If you’d asked me a couple of years ago how I thought I was going to die, I would have thought you were a morbid weirdo, but I would’ve answered, “Car crash, probably. Or cancer. Old age, if I’m lucky.” Now I think I’m probably going to get killed by a cashew.
As you age, allergies can sometimes get milder. Or, if you’re unlucky, they get worse with repeated exposure. I’m unlucky. Astute readers might have noted, that, in my first article, I mentioned eating a hazelnut and my throat closing up temporarily. In my second article, I ate a hazelnut and I ended up having my throat close up and throwing up for an hour and sneezing and feeling feverish for about two hours after that. These two incidents were about five years apart. The only reasonable conclusion is if this trend continues, five years from now eating a hazelnut will cause me to drop dead on the spot. That is the only reasonable conclusion.
After eating a hazelnut on Christmas, I have become way more diligent about carrying around an EpiPen with me. I’d been carrying around technically expired EpiPens for a couple of months, but after that incident I promptly got new ones and now have ‘RENEW EPIPENS!!’ scheduled in my calendar annually for the rest of eternity. (Did you know that EpiPens cost $100 each, per year? And that you need two of them? And that I’m no longer on my dad’s health plan? Blergh.)
My friends and I recently travelled to Montréal for a few days. They really wanted to go to one of those eat-in-the-dark restaurants, where the dining room is pitch black and you can’t see your meal. Supposedly this makes the food taste better by heightening your other senses. I was hesitant. I read their poorly translated menu online over and over, scouring it for signs of nuts. It seemed safe and I relented; we made a reservation. I started to regret agreeing to it in the first place. It seemed to me, as with dim sum or a bake sale, like a game of Russian Roulette. What if I couldn’t explain my allergy well enough in French and I died? What if they brought me the wrong meal and I couldn’t tell and I died? What if I couldn’t find my EpiPen in the dark and I died? What if my throat closed up and I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening and nobody could see me and I died in the dark in a gimmicky, overpriced restaurant in French Canada?
I was growing increasingly nervous, but everyone else was really excited so I kept my mouth shut. I looked up how to explain my allergy and discovered that French doesn’t technically have a word for nuts and panicked. (‘Noix’ refers to walnuts.) When we got to the hotel, I asked the bilingual concierge to help me. (She said ‘noix’ was fine.) I showed my friends exactly where in my bag I was keeping my EpiPen and explained how to use it.
At the restaurant, we learned that you placed your food orders in the lobby area before venturing into the dark. Before taking our orders, the server asked, in perfect English, if any of us had food allergies.
“I’m allergic to tree nuts,” I told her, sweaty palm on the paper in my pocket with the French translation written down.
“It’s a nut free kitchen,” she said in a blasé Québécois accent. “Too many allergies.”
I could’ve kissed her and/or punched whoever decided not to include this information on the website. Our server lead us into the pitch dark dining area. It was an interesting experience. There was a rowdy table seated nearby and a server broke a bunch of plates. My main course was weirdly damp and cold and I’m still not exactly sure what it was. The menu called it a ‘roll;’ it was the only vegetarian option. The crème brûlée was good.
When I think about my future death I now conceptualize it as some bizarro nut-based game of Clue: will it be ‘Server’ with the ‘Cashew Curry’ in the ‘Restaurant’? Or ‘Friend’ with the ‘Pecan Butter Tart’ at the ‘Wedding’? Or ‘Significant Other’ with the ‘Nutella’ in ‘My Own Home’? Humour aside, I’m terrified. Going to new restaurants, or ordering a different menu item at a familiar restaurant, makes me anxious. I check the list of ingredients on food items I’ve bought millions of times before just in case they’ve changed their recipe in the last two weeks. I ask servers if completely innocuous foods have nuts in them, and what kind of oil things are fried in. (I recently discovered walnut oil in a grocery store and my blood ran cold.) I make people taste test baked goods for me, but I rarely trust them when they say ‘I think this doesn’t have any nuts in it.’ That used to be good enough for me. It’s not good enough anymore.
I wonder what it’s like to eat without thinking about it. My friend ordered a mystery meal at the restaurant in Montréal; the thought of being able to do that is incomprehensible to me. Any time I eat something in an unfamiliar environment, I contemplate my mortality for a moment. I think that there’s a pretty good chance that I’m eventually going to meet my end at the hands of a cashew. Cashews have always caused my worst allergic reactions and I’m not sure how they could get much worse. I try to be vigilant, but I recognize that it’s a real possibility that I, or someone else, could slip up.
For now, I’m not going to let fear stop me from going out to eat with my friends. Eating great food while surrounded by people I like is one of my favourite things in life. The tiny risk is worth it. If this is really how I’m going to die, I just hope that I’m eighty-something years old when it happens, out at a restaurant with my best old lady friends, and that whatever it is, it’s the most delicious goddamn thing I’ve ever eaten.
PS: My dad is from Québec. Your province is lovely. (NO IT IS NOT, it is almost worse than Alberta, but I’m sure your dad is great, for a daywalker. – Ed.)
