It kinda is. I’m pretty sure the general concept of pizza predates the introduction of tomatoes in Italy. I visited Italy this June and some of the pizzas i had there were tomato-free. Not because i can’t eat tomatoes, but just because i had a lot of pizza and some of the non-tomato versions sounded tasty. I had a really nice pesto & cheese pizza, for instance. And a box lunch that had something billed as pizza that was really a sort of focaccia with olives and onions on top.
One of the reasons I watch Tasting History on YouTube is to get recipes from before the Columbian Exchange - no tomatoes for the European/Asian/North African ones.
Eating Mexican, of course, is much more challenging for me…
My great-grandfather worked as a baker in Rome before emigrating to the US. My mom once asked him what his notion of “pizza” was. His answer was “Bread with olive oil and little fishies”.
That said, you wouldn’t get that at an American pizzeria, but you could get a white pizza at most of them.
I could absolutely get that at any pizzeria I might go to, assuming the “little fishies” are anchovies.
Most of them would probably be happy to make it for you if that’s what you ordered, but it wouldn’t be on the menu. And they might ask for payment first, just in case it was a prank order.
We used to be friends with a couple. They had a 10 year old daughter. The wife believed her daughter would die if she inhaled one peanut molecule.
I remember the first time they came over to our house. Before she came over, she called the local emergency response team to alert them that they will be in the area, and to “be ready” in case their daughter was exposed to peanuts. (I am not making this up.) When they arrived to our home she spent half an hour tearing through our refrigerator and cabinets looking for any food products that might contain peanuts. She finally found something in the refrigerator with a label that said, “This product may contain peanut residue.” She then made a big show of putting this item in the back of a top cupboard.
We later decided to order some pizzas for delivery. It was then we learned the wife was “allergic to tomatoes,” and she requested one of the pizzas to have sour cream in place of tomato sauce. Over the phone, she instructed the restaurant employee on how to wash their spoons and ladles to prevent her pizza from becoming contaminated with tomato paste.
After the pizzas arrived, she took a couple bites of her special sour cream pizza, and then abruptly stopped eating it. I asked her why. She said saw someone eat a slice of regular (tomato) pizza, and then eat a piece of the sour cream pizza, thereby contaminating her pizza.
As we got to know this couple better, we concluded the wife was very… strange. She seemed to thrive on attention. We later concluded she was batshit insane, and the peanut and tomato thing was nothing more than a way for her to gain attention.
This does a real disservice to people who are legit allergic.
So many pretend at an “allergy” that it makes those who really have one more at risk.
Or alternatively can make their lives easier. My best friend from medical school has celiac (not an allergy but same idea of cannot eat something for real medical cause). I once asked him what he thought of all the trendy “I can’t eat gluten.” folk that have popped up, who we all know don’t actually have celiac or even gluten or wheat allergies. He loves them: they drive the market demand that results in his having more options on menus and in stores.
“There are people who have oral reactions to certain fresh fruits because those foods have similar proteins to pollens - for example, someone who is allergic to birch pollen may react when eating fresh carrots”
Yep. I have seasonal allergic rhinitis- hay fever. The food bit is called oral allergy syndrome and only happens when my hay fever is symptomatic. Basically, it just makes my soft palate itchy as all get out and that makes me sneeze. Foods that cause it? Cantaloupe, raw celery, carrots, turnips, cauliflower, broccoli, kiwifruit, pineapple, and unripe bananas. There are others. All of them have to be raw to cause the reaction and they don’t cause it in the winter when the hay fever isn’t bothering me.
I was raised in central Indiana but have lived in south Georgia for the last 42 years. The flora is different here- no cool season grasses to speak of and a lot fewer hardwood trees. One of the reasons I’ve stayed here is that my allergies don’t bother me nearly as much as they did back home.
Maybe the egg issue has to do with the quantity you ate, and since it’s unlikely you’d eat a whole cake that contained an egg or two, you would eat an amount that wouldn’t bother you?
See also pets disguised as “service animals”.
Although that trend seems to be fading a bit as various regulations and laws have come in to distinguish between pets, emotional support animals, and traditional service animals. With only the latter having real protected status.
I wouldn’t put it past me to eat an entire cake. 
I do think that might be part of it, but I’m not risking one bite of a boiled egg as an experiment. When I get banana pains, it’s instant now and I don’t want my sometimes-egg to turn into always-egg. Bodies are weird.
I don’t think there’s ever been actual evidence of the “one molecule of peanut in the house” sort of peanut allergy. I suspect that what happens is that the kid is actually allergic to something else, instead of or in addition to peanuts, and when the parents get rid of peanuts and the kid still has allergic reactions, they assume that it must still be peanut traces.
While allergy reactions can be dose dependent, egg proteins bonding to gluten is a known thing. Many people with egg allergies can eat things like cake safely.
Canadian egg ladder (pdf) is a graphic that shows a progression from dried egg pasta up through raw eggs, for people interested in testing their reactions or trying to decrease their reactivity to eggs.
One of my online friends elsewhere had a teen son who she was hoping to decrease the egg allergy restrictions-- apparently it’s common for people with egg allergies to outgrow them as teens. But also common for people to not do so. Friend was “lucky”, her son can now eat anything he wants to, eggwise, but it took a lot of work. A lot of repeat exposure, a lot of extra cooking so that there was adequate egg food and non-egg food in the house. And for both Mom and Son, some emotional work, as the thing they’d been thinking of as “poison” now became a thing he needed to eat.
The ladder recommends starting each step with a pea sized amount and working up to an age-appropriate portion over a few days or weeks. So, for plain cooked eggs, they started out with a pea sized portion of egg white, a bigger piece the next day or so, working up to half a deviled egg (kid didn’t like the texture), then trying out fried eggs (a bigger success).
And then hang out at that step for a month or two before moving on to the next step. .
Maybe.
Or maybe she was over-reacting to actual food allergies. Because that happens.
Just because you’re allergic doesn’t mean you have to live in a bubble or inflict your problems on others.
I have a life-threatening allergy to tomatoes if I eat them. Getting tomato juice on my skin can cause a rash like poison ivy. So does brushing up against a tomato plant. Yet I routinely handle tomatoes as part of my job, with precautions like not eating the customers’ tomatoes and wearing gloves to protect my hands. The only thing I won’t do is clean up a smashed glass jar that used to contain tomato products. My bosses and co-workers are aware of that and it’s never been a problem for me to step back in those instances because they know why I’m doing it.
I also carry emergency medications but have, fortunately, not had to use any in a very long time.
That’s how you manage allergies in the real world. Not by posturing, or “alerting” emergency response teams. God, how I loathe people like that. Why? Because -
It is possible to react to extremely minute amounts of a substance. Like me and tomatoes. I have a niece who is hyper-allergic to fish, and when she visits her mother’s/my sister’s house there’s a very thorough cleaning/decontamination of the kitchen and dining areas before she arrives, but it’s a cleaning, not a nuking from orbit. There might still be fish in the freezer or other location, but it’s thoroughly wrapped/contained/in a can/labeled so the niece can identify it, not open it, and stay away from it. Also, no one is allowed to cook fish while she in in the house. But no one swoops in like it’s a Biohazard 4 situation.
Again - that’s how you do it in real life.
I’m OK with emotional support animals IF the person has an actual need for one (not just using it as an excuse to cart a pet around everywhere) AND the animal is an actual, trained, service animal. A service animal being reliable to keep quiet, not threaten other people in public, and not pee/defecate in random locations. My store does have some customers with such support animals that are appropriately attired, trained, and what I would consider actually in service to their owner.
But too many people just slap a shitty Temu bought vest on an ill-trained, ill-socialized dog (often one that needs a support animal of its own being a neurotic mess itself) that growls, lunges, piss-marks anything vertical and shits randomly. I loathe those people as well.
That’s the thing , though. An “emotional support animal” is not the same as a “service animal”. They aren’t trained to perform a service. An ESA is basically a pet - the ADA doesn’t require stores and restaurants to allow ESAs. An ESA letter only requires landlords to allow ESAs. Used to be airlines too, but that stopped a few years ago. There are also psychiatric service animals, which do perform a service, such as interrupting a panic attack or blocking self-harming behaviors. And I’m sure many people try to pass off ESAs as psychiatric service animals.
As I said… I’m OK IF.
The rules/regs/laws and requirements are not up to snuff on that. I’m open to making a path for various support animals to be actual service animals IF it actually serves a need and the animal is properly trained. The fact that we’re not there yet doesn’t make me object to the concept.
I think I possibly wasn’t clear . ESAs by definition are not trained to perform a service- they provide comfort by their mere presence. That’s why landlords must allow them with a letter from a doctor or therapist, even if there is a no pet policy. If they actually perform a service for a person with a disability who needs it , they are by definition a service animal, not an ESA. If an ESA gets trained to perform a service for a disabled person, they have become a service animal.
Then every pet I’ve ever had was/is an emotional support animal and the term loses all meaning.
Service animals are typically well trained. ESA may not be. Folks shouldn’t be able to take a possibly untrained or under trained animal anywhere they want. Especially on private property where the management doesn’t want them.