Showing Hospitality When Your Friends Have Food Allergies

Showing hospitality can be difficult enough, and when your friends have food allergies it becomes more difficult to prepare a meal. You want to serve them something that won’t make them sick, but you may not be sure how. To make matters worse, there is the “cool kids don’t eat gluten” idea–the fake allergy syndrome. When some people just say that they are allergic but simply prefer not to eat something, their lack of a bad reaction to some accidental gluten/dairy/hazelnuts/whatever can cause hosts to become careless.

I personally struggle with a fear of making meals for friends who have severe food allergies, so I’ve asked a couple friends for help. They either have food allergies or family members with allergies.

Our Experts 🙂

Amy Ellen and her daughter Isabelle have celiac disease (no gluten for them). After Amy Ellen’s second daughter was born, she asked that people not bring meals after the birth, because well-meaning friends were making them sick. Even using a cutting board that has any tiny bread crumb remnants can cause her to get sick.

David’s cousin Ellen, on the other hand, is not allergic to the dairy she has to avoid–her sons are. Because Ellen is nursing, she has to stay away from dairy or her littlest one will get sick. (They also can’t eat shellfish, but that’s a much easier food to avoid than dairy.)

So how could we have either of their families over for a shared meal? How can you (and I) get over our fear of showing hospitality to those who can’t just eat “whatever’s on the table”?

7 Tips for Showing Hospitality to Friends With Allergies

1. When you invite someone over for dinner, ask about allergies!

   This may seem like a no-brainer, but it took me some time to learn. I whipped up a lovely batch of biscuits once for some friends, only to find out that one of them couldn’t eat gluten at all, and the other preferred to avoid it. So I ate a lot of biscuits. Ellen says it’s important to distinguish between food preferences and food allergies (because if it’s just a preference, the person won’t react badly to a contaminated cutting board). She words her question to potential guests like this: “Does anyone in your family have severe food allergies?”

2. Be careful about contamination.

   Amy Ellen recommends covering plastic or wood cutting boards with Saran Wrap or a paper plate if you need to cut vegetables or meat for guests with severe allergies. Clean your kitchen well, make sure no one has touched your silverware with peanut buttery or hazelnut-fingers, use lots of soap and hot water.

3. Read ingredient lists.

   Don’t just assume that your favorite seasoning mix for meat is gluten-free. I discovered all kinds of things in seasoning mixes and salad dresses when I had to avoid bell peppers for the first eight months of nursing Baby J. Here’s more from Amy Ellen: “So many products include ‘food starch’ (wheat) or ‘caramel coloring,’ etc. It’s tricky, though, as there are many similar hidden titles in products…’Natural Flavoring’ when capitalized is monosodium glutamate (MSG), [which] many are allergic to.”

4. Keep it simple.

   We are friends with one couple that has a couple of intolerances or allergies. We either invite them to come cook with us, or we make breakfast-for-supper. Why breakfast? Because neither of them is allergic to scrambled eggs, bacon, or fruit juice! Since they not only have several food allergies but also many preferences about food, it wouldn’t make sense for me to prepare one of my fancy meals that they wouldn’t enjoy or even be able to eat at all.

5. Use real ingredients.

   

   Check out our list of recipes for a month of sugar-free snacks. They’re all made of simple, unprocessed ingredients.

   As Amy Ellen said, it’s tricky sometimes to figure out what ingredients are in processed and prepackaged foods. So if your guest can’t eat dairy or gluten or corn, use simple, real ingredients. For example: fresh, unseasoned chicken, a fresh sprig of rosemary for seasoning, fresh fruit and vegetables, etc. You’ll both be healthier, and it doesn’t usually cost much more to cook real food. (In fact, I’ve found it usually costs me less to choose real ingredients rather than the appealingly time-saving but unhealthy packaged ones.)

6. Don’t be offended if your guests bring some of their own food.

   For example, my friend Mandy brings her Lactaid milk along to drink sometimes when she comes over for dinner. Ellen says that when her youngest was very small she was “in the habit of bringing some food just to get by in case we went somewhere and there was nothing we could eat.” Even now, she offers to bring along some dairy-free food to make her hostess’s life easier.

7. Let your guests with food allergies know what you’ve planned for the menu.

   If your guests are last-minute guests, then you may not be able to do this. But if you’ve been able to plan ahead and ask about allergies, and your guests have severe food allergies that could mean a hospital visit if something bad happens at the dinner table, it’s a great idea to ask them for approval of your final plans.

Showing hospitality is one of the best ways to get to know people better–and to share Christ. Let’s not let our fears of allergies overcome our desire to be hospitable!

Do you have severe food allergies?

Comment to let readers know more ways to make your life safer when we invite you over! (Or encourage us if you think we stress out to much about preparing a meal for you!)

By the way, we have a list of lactose-free freezer meals that don’t have to be frozen. 😉 They might be helpful if you’re prepping for someone who is lactose-intolerant.