A Shitty Analogy for Gluten
If you know anyone with allergies, you undoubtedly have come across the term “cross-contamination” — when little bits of the offending food are mixed in with presumably innocuous food. I have Celiac disease. I am cursed with the inability to digest gluten, and like many similar people, I care about cross-contamination because I have been sick from tiny bits of gluten in my food. Many times.
But now, I found an analogy to explain it to people who don’t understand — shit.
That’s right. Human feces.
What gluten is to me is what shit is to humans. Shit holds loads of offending, microscopic bacteria that can cause damage. Similarly, to be considered Certified Gluten Free, food must have less than 20 parts per million. That’s a lot of tiny stuff that you can’t see and can make you sick.
If you were making lunch and accidentally got shit on your hands, would you feel sufficient just running them under water or toweling them off? Or would you wash your hands* with soap and water before returning to food prep?
If you had poop on the counter, would you wipe it off with the same dishcloth you do your dishes with? Not unless you want polio.
Imagine it’s the holidays. You feel warm and cozy, until you see your lovely pecan pie slid into the oven next to a steaming cowpie of human excrement. Suddenly, the warm, cozy feeling is gone. Everyone is telling you to relax, shit can’t jump from one pie to the other. And you’re left thinking: is it so unreasonable to bake your pie before the shit pie?
Imagine you’re going out to a restaurant in this gastro-centric culture, but obviously you don’t want to eat at a shit restaurant and contract hepatitis A. But when you call and ask if they can make shit-free food, everyone seems a little uncertain. So you’re thinking, hey, hep A is serious and even just tiny amounts of fecal matter can make you really sick, and you kinda like being healthy, so you’re rethinking eating there… I mean, skipping this dinner or bringing your own food is reasonable when the recovery period is 2–3 weeks. Maybe your friends are disappointed or frustrated.
But we’re adults. We learn to speak up and advocate for ourselves. We’re in the kitchen and bring up a practice that we felt was mixing some shit in our food. So we say to our family, friend, partner: “Hey, can you do it this way? I’ve been feeling all sorts of bad and I think this may be the problem.” Now, imagine someone you care about says that to you. Maybe take a pause and think to yourself: would I be comfortable doing this if it were human feces instead of a loaf of bread? If I ran the risk of getting cholera, montezuma’s revenge, or some other fecal-oral infection, would I not be more patient and understanding? Would I maybe commence the Sisyphean task of using another cutting board?
Sure, mistakes are inevitable. But a good effort, a better attitude, and a bit of perspective goes a long way. So, in the same way that gluten = shit, people who are careless = also shit.
*Side note: the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic really illustrated how few people know how to wash their hands, so perhaps this wasn’t the best example.
