| "And gluten-free products are a) expensive, b) still pretty rare, and c) unlikely to be found outside of specialized sections" Not true. Our whole family has been on the diet for a decade or so for medical necessity of our son. Yes if you "demand" something like gluten containing junk food its terribly expensive and frankly doesn't taste very good, usually. But a perfectly "normal" GF lifestyle isn't any more difficult or expensive than a G lifestyle. Grilled chicken caesar salad with homemade tasty dressing... just hold the crutons. Traditional steak dinner with all the fixings, just don't marinate in soy sauce based marinades and don't serve garlic bread on the side. Beef pot roast with all the fixings except dinner rolls. Meatloaf just use rice as a binder instead of wheat flour and thicken the gravy with off the shelf cornstarch instead of wheat flour. For obvious "bun" reasons we tend to cook a heck of a lot more kebobs than burgers and brats. He have had cornbread burger buns and they're not as bad as they might sound... after all corn torilla and seasoned meat is not unheard of, so cornbread and somewhat less seasoned meat is pretty good too. Lime garlic marinated chicken stir fried Snack time tends a lot more toward corn chips and salsa or sliced up fruit than toward cookies and cake slices. You'd be amazed what can be done with cornbread and cornbread batter, but you have to make your own from cornmeal, the mixes in the store use flour as a binder. No problemo homemade is about 1/2 the cost of boxed mix anyway. I don't like eggs, but obviously for breakfast we do a lot more bacon -n- eggs than bacon -n- pancakes. I do agree that for social reasons a GF cake costing $10 and tasting like instant potatoes and crunchy rice is kinda ridiculous. So unless there's intense social pressure we don't buy the "GF-products" and stick to naturally GF food instead. Very little baby spinach contains wheat, for example. |
"Yes if you "demand" something like gluten containing junk food its terribly expensive and frankly doesn't taste very good, usually."
I'm not talking about junk food, per se. For someone who's on the road constantly, or works crazy hours, and doesn't often have time to cook or prepare meals, packaged and restaurant foods are unfortunate necessities of life.
Now, I'm fully aware that there are people who'd consider all such food, by sheer virtue of being shelf-stable and packaged, to be junk food. And I try my absolute hardest to avoid packaged foods in general. But I'm not looking for gluten-free chips or donuts. I'm looking for gluten-free ready-to-eat meals, or gluten-free microwave meals, or gluten-free options on restaurant menus, or gluten-free breakfast bars, or gluten-free breads, etc. All of these things have become much more available in the last half-decade than they've been in my entire life preceding it.