It’s Food Allergy Awareness Week!

May 14-20, 2023 is Food Allergy Awareness Week. We’re proud to be an #AllergyAlly and we hope you’ll join us! We’re sharing our allergy story (as usual) and we hope you’ll also check out some of the links provided by FARE on their social media pages.

As I write this, I’m still on edge after a challenging, stressful, disappointing evening spent hunting down allergy-friendly pizza at 3 different grocery stores. Our favorite, most reliable brand seems to have disappeared from the frozen food aisle. After a lot of extra driving and time spent explaining to the kids why we couldn’t eat pizza yet, we finally found one from a different brand than usual. It had a lot of veggies on it, so we then had to spend the next half-hour patiently explaining that they could easily take off the onions if they wanted to. So much for an easy dinner we could pick up on the way home.

On days like this, we have to remind ourselves how far we’ve come since that day 5 years ago when we first gave our son peanut butter and panicked when we saw his reaction. (And then again with milk. And eggs. And wheat.) In so many ways, it’s still a struggle. But it’s also been a learning opportunity. Despite how much we long for our son to be able to eat everything his brothers eat someday, we count it as a joy whenever we meet someone who sheepishly confesses their dietary restrictions to us and can happily say, “We’ve got you covered!” So for us, being an #AllergyAlly means cooking as an act of love. It also means raising awareness of the need for allergy-friendly options to be more widely available. Because whether we’re rolling our own or directing people to our favorite brand, every kid deserves pizza.