Gluten, gluten everywhere

I will never taste Hoagie Haven. I will never experience Frist Pizza at 2 a.m. I will never drink Beast. I will never go to House of Cupcakes. I will never sit down to a plate full of pastries at Forbes brunch, and I might not be able to join an eating club.

Why? I’ve got a wheat allergy. When I’m making food for myself, my allergy is functionally a non-issue. However, if I’m eating anything I didn’t prepare, my allergy instantly turns into a massive buzzkill. I found out my first week here that RCA and Residential College study breaks are not easy. I never know when wheat will rear its ugly head — cookies, pretzels, many Indian dishes and pizza are all off-limits for me. Sushi, however, is absolutely game. You will probably see me at every sushi study break until I graduate. This is not an exaggeration.

Thankfully, Princeton Dining Services does a great job of caring for us kids with food allergies. They have gluten-free bread and special toasters — to prevent cross-contamination — in all the dining halls. This is incredible. Before September, I hadn’t had a sandwich outside my house in years. The toasters and rice bread are in funky places — I have to hop behind the sandwich counter to get the bread in Wucox — but the stares are a very small price to pay for eating kind of like a normal person.

As great as PDS is to us, it’s also pretty big on orzo. The only thing you need to know about orzo is that it can go to hell in a handbasket. You’ve probably seen orzo in the dining hall soups and thought it was some kind of rice. Well, rice it ain’t. It’s pasta painstakingly shaped to look exactly like rice. This is torture for anybody with a wheat allergy.

The betrayal cuts especially deep because I love rice. Since rice is one of the commonly available grains my body can handle, I eat rice like it’s my job. I lived in China for a year of high school, and even my Chinese friends said I ate a lot of rice. That’s saying something. Orzo is such a tease because it looks like one of my favorite foods, but my body treats it like poison. I don’t know who went out of their way to make that shit, but it was a cruel, cruel joke on his/her part.

Other merry pranksters like to put wheat into things like soup. Café Viv is especially guilty of this. I don’t know why wheat has to be in tomato rice soup, but for some obscure reason it is. That said, Viv also sells gluten-free pizza — which is beyond fantastic. Since most pizza is made with wheat, I do a lot of watching people eat pizza and very little actual eating of it. Whenever I get the chance to eat a gluten-free pizza, it amounts to a spiritual experience for me. It is like shaking the hand of Jesus.

I’ll admit that this sounds very “first-world” problems-y. I’m very thankful that I have food to eat in the first place, but not being able to enjoy the staple grain of Western civilization is a definite downer. It’s not fun to go out to an Italian restaurant and know the only thing you can eat is salad. Salad is amazing and all, but it will never be as sexy as tomatoes and cheese on bread.