Pas dans mon assiette

Being deadly allergic to anything makes eating in restaurants at best inconvenient and at worst terrifying (okay, at real worst, fatal. But let’s not go there). I loathe the necessity of explaining (usually more than once) that I can’t eat nuts or peanuts, that my food needs to be kept away from any ingredients that will kill me, and that no, they can’t just pluck the offending ingredient out of the salad and serve it right back to me.

It sucks, too, because in principle I love eating good food. But in practice, I despise it. French people, notoriously unwilling to make changes to menus, just don’t understand the threat posed by allergies. Or by wrongful-death-by-cuisine lawsuits.

Luckily, usually the school-sponsored restaurant meals exhibit some notional awareness of the fact that hey, maybe that girl with the hypodermic injection of epinephrine in her purse has some kind of medical condition!

I get cool little cards with my name on it to explain that OH GOD NO don’t put that dollop of hazelnut crème fraîche in my soup! They did give me a superfluous “e”, which is troubling only in the sense that if they can’t be bothered to transcribe my name properly, who’s to say that they were even paying attention when the poor UChicago Paris secretary was rattling off my many forbidden foods? It calls to mind the whole green M&Ms in the contract rider phenomenon*.

But worry not (talking to you, Dad), because I ate quite well this past weekend.

Galette au blé noir avec épinard, crème, et oeuf. Hell yes.

Petit gâteau au chocolate avec sorbet à l’abricot, or something. It was tasty.

*Briefly: bands whose stage setup could be potentially dangerous if details were neglected would include a demand for something very specific (e.g. green M&Ms) in their dressing room as a way to test if the venue crew had read every little stipulation and hadn’t, like, wired fireworks into the monitors or something.