Food Allergies Suck Ass.

I have food allergies.

Generally they just suck.

Sometimes that food allergy is one that is very difficult to avoid. Say like milk, or egg, or peanut. I have a shell fish allergy, which pretty much sucks. However that is fairly easily avoided.

One of Spenser's friends has a peanut allergy. I never realized until I looked, how many things are made or processed with nuts. And since they pretty much don't care that peanuts touch almonds, or pecans, that makes almost every nut inedible for him.

Today I was searching for reasonably priced vanilla beans.

We make our own vanilla extract. It tastes tons better, and is real, doesn't have that shitty artificial flavor most extracts have. It also doesn't have corn syrup, or sugar added, since it is vodka and vanilla bean. We have about 8-10 beans in about 750 ml of vodka. So it is fairly strong in the vanilla department.

Anyway, we had to make more because we used the entire bottle up.

Took us a year.

So I wanted to get a few new beans to stick in the extract, to sort of pump up the flavor. I went to Trader Joe's. I wanted to see what they were like, and thought they might have what I needed.

I found the beans. They were reasonably priced.

I was ecstatic.

Then I went to check out.

For whatever reason I looked at the label again, and this time saw the food allergy warning. The vanilla beans were processed in a plant that processes tree nuts.

And since most tree nuts are processed with peanut something or other, it was not safe. I had to put them back.

I was so happy that I saw that before I bought them, or worse yet, before I made a huge thing of extract, and Noah, had a reaction. That would have been horrible.

Any way, I was a bit miffed that they would process those in a plant or on a line that processed allergens. Does not make sense.

Oh yeah, I was so not impressed with Trader Joe's. It was a rinky dink place, and honestly most of the stuff was overpriced, and I could get comparable items at Wild Oats.