Category: Planning

Why is a Corn-Free Diet so Limited?

Over a year ago, someone commented on my post detailing the challenges of finding corn-free meat by asking why one would not become a vegetarian instead of going to all that trouble.

My diet, and the diet of many people with corn allergy, is so limited that that would be a guarantee of malnutrition. I already fight malnutrition constantly. Adding an extra limitation beyond what I am already dealing with sounds downright dangerous.

This comment was written on a blog that is literally about how challenging a corn free diet is, on an article that goes into depth on just one single aspect of how challenging it is. Either I’m not conveying the magnitude of the problem well, or the person writing didn’t bother to try to understand the problem before offering a solution.

So here’s one more attempt to explain it.

Why is a corn-free diet so limited?

I do have a lot of challenges besides corn. But let’s pretend for a minute that my only issue was a severe, anaphylactic, airborne, and highly sensitive corn allergy. With only that:

    • I would be unable to eat almost any food from the grocery store, even whole organic produce, because of the possibility of corny packaging, organic sprays containing corn derivatives,  waxes, and cross contamination. People with a more moderate sensitivity to corn will still have many challenges finding foods in the grocery store that they can eat safely. In fact, those that can eat some foods but not others from the regular store have more to keep track of than those for whom this just is not an option.
    • This includes being unable to use pre-ground flours or any grains, beans, nuts or seeds that have been shelled, husked, or cleaned using machinery. Because of growing practices, threshing equipment, and packaging, dry beans are incredibly hard for those with corn allergies, even moderate ones, to find. I don’t think anyone has found a brand that works for many super-sensitive people since the Straw Hat beans changed the threshing equipment they were using. Some of us are using local farms who either sell us the dried beans in pod, or get fresh beans and dry ourselves.
    • I would be unable to tolerate almost most–or possibly any–vegetable oils. Most super sensitive people can tolerate Jovial olive oil, but some people even react to that and have no safe vegetable-based oil. Those people use the fat rendered from their safe meat, and this is one of the reasons why meat is such an important staple to us. Otherwise all our food is broiled, baked, and braised dry. Those that tolerate several vegetable oils still have dozens they can’t use due to contamination.
    • Because of this, I would need to carefully cultivate a network of farms, local and mail-order, who grew completely no-spray produce. If the farm is mail-order I need to negotiate safe handling and packaging in transit. Even the less sensitive need to exercise care in where their produce comes from and what is done to it. For example, citric acid washes and gas ripening cause problems for many.
    • Since very few (or zero, if you’re in a cold climate) crops grow year-round, I would need to preserve what food I can eat while it is available so that I can eat it the rest of the year. This is something many people with a corn allergy need to do to some degree, not just the super-sensitive.
    • This preservation would take about 4-8 hours a week of my time throughout the year, depending on the season. This is one area where sensitivity will determine how much stockpiling you need to do, but then again your average person doesn’t need to do this at all.
    • In addition to the actual preservation work, I would need to spend at least 8 hours a week year-round researching new sources of food, creating backup sources of food I already have and trying to track my nutritional intake to prevent against malnutrition, and keeping up with product changes and what things the corn allergy community are reacting to or doing well with. When one is new to the allergy or has had a sensitivity uptick, the time spent is often much, much more. Many people spend years feeling like all they do is research how to eat food safely. This is true across all levels of sensitivity.
  • Oh and also work a full time job, either inside or outside the home. I am counting stay-at-home-parenthood and caring for oneself as a disabled person full time jobs.

That’s a lot already. And many of us are dealing with other intersecting health issues that limit our dietary choices or ability to prepare or afford certain foods.

Continue reading “Why is a Corn-Free Diet so Limited?” →

Eating Seasonally: Prepare for Flu Season now!

Elderberries are in season on the Pacific NW and may be in your area as well! If, like me, you’re too sensitive to traces and cross contamination to tolerate any of the prepackaged elderberry syrups or prepackaged dried elderberries, now is the time to stock up on the wild foraged stuff and freeze or dehydrate to make into syrup for the flu season. Not familiar with elderberries and why I’d want them for the winter?

Where to Get Them

What we have growing wild and native in the area is blue elderberry. There may be some folks growing black elderberry in the area, but I haven’t found them. Let me know if you know of any in the Western Washington area or even down in to Oregon. If you live outside of the Pacific NW, you may have a different species available to you. The most common species seems to be American Elder, which has a strong folk tradition of medicinal use, but please do your own research and don’t just go taking herbs on my say so.

Only black elderberry (sambucus nigra) has been officially studied for its medicinal effects but I am taking a chance on blue elderberry being as good for you since it’s what I have access to. There’s at least enough folk wisdom referenced about the use of blue elderberry for medicinal purposes to make me feel comfortable doing so. Foraged and Found Edibles at the Seattle Farmer’s market has them right now and hopefully will for a couple more weeks. I emailed ahead and asked them for 13lbs to pick up at the market and he had a box just all prepped for me to pick up when I arrived.

How to Process Elderberries

Note that the stems and unripe berries are toxic, so you will want to carefully pick over your berries and remove those. What I do is wash them and place them still on the stems on baking sheets in my freezer. Then when they’re frozen I take a fork and pull the berries off the stems and remove as many of the stems as I can. I flash freeze again since the berries have melted a bit while I do that, then pick over to get the last of the stems and green berries out and then put into quart bags to freeze. Some stems still make it into the bags so I will rinse them and sift yet again before using.

You could also dehydrate the berries. I just chose to freeze mine.

How to Use and How Much to Store

Here is the recipe I use to make elderberry syrup. 1 cup of berries should make 1.5 cup sof syrup, and 1.5 cups of syrup will make about 5-6 days of doses for one person at the recommended 1 tsp every 2-3 hours.  My 13 lbs of berries made about 8.5 quarts without the stems so that’s about 170 days of flu-level elderberry syrup doses, give or take. Should be plenty for two for the winter, heheh.

Continue reading “Eating Seasonally: Prepare for Flu Season now!” →

Avoiding Another Lean Winter: Planning out Your Schedule for Preserves

Eating corn free generally requires eating seasonally and at least semi-locally. Things that have been transported a long distance, or grown by a large corporate-style farm, generally have corny things done to them. But of course most foods aren’t available locally for the entire year, so you’ve really got to plan ahead to preserve, or you’ll end up with very little to eat.

Folks who are able to eat grocery store produce are in a somewhat better position, but even if you can eat grocery store food right now, I encourage you to at least store a little bit away in case of emergency. Allergic sensitivity can change rapidly.

Last winter I moved into a larger rental house with a big kitchen and lots of storage space in order to accommodate my increased sensitivity to corn, and during the winter a leak in the basement caused mold to run rampant in it. I am allergic to mold, and the exposure brought my histamine levels up so high (we call this a “full bucket” in the allergy world) that I became hypersensitive to the tiniest traces of corn in foods, meaning that I could no longer tolerate a number of foods that I had previously been okay with. Additionally, I developed (or discovered) new allergies to basically most of the winter vegetables. So the foods that I had available to me locally and totally corn-free were all poison for me anyway.

For about 8 weeks I ate literally two foods, without spices or cooking oils. There was actually few days where I started reacting to my two safe foods, too, and just ate small amounts at a time and waited for the throat constricting to pass before eating some more.

After I figured out about the mold and shut it away from the rest of the house, I was able to add a couple more foods back: Organic lettuce from the grocery store, local unwaxed apples, even some big-box organic berries. Not all brands of course, just a specific one.

But now that summer is here, there are all *kinds* of foods I can eat, and I intend to make sure that I have *plenty* put away to get me through the barren months of winter. And being the Type A personality that I am, I made a spreadsheet with fancy formulas to help me calculate how much I need to preserve each week.

I’ve made this sheet available as a google doc, so you can take advantage of my formulas. Hope it’s useful!

Food Preservation Planning Worksheet

I almost exclusively freeze items because I don’t seem to tolerate any canning jar lids ever since Ball and Kerr’s canning jars became BPA-free. I have four 20+ cubic food freezers, two chest and two upright, and these hold as much as I need to eat in a year + some backstock to get me through multiple years so that I can slow down on preserving literally EVERYTHING I’ll eat for six solid months. (People who do not have dozens of veggie allergies should be able to put up less, but being allergic to every winter vegetable really limits my options most of the year.)

My tolerated foods can be something of a moving target: I have discovered  a few new food allergies over time, and  also I will sometimes notice build-up reactions to foods that are ever-so-slightly corny and have to cut them. So rather than cooking entire recipes to preserve, I tend to try to store single ingredients without spices as much as possible. This helps cut down on the possibility of having to feed 20 pints of chicken stock to my non-allergic spouse just because I’m no longer tolerating a spice in it. Instead I cook the chicken down without even salt and add spices later.

Don’t know what’s in season in your area when? Here’s one way to find out. There may be better charts out there for your area, but that has all the states in the US pretty well covered.

New to the idea of eating locally/seasonally? Here’s a great intro article to get you acclimatized, with links to more resources.

Don’t know how to preserve the food you got? PickYourOwn has an instruction page for just about every kind of food and every type of preservation you can think of.