food before. There is not a single person alive in their right mind that would risk a food allergy was someone else's meal. Y'all are just trying to justify what you did in the past.”

Wait, hold up. There are actually people out there saying you shouldn't put allergens in YOUR food (even if YOU are not allergic to them) because SOMEONE ELSE may have a reaction and DIE from eating YOUR food??? Without YOUR PERMISSION?!?! Am I getting this right!?!?

as someone with food allergies, can confirm I have never and would never steal someone else's food and risk an allergic reaction. Half the time I won't even eat food made specifically for me if I can't confirm it doesn't contain said allergens. Spice away, friends. Defend your food.

As someone who puts notes upon notes on MY tub of butter or mayo or whatever I keep in the fridge at work and STILL gets BREADCRUMBS in MY tubs from assholes putting a glutened up knife in MY CLEARLY MARKED 'GLUTEN FREE DONT USE ON REGULAR BREAD' jars, I support the ghost pepper lunches. Maybe I should spice up my mayo.

Every person I have ever known with food allergies knows this stupid debate and has agreed on this front: we don't take other people's food. Ever. Even if it's a dish that doesn't normally have X, we can't be sure the prep area wasn't contaminated. Stop using us as the crutch of your argument to justify your theft.

Enjoy your ghost peppered justice.

What you need to understand about people who steal their coworkers' lunches is that they do it for a power trip, and that is why they deserve to get ghost peppered or worse.

I always think back to a coworker from a previous job who had a similar experience at a prior job of his own.

He had dietary restrictions that meant he had to make his own food. Someone kept stealing his lunch. He made his name label bigger. They kept doing it. Sometimes they'd just eat half of his lunch and put the other half back. Sometimes his name label was removed. It was 100% on purpose. He complained to HR/management. Memos went out. It kept happening. He changed where in the fridge he stored his lunch. It kept happening. This fuckface was determined.

So he took matters indy his own hands. One day he made chili, portioned out some for lunch, and added most of a bottle of laxative.

Sure enough, his lunch was stolen again that day. He just waited.

About half an hour after he found his Tupperware bowl empty, the lady in the desk across from his, facing him, suddenly looked up with a D8> expression, leapt to her feet, threw her headset down, and sprinted for the ladies' room.

Only she didn't make it there in time.

She did not come back to work the next day. Or at all, in fact.

Don't whine at me that what he did was in any conceivable way wrong. Office food pirates deserve to get got.

[Video: a tik tok by user @/georgeaosei. In it a black man is sitting in front of a laptop and taking bites out of the food in a carton box next to him. Off screen we can hear horrible coughing as if the person is choking. The caption on screen reads, "When you put a ghost pepper in your lunch to figure out which colleague has been stealing it 🌶". End description.]

People will probably mock this, but once I worked with bugs in an exhibition that offered people the opportunity to handle some and to sample cooked crickets and mealworms, and we had to ask everyone who wanted to eat a bug if they had a shellfish allergy, and it was amazing how many people who were ready to chow down on crickets who actually were allergic and could have gotten hives, been ill, or gone into anaphylactic shock.

The last thing you want is someone getting sick or seriously ill because of something easily preventable that they just didn’t know about.

[Text in image: "FDA says to avoid eating cicadas 'if you're allergic to seafood'

Arman Azad, CNN

Updated 4:11 PM EDT June 2, 2021

Cicadas might seem like a crispy, protein-packed snack, but people with seafood allergies should think twice about eating them, according to the US Food and Drug Administration." End text]

Sometimes I think about how media does us a disservice by only showing a very narrow concept of illness and disability.

Like, Tumblr has laughed at people who thought 'the potato sweats' was something everyone goes through, but that's because that's not normal for you. The only kind of allergies that ever get talked about in movies and TV shows are the severe, immediately life-threatening kind, where your throat closes up and you'll be dead in ten minutes if you don't get an Epi-pen to the thigh. So why would you assume that getting sweaty is an allergic response?

I've talked about the fact that I have a histamine issue before. It's likely MCAS. It's functionally like being mildly to moderately allergic to basically the whole world. I've had low key symptoms at least since early high school (year 7/age 12) onwards. And for years, I just thought I got a lot of colds. Just basically constantly. It couldn't be hayfever, I thought; my family get hayfever, and it happens in spring. Mine was year round.

I was in my mid-twenties when I was diagnosed as having 'non-season-specific hayfever'. I didn't work out histamine intolerance for myself until a couple of years ago (a decade or so later), when a member of disability Twitter talked about having MCAS, and how it was likely connected to their fibromyalgia, and how it was probably correlated with fibro for most people, if not causative of it. And they talked about some of the symptoms, and I thought, huh. I tried a bioflavonoid called quercetin in supplement form (one of the treatments they mentioned), and was able to breathe through my nose without difficulty for the first time in literal years. And I'd been taking two different antihistamines daily for several years at this point.

My sister has started looking into MCAS a little herself, and I put together some resources and links of places to find more information. I would up reading the SIGHI (Swiss Interest Group Histamine Intolerance) symptoms list, and here's some of the random shit this 'pseudoallergic' condition can cause:

Before I changed my diet and reduced the amount of histamine-rich foods, I'd started having acid reflux out of nowhere, on a fairly healthy vegan diet – wasn't eating daily burgers and fries, or anything like that. It was happening near daily for awhile. Post diet change, I've had it maybe three times over the course of a year (likely when I've eaten higher histamine foods, tbh), and nowhere near as badly as I did before.

Histamine intolerance is still fairly new as a diagnosis, so it's not surprising that 0 doctors suggested it. But my point here was that allergies can look like a bunch of different things. One friend's mum didn't realise she was a cœliac until she travelled to Japan and didn't eat bread for basically the first time in her life. She was in her late 60s. One thing her cœliac disease caused was a serious nutritional deficit (I think it was potassium?) She passed out and wound up being hospitalised for it. This is common in allergic diseases, because when your gut's inflamed, it can't absorb nutrients properly.

There are so many examples of public misconceptions of illness and disability, but another one that hit home for me was epilepsy. The only kind of seizure that ever appears in popular media is Grand Mal – the kind with convulsions. So when my boss had an absence seizure in her office, with me the only other person in the building, I did my best, but I had no idea what was going on. My boss was sitting in her office, basically non-reactive for several minutes, and then she was confused and vague for maybe a half hour after that. She'd never told me she had epilepsy; at that point, she said later, she hadn't had a seizure for eight years. Back then, I didn't know there were any other kinds of seizures at all. (My boss was fine, btw.)

And this isn't getting into our usual gripes with the lack of disability rep behind the camera leading to a narrow and inaccurate idea of neurodiversity (especially autism) and disability, leading to things like wheelchair users being hassled because the general public believes – thanks to pop culture – that the only kind of wheelchair user that exists are paraplegics and quadriplegics, and that part-time wheelchair users are clearly 'faking'.

The thing is that yeah, you can always do your own research, but first you have to recognise that something isn't normal. For better and for ill, the media we consume helps set our baseline of normal.

It might be nice if they portrayed a broader concept of normal than they currently do.

Trying not to have a MCAS epiphany loudly in the replies because that's too ironic for this post, but acid reflux can be an allergy symptom?? Tomatoes can be high in histamine?? Premade food has high histamine???? Holy shit that just explained a good portion of My Entire Life Story?

But getting back to the point of the post, yeah I'm hypermobile and that starts to look pretty "normal" . . . since it's largely genetic and it puts you around other hypermobile people since birth basically. Same with migraines. I thought my head hurting all the time was just a sad reality everyone put up with. Not true! I have chronic migraines. People's heads aren't supposed to hurt more than 15 days a month. Most people don't have headaches (headaches! No light sensitivity at all!!) more than a couple times a month, and maybe one or two migraines a year. It's hard to tell when you're mostly around people who do have migraines, because it just is.

There's other things too- adult onset asthma can look like "I cough a lot for some reason." Gastroparesis can look like IBS-C which can look like "I've never had a typical bowel movement in my life so how was I supposed to know something was up?" Sleep apnea happens while sleeping. People think restless leg syndrome and TMJ are these Serious and Complicated Illnesses that a doctor would tell you if you had, but really they just have it and deal with it like anything else and then don't mention it and go undiagnosed.

If I didn't have something that explained why I needed to look into a bazillion things (hypermobility) I'd wonder how people go through life without getting diagnosed with dozens of things.

I dunno, I think it’s less ironic than apropos.

Yeah, I only discovered the acid reflux one recently. Though I also watched a Nutrition Facts video on YouTube about acid reflux, and Dr Greger said that at least one study found that for kids with acid reflux, removing dairy solved it for like 80% of kids, even for kids who hadn’t tested positively for a milk allergy. Which tallies for me with the fact that a lot of MCAS/HI people will react to substances that don’t come up as allergens in tests. (I don’t know if I’d test positively for a milk allergy like my sister did, but I do remember finding my MCAS symptoms easing a little when I first went vegan, and I was convinced then it was the dairy, even though I loved milk.)

I also think it’s interesting that the dietary restrictions I remember my friend with migraines having (alcohol, red wine, chocolate) are also restrictions for MCAS. Which makes me wonder how many different things will wind up being traced back to histamine tolerance for some, if not all, cases.

I’ve also got hypermobility, and I was talking with someone with EDS last year, and they also have the ‘painkillers don’t work right’ problem that I do (which is common for people with ADHD). So many of my weird health issues seem to be linked in with my other weird health issues. Even the fact that I have chronic fatigue ties in with the fact that I have ADHD, for goodness sake. I’m also personally convinced that the reason I have fibromyalgia is because of my hypermobility, since my pain originally was due to my permanently seized muscles, which were trying to compensate for my weak, soft joints.

Like my psych who specialises in autism said early on that she thinks I might be autistic, and one of the several reasons she gave was the fact that I have fibromyalgia, because she’s seen many autistic people with it. And I’ve just remembered that the friend I used to see all the time who also has fibro was diagnosed with autism at some stage in the past five years.

@jackironsides PLEASE EXPLAIN

i also have adhd (possibly autistic,) hyper mobility issues which have given rise to arthritis and chronic pain, as well as semi-regular muscle spasms which are being triggered by my prescribed stretching regimen?! and now i find that my weird immunity to painkillers is *common* to ND people?

what kind of painkillers are we talking, here? NSAIDS, opioids, cocaine derivatives? (i have problems with all three) PLEASE I NEED TO KNOW

@whatdoyoumeanitsnotawesome just an important thing to note, people with hypermobility disorders (including things like EDS) also don’t respond to pain medications or anaesthetic the way they’re supposed to.

It’s a mix of “can’t absorb meds due to gene mutation/connective tissue issues affect absorption rate” and also, in instances of local anaesthetic, our soft tissue is too spongy, so the anaesthetic doesn’t stay in the targeted area and spreads out more, meaning we don’t get the same targeted relief as most other people. I get anywhere from 6-7 shots of carbocaine at the dentist, most of them targeted around the problem area and not just the main jaw nerves, because otherwise the effect will wear off in less than 20 mins. Also local anesthetics with epinephrine in them (used to preserve the drug and make it more effective for most people) get processed out double quick by us, because our bodies are usually overproducing adrenaline anyway.

According to my doctors, anti-inflammatory pain killers work the best for stuff like this. Opioids, from my own experience, don’t do anything. I’m still in pain, I’m just high. I’ve also got MCAS so that complicates what medications I can take without prompting a mast cell degranulation event, which can actually manifest as physical aches and pains long before you reach the stage of anaphylaxis.

For those with fibromyalgia and non-specific chronic pain for which otc treatment and general “diet and exercise” doesn’t seem to work, you might want to look into how pain management works for EDS and look into the specific kinds of physical therapy used. I know the physical treatment they had me doin for fibromyalgia (before I got my hEDS diagnosis) was doing more damage than good because I was constantly over exerting myself, even with the help of a qualified therapist who had my best interests at heart.

The EDS society has some good articles on their website about pain management, for anyone that’s interested.

You know, maybe if we didn’t have such a widespread cultural myth about the “picky eater” and how it’s okay for parents to shove food down their children’s throats for “their own good”, maybe we wouldn’t have as many shitheads who go around tampering with people’s food and drink (giving them food they said they were allergic to, feeding vegans meat and dairy, etc.) for “their own good”. Food for thought.

reading letters from 1818 is wild

“it’s that time of the year when I get colds for no apparent reason again” have some Clairitin hon

But also we’re not becoming allergic to everything nowadays like certain white moms fear. Allergies have always existed. They were just talked about differently

Like “oh clams always ~turn my stomach~”. Or “what a pity he was taken from us at age 5”

“Well we didn’t have all this fancy chronic illness stuff in the Olden Days, what did people do then??”

They died, Ashleigh. 

This is a picture tracking bullet holes on Allied planes that encountered Nazi anti-aircraft fire in WW2.

At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas, because obviously that’s where the ground crews observed the most damage on returning planes. Until Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that this was the damage on the planes that made it home, and the Allies should armor the areas where there are no dots at all, because those are the places where the planes won’t survive when hit. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t.

We have higher rates of mental illness now? Maybe that’s because we’ve stopped killing people for being “possessed” or “witches.” Higher rate of allergies? Anaphylaxis kills, and does so really fast if you don’t know what’s happening. Higher claims of rape? Maybe victims are less afraid of coming forward. These problems were all happening before, but now we’ve reinforced the medical and social structures needed to help these people survive. And we still have a long way to go.

This is one of my favorite anecdotes to show how clever rewording of statistics can make them say the opposite of what they mean:

Every time a state makes riding a motorcycle without a helmet illegal, the number of ER patients seriously injured in motorcycle accidents skyrockets. Every single time.

When you phrase it just right, it makes it sound like it’s more dangerous to ride a motorcycle with a helmet than without one. Of course, the reality is that before those laws, those patients were going to the morgue, not the ER.

That also reminds me of a story from world war 1 where the soldiers started to take their helmets off because more soldiers would come back injured while wearing a helmet. That’s because if they didn’t have a helmet they died.

There has already been a post on environmental sexism but this is just a reminder

But why? Why only plant male trees? Is there some benefit to it or is it just ‘hurr durr male tree good female tree bad’?

Female trees drop seeds, which then have to be cleaned up.

So male trees are more convenient in that regard, but. Pollen. So. Much. Fucking Pollen.

Tree jizz. You can’t unthink it.

[ID: a tweet by Wendi Aarons @WendiAarons "It's Cedar Fever season in Austin. Male cedar trees are releasing a shitload of pollen (that's pollen, not haze in the pic). Allergists are booked, medication's sold out, everyone is sneezing.", the aforementioned pic of tree tops covered in what I foolishly assumed to be mist and a responce by Jessica Price @Delafina777 "have we talked about how cities only plant male trees and there aren't enough female trees to trap pollen and that's one of the reasons everyone's allergies have been getting worse why are you sneezing? tree sexism reality continues to be more absurd than fiction" End ID.]

interesting how when ppl mention they tricked ppl into eating v*gan food under the assumption it was normal food people are fine with it/happy but if you trick a v*gan into eating meat you’re a terrible person and it starts WW3

Both are awful, don't fuck with people's diets.

Honestly “tricking” a regular person into eating a vegan meal isn’t even tricking, it’s food, regular people don’t give a shit whether it has meat in it or not.

if you tell someone it’s meat but it’s actually a soy-based meat alternative it’s tricking. You better hope they don’t have a soy allergy 🙄

yeah i gotta chime in: i’m super allergic to multiple common vegan alternatives in recipes, like coconuts and bananas, so. yeah. i do care if it’s a vegan alternative because I Don’t Know What’s In That. if you serve me, hell, let’s say brownies, i’ll assume that they’re just regular everyday brownies.

and then you tell me they’re vegan and were made with bananas, and i’ve already figured that out because my throat is swelling and i feel like vomiting. and as the op said: some of the most common allergies are to soy and nuts. what if you ‘trick’ someone into eating tofu and it turns out they have an extreme soy allergy?  

the issue has not at all been ‘people want animal products in their food’, the issue was clearly stated to be ‘don’t trick people into eating things they professed to not like, because it can put them in the goddamn hospital’.

Any kind of tricking people with foods is playing with a person’s life.

You can’t know everyone’s allergies, medical conditions, etc

So thats a real asshole move especially when the common alternatives to animal products are also very common allergens.Same thing with tricking people about whether something was made with animal products—dairy is a common allergen and lactose intolerance is rly common.

You can call it a joke all you want but when someone ends up in the hospital following anaphylaxis (if they’re lucky) do you really think it’ll be sufficient or acceptable to look them in the face and say “it was a joke”

Seitan is a common meat substitute, that is similar in texture (when properly prepared) to ground Italian sausage.

It's made entirely out of vital wheat gluten. Pure gluten.

It could KILL my parents.

Same goes for all the other “tricks” people think are funny to pull on people, like decaf/regular coffee, diet/regular soda, milk/soy etc. A lot of people seem to have this mindset that folks COULD eat/drink [food], but they’re just being a “snowflake” or are “prejudiced” against it (like with vegan stuff). I’ve heard of people being hospitalized/near death because some asshole thought they’d be really clever and give someone a different thing because they’d “never know the difference” and then the person had a severe allergic reaction.

Respect peoples’ food choices. Even if it isn’t a life-or-death allergy thing, it’s still a shitty shitty thing to do to someone. And frankly, no one should have to say “I’m deathly allergic to [food]” in order to have their wishes respected. Especially since sometimes people STILL think they’re “just being dramatic” and foist it on them anyway, then act shocked when the person starts choking and gasping for breath.

whats the freaking golden rule everyone learns when theyre six? treat other people how you would like to be treated? you have a fundamental problem if you insist thats how you need to be treated but think theres a loophole that allows you to not be required to treat other people the same way ‘someone feeding me an actual egg telling me its vegan is tantamount to rape, however i feel okay tricking someone into eating seven of the most common deadly food allergens and not telling them it could kill them’ you could, instead, politely ask ‘would you want to try this vegan alternative which i will disclose to you the ingredients of’ next time. the replies might surprise you

Don't interrogate people who need dietary accommodations.

Don't mock people who need dietary accommodations.

Don't get angry at people who need dietary accommodations.

A simple 'sorry, we can't ensure that your needs will be met here' is fine, if cross contamination is unavoidable.

There are countless health conditions that require unique diets. It's not your job to police whether or not people deserve accommodations.

If someone says, [insert food] doesn't make them feel good, then believe them. It costs you nothing to believe them.

And absolutely DO NOT contaminate their food with the triggering item out of spite or to "catch them lying". You're fucking with someone's health or possibly their life.

Not to hijack the weed allergy discourse but also don’t smoke at pride cause if someone has asthma then just the smell of smoke can cause their chests to close up. No amount of inhalers is gonna keep us from being unable to breathe in smoke. Please don’t smoke at pride.

just dont smoke in populated public spaces like period. its common courtesy no one wants your secondhand and there are tons of health conditions that can cause a negative reaction to smoke exposure, plus it just smells nasty. this goes for weed, tobacco products, and your dessert flavored vapes too

“I’ve literally never heard of a corn allergy you people are just being difficult”

I’d never heard of you until you came into my inbox five seconds ago and yet regrettably you exist.

Also “you people”. Really? Really?

Just tell the fuckos it’s a new allergy that exists because of GMOs.

It’s probably true in a more technical sense, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a finger or two can be pointed at Monsanto for some folk’s corn allergy.

It is true for some of us. I am actually allergic to most corn grown in the US because of this exact reason. GMO corn is intended to stand up to liberal pesticide use, which makes it a hardier and more bountiful crop, but it’s the synthetic pesticides (like Monsanto) that triggers my autoimmune problems and makes my cells start to attack each other. I never had a corn allergy till I moved to the US and was exposed to it. My (former) allergist/immunology team were fascinated by it. Potatoes is another thing. Organic potatoes are fine, non-organic ones trigger asthma. It’s wild.

The human body is nothing if not a wondrous catastrophe with two settings, ride or die.

Yanno, if I come across something I’ve never heard of, I usually fucking google it.