Wheat Poisoning

One day I will conquer cling wrap. I will spread it firmly and flatly over a dish of left-overs without wading it into a morph of origami animals. One day, I will conquer cling wrap, but until that day comes, let me just say this:

I was wheat-free, when wheat-free wasn’t cool.

I was born to peal a wrapper off a frozen dinner and pop it straight in the microwave, and nobody, I mean nobody, can put a crank on a can opener like I do, but oh no, God has a bigger sense of humor than that! I live with a person who is wheat-gluten intolerant. As this diagnosis has become the flavor of the month, I’m sure most of you are familiar with it. It is a failure of proper digestion, kind of similar to lactose intolerance, but caused by wheat gluten and a variance of other grains, depending on the person.

You ever seen somebody order a double cheeseburger, throw the bread out, then turn the meat patties in to use them as containment buns for the lettuce and tomato? Or how about the three finger special on a pizza? You place index and middle fingers at the crust of a slice, and span the thumb to touch the point, then bring the three digits together. Topping comes right off. A pizza buffet will kick you out on your butt if they catch you doing the three-finger special. Ever tried to find a knife and fork in a fried chicken joint? It’s nothing but sporks and foons! Again, not pretty. Piles of chicken skins, a stack of pizza crusts, poor homeless buns, faking sacrament at Communion, ordering salad without croutons—these are the adventures of the brave and the wheatless.

Absolutely no processed foods. Wheat is so often an additive, they’ve found traces of it in prepositions. It most certainly shows up in any white-based soup or sauce. There’s no saving a casserole with a can of cream of mushroom! Wheat flour comes in hidden processing too, like on the conveyor belts for certain chewing gum. Even soy sauce has wheat! How does a rice-based culture come up with wheat in its sauce? And Twizzlers, they have wheat too. Of course cakes, cookies, and breads have to be avoided unless they are prepared at home where you can be certain of gluten-free ingredients. It’s enough to make you think there is a God, and that God has a great big fat sense of humor on me.

Rice Crispies is a pantry staple, like you might have flour or sugar or a bottle of vanilla. I have Rice Crispies cereal. It goes in meatloaf. It tops casseroles where normally you would crumble Ritz crackers. It’s the filler of sausage stuffing.

Strips of green cabbage substitute for noodles in soup.

I have made tabbouleh with quinoa, at roughly the street price of cocaine. Then again, quinoa is reputed to be the perfect grain. Couscous is just fun to say.

I rejoice in the new products rushing to serve the exponentially increasing demographic of the gluten-intolerent. I welcome you who are newly diagnosed with celiac disease. Perhaps one day you shall have a candidate for President. Prior to the days of Paul Newman’s O’s, which delicately mimic Oreo cookies (with all the delicacy you can muster towards an Oreo) prior to that, any and all wheat-free cookies you could find in the obscure corners of the dirt-smelling health food store, yes, any of those old school wheat-free cookies were not just wheat free. They were also devoid of milk, eggs, sugar, and all resemblance of food substance. They were made strictly of sawdust, and exploded inside your mouth into the bitter dryness of sheet rock putty.

Pasta was another great stumbling block of the earlier days. For years, corn pasta was the only wheat alternative. You drop corn pasta in boiling water and instantly it congeals into one giant starch blob. You have to stir and fight and be diligent and vigilant! If you have religion, it’s likely to make you lose it. If you don’t have religion, you’re likely to pray to as much as a dirty ashtray trying to cook this mess. Now they have rice pasta, which is much better behaved. It doesn’t store quite as well as its wheat counterpart once cooked, and you’re not likely to find chocolate linguini in rice noodles, but the rice is better than the corn.

I have memorized the proportion of xanthium gum to one cup of rice flour, but some recipes translate better than others. Works pretty well for Nestle Toll House cookies. They come out more grainy and dense, but cookies really don’t have to rise a lot, so the essence is there, but try substituting rice flour in your favorite cake recipe.

My favorite cake recipe comes in a box. You add three eggs, oil and water. Me and Betty Crocker, we’re like this…I’ve stopped typing so I can put my two fingers together…second only to Duncan Hines. But that would be easy.

I make cake from scratch. Extra beat the eggs for more fluff to help the dough to rise. One teaspoon of xanthium gum to one cup of rice flour. Forget the electric mixer. You’ll kill it. And I’ve broken more wooden spoons…. You have to knead it, you have to want it, and then you have to knead it again. It’s like massaging a buffalo, except it’s the tar baby. You put your hand in. Your hand gets stuck. You put your other hand in. Your other hand gets stuck. Put your foot in. Call for help, using your nose to dial.

The batter comes out of the oven in the exact shape you put it in. It doesn’t rise and fill the pan. It stays in the one lump, like it’s antisocial with the heat. Baking only preserves the odd-knobs and who-bubs you failed to smooth. Alligator hide has a better complexion. Furthermore, it’s hard. You haven’t baked a confectionary delicacy to enjoy after dinner—YOU’VE MADE BISCOTTI! It is hard and dense, and you need a hatchet to crumble it into various bits, servable only after you retrieve them off the floor and all corners of the kitchen. Dogs fail to recognize the crumbs as scraps. Even cockroaches are unattracted.

I’m sorry that so many people have this condition. I’m sorry for their suffering, but I’m thankful too. Without the ever-growing market for easy wheat-free products, the new instant mixes would have never appeared on the shelves. Even the Atkins Diet has helped by prompting restaurants to offer no-carb menu selections, which also means no wheat. I’m sorry for those of you who have wheat-gluten intolerance, but I thank you too, because you have improved my quality of life. I cannot catalogue how many more wheat-free products are available now, or how much easier it is to order out without back flips of substitutions, not to mention the labeling addition “contains wheat” which makes selection safer.

With food consciousness raised by emerging food allergies and intolerances, such as gluten intolerance, no doubt, I’m going to live far longer than I should. I’m going to cook and eat from more pure ingredients, closer to the raw materials, the building blocks of nutrition, probably extending my life way beyond what some would prefer. Perhaps I shall have to take up smoking.

People used to scoff at the hazards of lead-based crockery; now we’re recognizing the realities of wheat poisoning. Bon appetit, sans wheat!