The Fabled Land of Glutenfri

Nowadays, it only exists in fragmentary and beleaguered outposts, the once vast realm of Glutenfri.  In olden times it spanned most of the world, and people like my nine-year old daughter lived free, eating the same food as their families and friends, unafraid to share dishes, with no thought of being laid low by the merest crumb.  In those days people ate a great variety of foods--wild greens, tubers, fruits and berries in season, nuts and seeds, mushrooms, wild game, wild birds' eggs, fish, mussels, clams, seaweed....

Then agriculture was invented.  Some historians have blamed women for that, claiming they must have wanted a more settled and secure life and hounded the men into becoming farmers.  The lure of raising a dozen children and spending one's days cooking and cleaning does not seem so appealing to me, however.  It's pretty well established that the hunting-gathering lifestyle involves something like 4-hour workdays, and families of manageable size.  Farming is much harder work by any measure.

Another idea is that as populations grew to higher densities, a gradual shift to agriculture allowed still more people to occupy a given space, and the innovations continuing to this day have created our runaway population explosion. That is, we keep on figuring out how to turn more of the standing biomass of the planet into human flesh, in an attempt to stave off hunger that only creates more mouths to feed.  Not that all this is evenly distributed by any means.  But biology trumps economics: this sort of growth can't continue indefinitely.  However clever we may be, we still live in the physical world and must grow our year's food with the year's sun and whatever water and minerals can be found (at least CO2, the other necessity of plant life, is nowhere in short supply). 

Then there is the astonishing notion is based on the discovery in Turkey of 11,000-year old ruins at Gobekle Tepe.  These are immense stone monuments built long before any cities, that would have taken thousands of people decades to construct.  So it may be that the drive to create monuments for artistic and religious reasons led scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers to organize themselves and develop a more reliable and settled food supply.
 

Unfortunately for about 1% of the population who are intolerant to gluten, the staple grains these Middle Eastern agriculturalists grew, and which the world has inherited as its dominant foodstuff,  were a trio of closely related species:  wheat, barley, and rye.  These are the only three foods in the entire world that a gluten-sensitive person needs to avoid, so the choices of food are still vast.  Yet in our modern world these three grains infiltrate the food supply making it a difficult and socially isolating ordeal to keep from ingesting gluten.  Still, I like to remember how it's only an accident of history that gluten is so omnipresent.  Sure, it has some useful properties like a tendency to become rubbery when beaten with liquid, which makes for nice bread.  But until European culture spread to fill the world in recent centuries most civilizations on most continents remained in the realm of Glutenfri.  This is no longer the case--even most soy sauce is now made from fermented wheat. 

The natural-born citizens of Glutenfri still roam the world, a scattered and beleaguered people.  Parts or all of their kitchens are free of gluten, maybe even the whole house.  Once they leave the house, all bets are off.  There are peanut-free classrooms in grade-schools to protect the dangerously allergic, but gluten is both too ubiquitous and insufficiently life-threatening to merit such accommodations.  Avoiding gluten is a serious, lifelong commitment for many people, essential to their health and comfort in the short and long term.  It is hard to explain to outsiders how even a tiny crumb can disable them for a week, hard to have to keep refusing to trust well-meaning friends who have tried to cook safe food, hard to face the inevitable suspicion that one is being overly fussy in taking the necessary precautions. 

In honor of the citizens of Glutenfri and their supportive friends and families, I present the following anthem:

(to a sentimental tune)
    Fair land of Glutenfri, land that I love,
    Forests span to shining seas,  wide skies above.
    Wild mushroom, wild berry, salmon leaping from icy streams.
    Fair land of Glutenfri, home of my dreams.

Chorus (to a bouncier, irreverent tune):
      We don't want none of your weevily wheat,
      We don't want rye or barley.
      But give us rice or maize or oats,
      We'll make a cake so fairly.

(to be continued...)

Gluten sensitivity, both due to Celiac disease and from separate unknown causes, is on the rise for reasons we don't really understand.  This isn't merely a matter of over-diagnosis or greater awareness:  a blood test for antibodies to gluten, one hallmark of Celiac disease, showed a rise of 4.5-fold when blood from U.S. Air Force servicemen from the 1950s was compared to samples taken recently.  This means something in the environment must be triggering more cases.  As many people are aware, food allergies (which involve a separate part of the immune system from that causing Celiac disease) are also on the rise to a startling extent.

It is interesting to consider how these problems are related to our modern way of life.  Maybe all these new food sensitivities arise from modern changes such as antibiotics, more processed food including a huge set of chemicals never seen before in nature, a cleaner living environment causing our immune systems to be less challenged, and changes in the composition of our gut endosymbionts from these and other causes.  Still, there is need for caution in guessing at causes and attempting to return to a more "natural" way of eating and living.  There is a lot of potential for sloppy thinking and grasping at magical holistic cures.

I am a natural skeptic who has been unwillingly dragged into experiencing firsthand and close up the effects of a variety of dietary sensitivities, foremost having a child who is highly sensitive to gluten.  I am a mom who wants to take good care of her gluten-free child and raise her to be happy and at ease in the world.  I am a scientist interested in the biological basis for disorders such as celiac disease and other digestive disorders.  I am a parent who has been frustrated by the lack of information and understanding from many doctors, and by the inundation of misinformation among the useful information available online and in books and most of all, on food packaging.  And I am  someone who would like to offer an tour of this land of Glutenfri, in all its myriad and complex aspects, that illuminate topics as wide-ranging as immunology, cooking from scratch, living in a social world with dietary restrictions, implications of mass produced and highly processed foods, managing one's health in the face of imperfect knowledge without resorting to quackery.

It has changed our family's life to have created a gluten-free refuge in our home, and in many ways it has changed it for the better.  We cook a lot more, and eat a lot more fresh and simple foods.  We are forced to think a lot harder about where our food comes from, and what has been done to it between the farm and our table.  And the daily food we give our daughter, by needing more careful thought and preparation than what is called normal food, is a daily sacrament telling her we love her and will give her what she needs to be well.  So we go on coping day by day, some days easier than others.  As our daughter says, at least she doesn't have to give up blackberries.  Or ice cream.  Or popcorn.  Or the thousands of other delicious foods we can find or make.