Trade-offs

With Joe's recent switch to a gluten-free diet, our concern for nutritional value is at a new low, eclipsed by the need to find something -- anything -- he can eat. Gluten lurks in everything -- we have become suspicious even of our toilet paper -- and must be thoroughly eschewed, even at the expense of higher fat, higher cholesterol, greater belt size, etc.

Puffin Flakes Cereal? Great! Who cares if it has 8,274 grams of sugar in it? It's gluten free!

Amazon Granola with more calories than ice cream? Load it on!

Ice cream one of the few things you can eat for dessert? Pass me a big spoon!

But thank goodness for companies like Dannon. Although most Dannon yogurt, sadly, cannot be considered gluten free, certain flavors, basically the plain ones, are. Whew! What a relief! And the reason they are gluten free -- this is even more of a relief -- is that they contain "no natural flavorings."

Well, what's the big deal about natural flavors, anyway.

Our concern for taste is also at a new low. Joe is getting used to his hockey-puck bread -- so called not only because of its consistency but also because that's about the size of each piece -- in the way you get used to the thought that at any given time there are roughly 1.3 million microscopic bugs crawling around your bedding.

I read the ingredients for Garbanzo Bean Chocolate Cupcakes and got as far as reading the second step in the directions before I realized I was actually considering making chocolate cake with BEANS.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

To be fair, the recipe did get good reviews. (I read those, too.)

I suspect the truth-in-advertising laws are suspended for gluten-free products. From the taste of some of them, there can't be more than, say, .2% actual food particles in them. The rest is made up possibly of debris from Halley's comet.

This is not to say that everything gluten free tastes bad. There's still rice cakes.