The problem for waiters or chefs hearing the word “allergy” is that everyone uses it, including people who don’t like an ingredient, people on the fad diet of the week, folks whose naturopath have told them to avoid ingredient X, and people with real allergies. It’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf Effect. Which sucks. I have no allergies, and I have much success with the Refreshingly Honest approach: “I’m not allergic, and bell peppers won’t kill me. But I hate them and they give me horrible indigestion. Can they be left off? Thanks!”
“No, mother. I want you to be dead.”
…or at least that’s what I’d be tempted to say.
Someone I work with has fad allergies. Currently, she is allergic to gluten and any sort of nuts, except pastachios. Last year, it was milk and cheese. She was allergic to citrus until I brought a jar of my signature lemonaide to work. (wash 6 lemons very well, squeeze the juice into a gallon jar, then drop the lemons into the jar, cover them with a cup of sugar, let sit for an hour then add water and ice to fill the jar.)
I’ve stopped caring about her diet now. When I bring food to work, I don’t care if she “can” eat it or not. The sad part is that she had made me start ignoring other peoples’ allergies.
I’ve been allergic to peanut and tree nuts since birth. Guess what, I don’t eat nuts and I don’t eat anything if I can’t confirm there are no nuts in it. In fact, there was only one time ever that not eating nuts was a considered a special diet.
The Naval Academy did not accept me based on that allergy since they do not accept candidates needing “special dietary concerns”
I’d never met her before, didn’t know her from Eve. She was a friend of a family member. We had to go on a day trip to pick up someone else’s car. We weren’t even supposed to stop, we were on a tight schedule. If I’d known she planned to stop and eat, I’d have asked her to eat *before *picking me up. When she asked if there was a Wendy’s nearby, I thought she intended to go through the drive-thru. 
And it’s happening again tomorrow… where’s a suicide smiley when you need it?
I’m in the same boat. The vast majority of my dietary issues are preferences, not allergies or intolerances or whatever. As long as I’m clear about what I want and how I want it, no one cares why I want it. And it’s not a problem 99% of the time because I’m not a screaming Mimi about it. (When it’s been a problem, it’s because the server isn’t paying attention or is just a bad server.)
:eek: I’ma go throw out my antique Thanksgiving tableware set now… I don’t want to sit down to dinner staring at a horny turkey gravy boat.
I hate to tell you that but thats not “gravy”.
:eek: Please don’t tell me what’s in the napkin holder, butter dish, or salt shaker either… (the pepper shaker can stay, because she’s a nice girl turkey)
I hate to tell you this but that pepper shaker was tag teamed by the Pillsbury Doughboy and Mrs. Buttersworth.
Who diagnosed the allergies: Naturopath, Homeopath, or Chiropractor?
Here’s a tip: if you are in a pit thread and you can’t tell who’s being pitted, it’s probably you.
Some humans having been drinking milk for several thousand years, but not all. If you’re of Asian ancestry it actually is more likely than not that you’re intolerant of dairy foods, at least those with lactose, as an adult. African groups are all over the map on this, with some like the Masai being very dairy tolerant and others completely intolerant as adults. In Europe, dairy tolerance increases as you go north.
So yes, there are a lot of adults who don’t tolerate dairy. On the flip side, there are a lot who DO. What those of us who retain the ability to digest milk as adults find irritating are all the non-dairy-tolerant who aren’t content to simply not eat dairy themselves but want to take it away from everyone.
God the web is full of stupid. I was looking up allergies to vinegar (hadn’t heard that one yet) and ran across this gem:
Yes, teeming masses, the magic alkaline vinegar.
I have a love/hate thing with restaurant dining for precisely this reason. I can’t eat black or white or red pepper, and in some restaurants, there are NO savory dishes that don’t have black pepper in them. And when I inquire as to whether something has pepper in it, I get told “well, it’s not very much, you won’t taste it”. Tasting it isn’t my problem. Spending the next day (or week) in the bathroom is the problem.
I’ve asked for plain grilled unseasoned chicken, too, and come to find out that the chicken is preseasoned. Now, if I’d known that, I’d have gone for another dish.
I no longer care whether someone thinks that I SHOULD eat something. I refuse to eat stuff that’s going to make me miserable. And I’m not going to pay for it, either.
I realize that the restaurant is going to have the sauce already made up, either earlier in the day, or the place buys the sauces premade, so I’m not going to ask for an individual serving of cream/sausage gravy to be made up especially for me, only without the pepper. Cream/sausage gravy is made with a lot of pepper. I know this, and I will ask for the gravy to be left off. But I think that whoever plans the menus should realize that not everyone can eat pepper, and that some people can eat it but just don’t like it.
I am a food blogger. I was blogging when the name did not exist (11 years this coming August). It annoys me more than it annoys the OP. I get asked if recipes from a decade ago are appropriate for the diet du jour all the time. The fuck if I know (my answer: “consult your doctor”).
Dear Og, yes! There is so much bullshit in food writing that it makes my blood boil.
I am mildly lactose intolerant. Milk and cheese make me fart. I take my lactase pills or just rip a good one when I get to the toilet. No biggie. I once fumigated Rome after dinner. 
I cannot really blame them. They can’t cater to every food preference/diet/allergy/religious rule under the sun.
I am not a picky eater, but prefer to eat mostly vegetables, fish or seafood as a second choice, meat is almost never a choice. I just came from a restaurant where there wasn’t a single vegetarian-friendly meal, not even a salad. Of course my experiment in Vegan living lasted a whole of two months, but I feel extremely sorry for vegetarians if they go to that restaurant, other than the wine there wasn’t a single thing they could eat. But if I still were a vegetarian I would have inquired about accommodations beforehand.
It sucks, I know, but I don’t see what they can do. A restaurant kitchen is not really amenable to those flexibilities.
I can’t imagine a chef trying to deal with people like you. Chefs are trained to make food taste good. What savory dishes don’t have either black or red pepper in them? It’s used in soups, on vegetables, in salad, on meat, and on seafood. Even deserts: black pepper might be added to strawberries and red pepper may well be in a chocolate. You don’t need a restaurant, you need a grocery store. You can buy the ingredients and then cook it how you want.
I’m racking my brains to think of any savory dish I cook that doesn’t have black pepper in it.
Wait! I’ve got it! Marinara sauce! She can come over on spaghetti night.
But she’s out of luck on the meatballs, garlic bread, and salad.
There are quite a few places which don’t put black pepper in every single savory dish.
And while I do cook most of my meals at home, I also enjoy eating out.
Do you also tell people who have mobility problems that they should just stay home, because it’s too much trouble to accommodate them?
I love you guys!
I cook for conventions/banquets, and some of these people have really helped me to understand that term I learned from the SDMB: Attention Whore. I’ve become convinced that there are people who attend these conventions who just can’t stand the idea that somebody special like them has to eat the same thing everybody else is getting. The most shining example was the woman who was here for a 2-day event that included five meals. She obtained a copy of the menus ahead of time and kindly provided us, in advance, a meal-by-meal itemization of everything she couldn’t eat. At first we thought this was awesome - it was much better than those people who wait until the meal is being served to announce their dietary requirements. But then we started looking over her list, and started to notice how her allergies contradicted themselves from one meal to the next.
I’ve lost count of the number of times all the vegetarians and vegans — the ones who were making us jump through hoops for the first 3-4 meals their group had — mysteriously stop being vegetarians/vegans when they see the big juicy steak being served at the final dinner.
There’s a similar issue that I’ve encountered, usually with “older” men. Their doctor (a real one) notes that they need to cut back on their fat intake, and suggests that they stop eating butter. The older gentleman then interprets this to mean that butter is at the root of their health problems, and so they go out to eat and order bacon/sausage and eggs and hashbrowns with gravy all over them … and dry toast. The meal is loaded with fat, but hey, no deadly butter. I once had an extremely elderly man who clearly grew up when everything was fried in butter, and couldn’t comprehend that we didn’t do that (I can’t remember any restaurant I’ve worked in over the last 29 years frying in butter). He was very insistent that we not fry his food in butter, to the point he wanted me to cook his over-easy eggs in a completely dry pan. Sorry, not happening. (FTR, most breakfast places I’ve seen fry with an artificially-butter-flavored vegetable oil, like Whirl.)