Monthly Archives: July 2008

If you’re in America, then this could be a very useful giveaway: Triumph Dining are offering free American Dining Cards until the end of August.

The concept of a card that you can show to the chef to explain your dietary issues isn’t new, and I’ve talked before about the Multi-Lingual Phrase Passport book series.

I wasn’t aware of these before, though, and they do look very useful.  There are cards available for 10 different cuisines: American, Chinese, French, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, and Vietnamese.  (It’s the American ones that are available for free).

Each card is specific to its cuisine. For example, the Japanese card prohibits imitation crab, soy sauce, and tempura, while the Mexican card prohibits flour tortillas, and each covers the common and hidden sources of gluten. Did you know that:

the most common hidden source of gluten in Chinese food is soy sauce, in Thai food it’s fish sauce, and in Indian food it’s a spice called hing.

(I’d never even heard of hing, until I looked it up – I know it as asafoetida.)

And apparently the cards are also multi-lingual. Now that is useful.

The giveaway deal is exactly that – a free card. No doubt they’re hoping that you’ll then buy more. However, there’s more. I quote:

The purpose of this give-away is to raise money for Celiac Disease Awareness. If we get 15,000 people to sign up for free dining cards, Triumph Dining will make a $10,000 donation in support of a national celiac disease awareness campaign. When we hit our goal, we’ll ask you and the gluten free community to help us decide which […]

Another allergy alert today – Morrison’s own brand of beans and sausages (Bettabuy Beans and Sausage, 425g, all dates) contain undeclared gluten.

They’ve nofified the Food Standards Agency, and have withdrawn the products from sale, as well as posting notices in the shops.

We wouldn’t have bought these, since I know that hardly any sausages are gluten free. I rely on Heinz, who explicitly put Gluten Free on their tins of baked beans and sausages. But Heinz are more expensive, and I suppose it is possible that someone will have looked at the label to see if it declared the presence of gluten – and when it didn’t, put it in their shopping basket.

If you bought them, then don’t eat them if you are coeliac.

Amazingly, German researchers from the Johann Heinrich von Thunen Institute in Braunschweig, have shown that high CO₂ levels in the atmosphere lead to wheat crops with less gluten.

This is because CO₂ disrupts nitrogen uptake by the plants, and this in turn causes the protein deficiency.  See the New Scientist blog for more.

As the New Scientist points out, this rise in CO₂ is also a contributing factor in the global rice shortages, so it isn’t good news for coeliacs. (Or for anyone …)

Plus, of course, the fact that there is less gluten doesn’t mean that there is no gluten present – so the future wheat crops won’t be any safer for coeliacs to eat.

The New Scientist suggests that farmers could opt to grow genetically modified wheat varieties capable of producing higher than normal gluten yields. We all know how unpopular that will be round here …

Of course, some people have suggested that we could have genetically modified wheat that contains no gluten. I can’t really see that going down well either, whether with the anti-gm movement, or with those people who are both wheat and gluten intolerant.

So there isn’t good news here – but it is alarming, isn’t it, how widespread the impact of climate change will be?