Food restrictions

[ewx]

[Poll #1241007]

(I'm asking about the nature of the substance, not the process that led to it: I'm not asking whether you'll eat battery chickens or baby-killing coffee.)

Comments

[aldabra]

I don't eat things that came out of the sea. I think I'm quite possibly allergic to some of them and I'm not interested enough to experiment. I'm OK with fishfinger fish, but I'd only eat it if it had been got for K and she hadn't. (I would eat seaweed if I liked it, but it triggers whatever the seainess is that I don't like.)

I don't eat blue cheese, which I think I'm not allergic to but otherwise feel similarly negative about.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Brazil nuts give me a sore throat. Yes, I do shell them first. Since my mid 20s. So I stay away from them.
It appears possible that whatever it is in them that does it is also in certain beers, but by the time I know (next morning) I've forgotten which beers I've had. And it's not as bad with the beers, so I don't worry about it.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

This poll has made me feel hungry.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

OM NOM NOM.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I had a duck egg for lunch. The albumen had a faint green phosphorescence. It seemed sinister.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

What she said.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I haven't (as far as I know) tested my ability to eat arsenic in very small quantities, but I understand it's normal, for small values of "very small". And avoiding people I wouldn't, for example, buy sausages that I knew had had a whole person fall into the mincing machine even if it was accidental. Maybe I should have ticked "Trivial" instead. On the other hand, given a sufficiently dire emergency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571#Food_and_water) where the people in question are already dead, I think I'd eat them. I'm not sure I could cope with the "let's draw lots to see who in the lifeboat gets killed because otherwise we'll all starve" (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KvB6NPbSByAC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=lifeboat+cannibalism&source=web&ots=w9xOm5k8yh&sig=IhAPoGelQnw9RgW2ATTkQ_iDpGw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPA249,M1) system though.

[armb.livejournal.com]

> let's draw lots to see who in the lifeboat gets killed

Determined to definitely be illegal in 1884: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Dudley_and_Stephens

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of an article I read recently debating the idea of meat made from tissue culture in big vats. Which seems to gross most people (including carnivores) out, despite the fact that it involves basically no animals having to die. The article went on to raise the possibility of it therefore opening up a market for meats that would be ethically not-suitable-for-eating at present, such as panda, and then threw in the idea of human meat somewhat flippantly just as a topic for consideration.

Would I eat tissue-cultured human meat? Probably not, for reasons of eating one's own species being a good way to get interesting diseases. But I'd be kind of curious to find out what it tastes like.

I'm fairly sure I've ingested minute traces of arsenic at one point or another...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Presumably deliberately cultured human tissue would be carefully kept free of nasties...

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they'd do their best, but considering the safety precautions we have to observe when dealing with HeLa cells (a human cell line used in labs), I'd still worry. If a retrovirus or something got into one batch, and a cell in that batch also happened to develop cancer-like properties, contact with even a few cells could, theoretically, give people cancer by spreading the dodgy cancer-causing DNA into the unwitting manburger consumer via their mouth lining or something. :(

And stuff like CJD caused by wrongly-folded proteins would be really hard to prevent, I suspect.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I'd eat vat grown protein. Actually, I already do - quorn for instance.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

I classed myself as "unable to eat" tomatoes and "something else" (-> strawberries) not because I suffer adverse effects from eating them, but because I simply can't manage it -- I think the texture is the problem with tomatoes, whereas I know the smell of strawberries makes me feel queasy.

My boss once asked if it was just red stuff I had a problem with eating, having not enjoyed some Swiss red cabbage-based delicacy. He may have a point, given colour vision!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'll avoid endangered animals, and if presented the choice, i will choose local food, and sanely produced food. I am also pondering my consumption of high-level predators (for example, tuna).

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

According to the Marine Ecologists I've spoken to, avoiding tuna is a pretty good idea for conservation reasons generally - the big net things are pretty effective at destroying a multitude of other species, and even line-fished tuna isn't ideal because the long lines also kill albatross. :(

(This makes me sad as I love the taste of tuna, but don't want to be enjoying it at the expense of albratrosses...)

[numberland.livejournal.com]

[X] It's more complicated then that....

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

"I am unable to eat cow's milk" isn't entirely accurate for me, it comes down to a battle between my willpower and the knowledge the delicious butter-containing-cake I'm about to eat will most probably have me suffering a variety of allergy-like symptoms within seconds-to-hours afterwards.

Whereas I can't eat prawns because, well, I just can't bring myself to. Little black eyes, ick. The only time I've eaten prawns was when a friend made three-course dinner including prawn cocktail and I didn't want to disappoint her. :-) (prawn crackers are fine, yum, but prawn-shaped chocolates are a no-no too - how bizarre)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I avoid a number of things just because I don't like the look of them too. I recognize this is something of a luxury...

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

[X]Hopefully only temporarily (2 years without has a pretty good chance).

Unfortunately, restaurants *lie* about it not having dairy in, which will make without very hard.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'd not realized allergies could have the potential to be that (relatively) short-term; while my Mum has mentioned her hayfever improving over the years that's something going on on a multi-decade scale. Good luck l-)

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

I ignored my general slight intolerance to dairy stuff, because it's no biggie. My main thing I avoid, strangely, is cod. It's the only fish where even eating a small amount makes me go all Linda Blair projectile-vomit-tastic. |-(

Ethically, I don't really have a problem with anything foodwise. Om nom nom...

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I have said on occasions that I was so hungry I could eat a horse, but I think that given the relative size of me and a horse I may actually be unable to a horse.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

You don't have to do it all at once!

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Before the garklet was born, ias and I were participating in a study on the effects of maternal diet on egg and milk allergies in infants. The study was cancelled before the garklet could be tested, but we both had scratch tests for common allergens. In addition to grass and tree pollen allergies (which I already knew about, thankyouverymuch), I was also allergic to dogs (I've never liked dogs) and slightly to peanuts.

The latter surprised me, because I will happily scoff peanut butter. On the other hand, I don't like eating monkey nuts because (so I realised) the skins made my mouth feel funny. It hadn't occurred to me that this could be a symptom of a minor allergy. I haven't stopped eating peanuts, mind.

The garklet only has one allergy - a moderate reaction to egg white (even on skin contact) which brings him out in hives like bad nettle rash. If the study had still been running, we would have found this out at three months, rather than at six months when we tried to feed him scrambled eggs.

Far too many foods contain egg, alas.

[simont]

"Something more complicated": for the most part I delegate judgment to Coeliac UK, who do diligent research to see what products are safe for me to eat. I don't know how much of their judgment is based on qualitative considerations like whether there was gluten in the same factory or not, but I know that at least some of their judgment is based on doing actual chemical tests to see what things really do have gluten in them at the end of the process. Every so often they disqualify some foodstuff as a result of improving their test procedures.

"Any accidental contamination": I take armb's point about potentially being a bit uncomfortable if I knew a whole person had fallen into the sausage machine, but I don't think that's an ethical objection; my ethical objection to eating people is that I would not wish to cause or encourage any person's death or mutilation for the purpose. I imagine I would be unwilling to eat a large amount of human after a sausage-machine accident, but that would be for pure ick reasons rather than ethical ones: would it taste weird, would it carry human-transmissible diseases, would there be BRAAAAINS involved.

[lnr]

I decided against "any accidental contamination" on the principle I wouldn't want to eat soup with a whole thumb floating in it, and I agree I wouldn't want to eat a sausage that was *mostly* diced person. It's true that this is more a squick consideration than an ethical one. But equally I think that making sure such meat is considered unfit to eat is a good way of discouraging companies from allowing their people to fall in the sausage machine, so I'll not go correct the poll ;-)

[k425.livejournal.com]

I agree mostly with this - although because my symptoms are so mild as to be non-existent, I will eat food that has been produced on a line handling other gluten-containing products. And if the label says "contains gluten" but the ingredients make no mention of anything containing or derived from gluten (Morrisons Stir-fry veg, I'm looking at you) I'll eat that too.

[nja.livejournal.com]

Dairy products are odd for me - I can't drink milk or hot drinks with more than a small drop of milk in, because they give me terrible stomach ache and queasiness - the sort of symptoms lactose-intolerant people report. But I can eat cream, butter, and cheese without any problems of that sort (not altogether sure about cream because I haven't eaten that in any significant quantity for years). Kiwi fruit are the only other things I know I'm allergic to - they make my mouth swell up and tingle.

I'm a kind of slack vegetarian - I will occasionally eat fish when I'm eating out, although I know it's bad for environmental reasons, but I don't buy it for home consumption. I haven't knowingly eaten mammal or bird (or marsupial come to that) for about twenty years.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'd eat the sausages if a human had fallen into the sausage machine; I probably wouldn't eat a thumb in my soup (but I would fish it out and eat the soup).

I also prefer to avoid aspartame, because it gives me headaches.

Arsenic is OK in trace quantities - but builds up in the system. There is an antidote. If you work in a chem. lab researching arsenic compounds you go through a lot of the antidote. Then the spooks show up to see why you are going through so much of it... (apparently troo story of someone my Dad knew who was doing a PhD on arsenic compounds).

[ceb.livejournal.com]

[x] hot dog buns

[sonicdrift.livejournal.com]

Where "in emergencies only" includes when people put it in front of me unless it's something that will cause me physical harm.

[gerald_duck]

For reasons of general squickedness, I won't eat anything that looks like an egg.

Eggs as an ingredient in other foods, once sufficiently mixed to lose its egg-nature, I'm completely fine with, provided I don't have to make it or watch it being made. On the other hand, there's something about yolk sacs, denaturing proteins, etc. that really seriously squicks me. Ugh.