To think that all the dietary requirements these days is taking the joy out of hosting?

[ChristmasMenuDrama]

Across my family and their partners, we have:

• Allergic to all fruit
• Allergic to nuts & seeds - won’t eat anything that “may contain” just in case.
• Allergic to Seafood
• Vegan
• Coeliac
• Legumes set off his IBS

And then there are other people who are just plain fussy like the person who won’t eat anything with cream, creamy, or that is too similar to cream in their opinion.

Then you factor in children and I start to lose the will to live.

I really try to be an accommodating host and I always find something everyone can eat eventually but is just me or is it getting worse?

It was fine when it was just one person with a “requirement” but a lot of the ones I have listed aren’t very compatible with each other.

It really takes the joy out of it when I have to keep vetoing things or replacing them with very expensive substitutes!

Whilst being able to eat a whole ice cream sounds a bit unlikely, it's actually quite possible that a person with non IgE mediated allergies can tolerate their allergen in certain forms and quantities - they're not necessarily making it up at all.
My DS has a mixture of IgE and non IgE allergies, all very real, diagnosed by a paediatric immunologist and gastroenterologist when he was little and they've all required him to be hospitalised at some point during his life. His IgE mediated allergies are the typical kill you if you've not got your EpiPen type of thing and he is extremely sensitive to some of his allergens so even minute quantities will trigger a reaction. His non IgE mediated reactions are mainly gut related and have improved to some degree over the years so he can for instance now tolerate some amounts of cooked egg in baking but couldn't eat an actual whole egg. His reactions are also dose dependent in that large quantities or repeated small indiscretions are both problems. So he could eat say one cupcake once a week, but eating several at once would make him very unwell and eating one every day would too. Non IgE reactions are also typically delayed, so if they do occur after a dietary discretion not necessarily obvious to an observer.
To avoid confusion we always just tell restaurants, people who are hosting us etc that DS is allergic to his long list of forbidden foods and don't specify which are IgE and which non IgE mediated.He tends to avoid all his allergens outside of home even if there's non IgE stuff he could probably eat. Aside from the fact that he has many years experience of knowing what he can tolerate and what he can't and other people don't, there's just too much risk of someone getting confused between which foods he can have traces of and which he can't. Or of someone who knows he's allergic to egg seeing him eating a cupcake, deciding he is a liar and then giving him something with almond milk in (which would trigger anaphylaxis) because they've decided he's making his allergies up.
Yes, people do make up allergies and intolerances. I have no idea why as it is a complete PITA, but they do. But not everyone that is eating something you think doesn't make sense is lying.

We are vegan, as are the in laws, we are hosting Xmas dinner this year, my dad is coming too, he’s not vegan but he is perfectly happy to try his first vegan Xmas dinner and spend the day with us all. It’s the first time he’ll have met my partner’s parents.

Let them starve….

Thank you for sharing this information - it is both interesting and appreciated. I did not mean to belittle the difficulties your son has with his health. It sounds really challenging.

Given most of those restrictions can cause serious health issues, YABU. It’s hardly their fault!

id be asking everyone to bring different dishes to make it easier.

Oh please. The poor OP is expressing some perfectly legitimate frustration that she is faced with catering for a very wide and mutually exclusive set of food …..necessaries. You accuse her of being a mass murderer.

I bet your parties are fun 💨

Not always. My sister went vegan for a while because she was dairy intolerant and she knew that she could have the vegan food.

I eat some vegan food and use vegan milk. Too much Voss milk affects my breathing. Hardly a "choice"

Seriously? You do know that ChatGPT hallucinates? (ie includes plausible sounding random falsehoods) Why would you use it for something that may have fatal consequences?

@Unforgettablefire For everyone else could you not just put everything in the middle of the table and let people help themselves? no, because of cross-contamination and CFs.

They may have Crohn's. A family member has it and although they can eat some fruits they blanket "no fruits" when out to avoid mix ups. It's the seeds they can't have.
I understand - easier to say and to understand.

Some people are clueless about food. I used to think that coeliac was 'wheat will make them very ill , so oats, rye etc would be fine' FFS.
The gluten free diet - All you need to know about the diet that will make you well again - Coeliac UK

I know I have read somewhere the theory that some nut allergies may have been caused by parents not giving nuts to children early on and there was advice that some form of nut product be introduced to a baby's diet much earlier.

Some time after the80s, medical advice was issued to avoid peanuts - I don't know whether this originated in peanut allergies or was simply and anti-choking thing. Then peanut allergies soared. And the advice was changed, to introduce them earlier.

There has been a global increase in allergies. In the UK , for example, in the 20 years to 2012 there was a 615% increase in the rate of hospital admissions for anaphylaxis. Pensioners have the lowest rate of allergies. I don't think anaphylaxis would have gone unnoticed, and allergies aren't noted for resolving themselves as you get older, rather the opposite, so I don't by the hypothesis of one poster, that there's always been this level of allergies, we just didn't recognise them.

You're very welcome. Non IgE allergies are poorly understood generally. My DS has a fairly unusual condition which I won't go into as it's sufficiently rare to possibly be identifiable,and I think even the paediatric consultants at our local hospital thought I was a madwoman who was making it all up as they couldn't explain what was happening. It took being admitted to a children's hospital hundreds of miles from home and some quite unpleasant investigations to get to the bottom of it. I'm possibly a bit over sensitive about people not believing him due to those childhood experiences!

@MereDintofPandiculation , back a few decades ago, friends' dd had a nut-allergy, and they'd been told that a likely cause was groundnut oil in nipple cream. No idea if it was true, but the friends are intelligent (as in Cantab maths/science degrees)

This is what I thought.

It sound like she goes to great length to not just accommodate the allergies as you'd expect but the likes and preferences. It's probably because she is taking it very seriously and is going to great lengths to accommodated everyone that she is finding it stressful.

I do think previous PP advice of find a menu and stick to it - obviously checking no pre-made stuff has changed recipes in meantime - is probably only way to avoid stress every time.

Ds has a lanolin reaction - I was told to smother nipple cream on with him (now suspect tongue tie) - the cream was full of lanolin. However I react to wool jumpers - get rash - so perhaps it was always on the cards.

But groundnuts (peanuts) are a legume, not a nut.

@msbevvy , sorry, friends' DD had a peanut allergy but was told to avoid all nuts too. I'm well aware that peanuts are legumes, thanks.

Friends' DD fortunately is no longer allergic to peanuts, but it meant a few years of them being frustrated by 'may contain nuts' labels on food.

I hear you OP. I am used to our close family's seafood and peanut allergies, lactose intolerance and vegetarianism, but add in extended family and friends long lists of dislikes and preferences and suddenly menu planning becomes a headache.

Allergic to all fruit seems unlikely. Unless they’re awaiting allergy testing to determine which fruit.

Also allergic to all nuts and seeds is unlikely. Unless again they’re awaiting testing.

Unless the OP has a particularly atopic group of friends or is inviting a very large group of people over for all of those allergies to be present in a typical selection of dinner party guests seems unlikely.

There are some very unpleasant replies on here OP. Catering day in day out for on allergy is hard but becomes the norm. Catering occasionally for multiple allergies and dietary requirements is going to be more difficult because a) you are not used to it and b) there are multiple things to take into consideration. And yes that will make things hard and yes instead of relaxing a bit you will be on edge that you have got something wrong because you are not a trained caterer and you are in your own kitchen where the risk of cross contamination is high. Far from making you an ungracious host I think it speaks volumes that you are trying very hard to accommodate people.
Yes its difficult when you have someone with a serious life threatening allergy but the amount of vitriol and sarcasm thrown at the OP is totally unnecessary

@Cloudysky81 , if you were likely to go into anaphylactic shock if you ate poppy seeds or sesame seeds, would you want to risk trying any seed?

I'm allergic to all nuts and peanuts. Just different severities. Some will kill me, others will just make me feel like I'm dying. So, not all of them induce anaphylaxis, but I still don't want to eat them!

I don't avoid all 'may contain traces of' labels though, or I'd starve.

We're just not grubby enough now. If your immune system never gets any of the germs from the local mud to work on, because the kid in question plays inside all day, there is a higher chance of allergies because he immune system gets going on anything that might be a germ.

Caveat: this is based on something I read years ago, when I was busy ignoring all the advice about not feeding small DC peanuts (it seemed completely illogical to me, people in Indonesia and West Africa are not noted for high rates of peanut allergy and they eat them from infancy).

Probably better they bring their own than expect someone else to manage it all.

Among my in-laws:

A is vegetarian
B is vegan
C is pescatarian
D won't eat fish, pasta, anything with a sauce, or any vegetables apart from potatoes
E won't touch pasta, rice, garlic, or anything creamy, cheesy or spicey
F is gluten intolerant and won't eat meat, but will eat poultry
G is gluten and dairy intolerant
H is allergic to nuts

and I'm allergic to a lot of seafood

Roast chicken/turkey is actually the easiest thing to feed everyone, with a nut roast for the meat avoiders and everyone else can just not have the bits they don't like.

If H went vegetarian, that would bugger things up a bit.

Pensioners have the lowest rate of allergies.

That's interesting. I'm a pensioner who used to have loads of allergies, but now have very few. I assume I've somehow become desensitised over the years. I had a dreadful reaction the first time I ate prawns, but I can eat them without fear now, although sometimes they give me itchy, tingly bumps in my mouth.

I've also had dreadful D&V whenever I've eaten mussels or oysters, and haven't dared trying them for years to test if they still make me ill.