A guide to talking to your school cafeteria about gluten-free foods
Hi! My name is Mira, and this is the first of many blogs to support teenagers as they navigate life with Celiac. I wanted to share some tips and tricks on an experience that nearly every teenager deals with – navigating school lunches!
I moved to a new school for the sixth grade – and what a welcome I received. About a week into my new routine, I ate a slice of garlic bread since everyone else was grabbing it at lunch. Apparently, silly little 6th-grade Mira thought that garlic bread was *definitely* Gluten-Free – that’s what the allergen board had said after all. Spoiler Alert: It’s not. It turns out that some kid was leaning up against the board, and since it’s a whiteboard, the little check on the gluten box got wiped off. This ended in little Mira throwing up her guts for four hours straight. The worst part? The garlic bread wasn’t even that good.
I know this probably was not just because of a whiteboard – it’s because schools do not always know how to navigate celiac support for their students. I know that you all have likely experienced something similar.
After that incident, my parents encouraged me to go to the school’s Head Chef and tell him about my celiac disease, so that he would be able to make celiac-safe food, and also warn me when I tried to pick up a piece of gluten-free bread. While this did help me when I tried to accidentally pick up an egg roll, it also earned me knowing looks when I would go up to get a cookie for one of my friends. In the end, I am so grateful that my parents made me go and speak to the chef because since then I have been able to eat comfortably in the cafeteria without worrying about cross-contamination or whether or not something is gluten-free. When going about talking to your cafeteria staff about your celiac disease, there are a few key things to keep in mind. You might be wondering what this infamous allergen board is, now that I’ve spoken out about it so much – both in positive and negative ways).
Though this allergen board did fail me once, it’s still so helpful on a daily basis, and not just for people with celiac disease but also people with any sort of common allergy. However, you should learn from my mistakes and use common sense when getting school lunch… for example, don’t assume that nice gluteny garlic bread is gluten-free. My final word of advice is to not get shy or be ashamed to tell your cafeteria staff about your celiac disease, it’s nothing to be ashamed of! The chefs WANT to know that you are gluten-free because they want you to have food that you feel safe and happy eating!
