Advance warning: I’m not even pretending this article is about a recipe. Sorry. :-)

As I think I’ve mentioned (and if not, now you know), I’m extremely difficult to feed. I’m almost vegetarian and I don’t eat dairy. The former because I’m a weirdo, the latter because of medical reasons.

This is surprisingly common. Off the top of my head I can think of three friends of mine who have some sort of dairy intolerance, three with a wheat intolerance, three nut allergies and one intolerance of sweet peppers. Various degrees of vegetarianism are also getting more and more common, for one reason or another. Even that strange beast, the ‘vegan’, has been spotted among us on occasion.

So, what do we do about it?

Most of the time it doesn’t matter – people with specific dietary requirements generally have a very good idea of how to feed themselves (well, most of the time. Some people become vegetarian, or even vegan, with very little idea of nutritional requirements and as a consequence eat very unhealthily. There’s a technical term for such people: ‘stupid’). But eating is often a communal activity, but what do you do when you invite someone over for dinner (or worse, out for dinner) only to be told “Great! I’d love to come! Oh, by the way, I have a deathly allergy to the colour red. That’s not a problem is it?”

I don’t have any magic answer to this. Often my answer is “panic”. Some are easier than others – I have no trouble handling full fledged vegans. Partially because I’m so close to being one myself, partially because I lived with a vegan for a year and some and got very good at cooking meals he could eat. Intolerances of some specific and not too common ingredient are often not too hard to deal with: Peppers, shellfish, etc. You just pick a recipe which doesn’t use them. Easy, huh?

But what about a wheat intolerance? Or, for people who aren’t me, a dairy intolerance? Or vegetarians? All of these cut out a huge proportion of the recipes we’re familiar with, and can often leave us floundering.

The one that will often send me into a total panic is a nut allergy. You know all of those packets which say “May contain traces of nuts” because the product has been prepared in the same factory as something with nuts in it? My kitchen is like that. Less so than it used to be, but for years I simply didn’t feel that I could guarantee that anything produced in my kitchen was free from traces of nuts. Even these days I’m not very sure. It’s all probably safe, but when you’re weighing the chance of it being safe against the chance of it killing your guest? I, for one, don’t want to take that risk. My friend Liz, who I mentioned in my first article here has a nut allergy. This makes me feel very bad, because I often give cooked goods as presents and it has many a time resulted in me looking at her apologetically about the absence of a present.

The one maxim I try to stick by is that the objective of cooking for someone with a dietary restriction is that you should not try to make up for the lack. A recipe needs to stand or fall on its own merits. It shouldn’t be an inferior copy of something which ‘normal people’ can eat – fake meats, soy milk, wheat free bread. These all tend to be really nasty and I avoid them like the plague. On the other hand, one of my office mates recently brought in a wheat free carrot cake with a dairy free icing. I looked suspiciously at it for a bit, but when encouraged to try some I did. It was actually very good. A little dry perhaps, but otherwise a very nice carrot cake. Equally, I’ve had some very nice soy based ice creams, and some veggie burgers (which aren’t trying very hard to pretend that they’re meat) are pretty nice.

So, I guess this is all a very long winded way of saying “I don’t know”. This isn’t a question that has an easy answer. But it’s important to think about, as even fragments of an answer can be helpful in knowing what to do.

Any thoughts?