Let’s talk about food allergies for a moment.
About ten years ago, I met a good friend of Deb’s at the wedding of a mutual friend. During cocktail hour, hors d’oeuvres were being passed around, one being some sort of stuffed mushroom or something. This friend of Deb’s grabbed one of these niblets of food and, just as it was about a millimeter from touching his lips, he decided to ask the server if it had shellfish in it. In fact, it was stuffed with crab meat.
“Oh! Well I can’t have that then,” he said, and he tossed it out.
“What would happen if you ate it?” I asked.
“Oh, my throat would close up, I’d go into anaphylactic shock and might die; I’m severely allergic to shellfish.”
Uh, wow. This guy was a mere millimeter from death! What if he hadn’t asked? Well, he’d be dead or at least would have been a huge downer to the wedding reception. Total buzzkill.
My son has food allergies, so I’m no stranger to having to ask the ingredients in foods. Deb, as you know, is mayophobic, so that question comes up … a lot. Being allergic to a food means, if you don’t spit it the hell out, you should be very nervous about what you ate — you might have to have someone standing at the ready with an EpiPen! What, though, do vegans and mayophobics do when they realize they’ve eaten something they strive to stay far away from, but it won’t endanger them?
An in-law of mine was once served some yummy cherry chocolate chip ice cream. He was loving it and was nearly finished the bowl, when he found out it was actually soy ice cream. Immediately he said he thought he felt ill and threw the rest of the dessert away. Sorry, but what the hell? You were enjoying the hell out of it a second ago!
Seriously, I’m curious about this. To borrow from commedian Zach Galifianakis, what do vegans do if they eat a tasty pepperoni pizza and find out later the mistake they made? “Man, that was a tasty pepperoni pi … ah FUCK!” Do you induce vomiting? Go into severe depression? Are you banned from the club? I want to know!
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on Jun 24, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
pepperoni pizza… uhm… oh! I just learned that Pepperoni is a “Salami” over there… wow. Over here “Peperoni” is the word for chilli peppers or jalopeno peppers. Wowie. Cool. Hey. Haha
I’m not a vegan so I can’t answer this but I’d guess it would be like when you are on a diet and try to avoid eating things with high carbs or many calories and think something is lean and later on find out that you just ate a piece of cake worth your days quota of calories.
I think the follow up question would be – if you loved it so much what the hell will you do in the future? Will you eat it again? Is being a vegan for you something like not smoking when meat tastes so good or what is your reasoning?
I myself hardly drink, don’t smoke and don’t drink coffee, but lots and lots of Coke Zero (you know the new brand of diet coke I guess that’s what it’s called over there too since diet coke is called “coke light” over here).
Anyway, I’d love to hear from a vegan about this too
I’m pretty sure they go sit in a corner and cry quietly while they rock back and forth. Or, that episode of Seinfeld where George fed Jerry’s kosher girlfriend lobster without her knowing it comes to mind.
I actually kind of talked about this in one of my Hold The Meat columns. If it’s a fair amount of meat, I’ll get violently ill. If it’s just a little bit, I just feel kind of awkward and weird.
Vegans wouldn’t eat pizza because of the cheese..
But if they somehow managed to not notice they were eating pizza, they might actually get sick.
when you don’t eat animal products for say anything over a year, your body doesn’t know what to do with it and a lot of vegans/vegetarians throw up from eating meat for the first time.
they’d probably just feel really guilty though, because i’m guessing there’s a reason they stopped eating meat/dairy in the first place