ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCES: GETTY IMAGES
Alex Cyr is a Toronto-based writer.
Last month, I attended a hot-yoga session in one of Toronto’s ritziest wellness clubs. I, a distance runner who finds his own “wellness” outdoors and has never held a proper gym membership, made it my goal to simply fit in with the rest of the class. So, after we’d wrapped up our asanas, I followed dozens of yogis and their Lululemon mats into a back lounge for a complimentary postclass smoothie.
I asked the server if the blue drink presented to me contained nuts, because I am allergic.
“There is almond milk,” she said. I told her almonds were fine for me, and took a sip while chatting with another guest. After 20 seconds of trying to make my conversation partner believe I knew a downward dog from a tree pose, my throat started to tickle and my mind began to race.
That wasn’t almond milk, I thought, as panic set in.
I stopped mid-sentence to excuse myself, left the room in a sweat and hailed an Uber to the emergency room. So much for fitting in.
Turns out, the smoothie server had it wrong: The drink had contained cashew milk. Potato, potâto – unless cashews send you into anaphylactic shock. For the second time that month, I sat in the emergency room of St. Joseph’s hospital red, wheezing and waiting for a nurse to jab me with epinephrine. I had also ingested cashews three weeks prior at an Indian restaurant; there, too, the waiter had mistakenly told me the chicken curry was nut-free.
I used to be more cavalier about my allergy and was able to get away with having a few nuts; until 2024, eating cashews would result in nothing more than a scratchy throat for me. But this year, for a reason I don’t know, my allergy has gone nuclear, putting me in the group of roughly 85,000 Canadians a year who visit emergency rooms with an anaphylactic reaction. So far, my membership in this group is not going that well.
I feel like I am living in a minefield. How was I supposed to know there were tree nuts in a drink, no less after the server informed me there were none? I realize there is a responsibility held by the allergic person (me) to inquire about the food I ingest. But it also strikes me as irresponsible for food establishments to serve items – sometimes as innocuous as a blue smoothie – that contain common allergens without proper warning.
In Canada, such ingredients must always be clearly declared on packaged food labels when present, but vendors using these ingredients have no requirement to follow suit, leaving us allergic folk at the mercy of their competence, or lack thereof. That makes it twice as hard for me to eschew the cashew, yet all of the ensuing drama could be avoided. Cracking down on food vendors and requiring them to produce an allergen list for the food they sell would protect people like me, and would get Canada on par with other countries that already do it (while alleviating pressure on our clogged emergency rooms).
There is no better time to turn this screw: Food allergies are on the rise across the world. Instances of anaphylaxis doubled in Canadian kids between 2011 and 2015, and it was estimated in 2016 that more than two million Canadians had a food allergy – enough to send a patient to a Canadian emergency room every 10 minutes. Those are the most recent data available, but since then, our population has increased by almost five million people and new allergens that can cause anaphylaxis (such as lupin, a legume that comes from the same plant family as peanuts) are more prominent in our foods.
And yet, Public Health Canada still does not recognize food allergies as a chronic disease such as, say, asthma or diabetes, meaning there is less money available for research, and next to no law that enforces a safe dining experience. Jennifer Gerdts, executive director of Food Allergy Canada, said that in the absence of federal law, her organization is limited to encouraging behaviour that prevents allergic reactions. Recommendations to consumers include things such as calling the restaurant ahead of time to make sure it’s allergy-friendly, eating at a low-traffic time to prevent miscommunications with waiters, or, simply, not eating at restaurants. She encourages food vendors, meanwhile, to see the good business case for being vigilant about allergens and not sending customers to the ER. All of it, to me, feels like one mistake away from disaster.
There is a better way to do things: in the European Union, the listing of common allergens on both prepacked and non-prepacked food (including restaurant menus) is the law. I recently travelled to Iceland and, because it was just three weeks after my second emergency-room visit, I was especially tentative when trying new restaurants. But I was quickly reassured: Just glancing at some airport granola in Reykjavik elicited the staffer to tell me, “No nuts, it’s not vegan … but there is gluten.”
There is a sad reason for the vigilance: In 2016, 15-year-old Natasha Ednan-Laperouse purchased a baguette from Pret a Manger, a popular chain in Europe, at Heathrow International Airport in England. She died shortly afterward, after the food shop failed to tell her there was sesame in the bun, to which she was deathly allergic. Since then, the European Union’s legislative regulations require that ingredients be properly listed. In Britain, Natasha’s Law became effective in 2021, requiring retailers to display full ingredient and allergen lists on every direct-sale food item.
Canada has no such law, and we are aimlessly marching toward our own Natasha moment because of it. When it happens, we will once again bemoan our reactive, and not preventative, brand of health policy. We are also exposing ourselves to lawsuits. In 2011, an American man sued a Saskatchewan restaurant for $25,000 and won after having an allergic reaction to a cheesecake the waitress said was nut-free. Then, in 2016, a man in Quebec who was allergic to salmon had an anaphylactic reaction after eating salmon tartare, which the waiter confused for steak tartare.
There is a better way forward. We have shown that, at least on a provincial level, changes in food labelling policy can happen quickly. In 2017, Ontario began to require food chains with 20 or more locations to include calorie indications on all their foods; all of a sudden, we knew how much energy there was in each flavour of Timbit.
Allergic people are owed the effort. We take a no-nonsense approach to psychological safety issues in restaurants (a waiter or food merchant who makes a racist comment or purposely misgenders someone, for example, would be out of a job). So, why are we not so serious in response to life-threatening issues of physical safety?
I am not advocating for a nut-based witch hunt, nor am I motivated to rid people of their jobs. I just hope that one day we will not have to commit our well-being to a waiter’s memory, and avoiding allergens at restaurants will be as simple as reading a piece of paper.