How can hospitality learn from my experience to boost consumer confidence and training on allergens?
Here’s my 7 reasons for not eating out with allergies due to near misses. I hope the hospitality sector can improve.
1. My personal fear and energy wasted in preparing to dine out with allergies
I’ve had life-threatening food allergies my whole life. Like most consumers with allergies, intolerances or auto-immune diseases like Coeliac Disease – dining out isn’t a spontaneous, fun event. It often requires vast amounts of time and planning. For example, with hours of research online and calls to venues to double check how they cook their food to ensure I can avoid cross-contamination with allergens. Like most people living with food allergies, I always tried to live my life and not let my allergies get in the way of my social life.
Several years ago, an accumulation of bad experiences combined with allergic reactions set off a torrid time of panic attacks. It resulted in me analysing the cost-benefit of eating out. The result, it no longer made sense to me. Why? I found that the thought of eating out became overwhelmingly anxiety-inducing, the worry, the research, the what if they contaminate me again? Any enjoyment I used to get from it vanished. I started avoiding social events involving food.
2. Social stigma and the exhaustion of self-advocacy
I realise that protecting my safety dining out can come across as rude and lead to tension or being admonished by waiters. This gets tiring, each time it happens, the more it grates. I much preferred buying some nice food to eat at home. Luckily I’m a decent cook so I suppose being able to create such a safe home environment allergen-wise made eating out seem even more perilous by comparison.
3. Inconsistency of allergy awareness and training
I ate out for many years. I hope people’s experiences are better and more consistent nowadays; inconsistencies in responsibility, transparency, and communication characterised my encounters. Funnily enough, now that I’m less naïve and more assertive, I’m less inclined to eat out; perhaps this is partly because I’m more aware of how widespread human error and fallibility are. There’s still far too much inconsistency and inadequate training on allergens in restaurants.
4. The increased risk perception over time
In my experience, allergy risks seem heightened after emerging from the risk-prone, hedonistic teenage years, particularly if you have a couple of severe reactions on top, which skews your tolerance to and perception of risk. Decades of a mixture of low-level and high-level fight-or-flight were fatiguing. I often felt like Benedict Cumberbatch in a hyper-focused crime-solving mode in BBC’s Sherlock. The associated stress morphed from the adaptive acute form to the maladaptive chronic form, an increased ‘allostatic load.’ My teenage mindset seems alien to me, almost like it’s not the same person, a less fractured individual, perhaps, with an alternative framing/worldview/perception.
5. The lack of response to feedback
Multiple times, when I suspected I was reacting to allergens when eating out, I didn’t report the incident during or after the meal. Why?
It’s the last thing on your mind when you feel sick. During which you’re just surviving and trying to get to a safe space. Afterwards it can be pretty overwhelming; there’s often not much fight in you the days after a reaction. You’re still unwell, shaken and often annoyed that you took the risk to eat out. The world seems more dangerous again. Yet I have to say that when I was younger if there was a reporting system like the foodallergyreaction.report, I would have been more likely to eat out as I’d have confidence that I could report issues and that catering teams were interested in incident reports and improving to reduce near misses.
6. Bad experiences and near-misses
I realise that if you don’t have an allergy, it can be hard to relate to my lived experience. So, I’ve included some incidents that made me swap dining out for chilled nights at home. Below, I’ll detail three memorable final straws that made me wonder: Why am I putting myself through this allergy hell?
- A-Level Celebration Turned Nightmare
To celebrate A-level exam results as a family, we went to a restaurant. Sadly I was ridiculed and not taken seriously by the waiting staff or head chef; I ended up leaving in tears, belly empty. - The Peanut incident
At a high-street restaurant, I was asked before serving, ‘would you like the peanuts on the side or the top of the dish? This blew my mind as it was after I’d taken time to clearly explain my severe peanut allergy to the waitress. - A Risky Meal in the Whitsundays
A bittersweet experience from my gap year travels to Australia involved sailing around the picturesque Whitsundays. It was incredible! The crew repeatedly confirmed our supper was ‘just chicken’. I decided to trust them as I’d explained my allergies before and ‘just chicken’ should be…just chicken. However, once I started eating, it became clear it wasn’t just chicken at all. Instead, it included a sauce and stuffing cooked with it. I realised the crew were unreliable, so their lame attempts to assuage my concerns were taken with a pinch of salt. I sat looking out at a calm sea, nowhere near land; my mind-state was the antithesis of the serene sea. Luckily, I was fine. I took a deep sigh of relief when I finally stepped ashore.
7. The danger of dismissive attitudes
A common theme of this blog is that my experience is that caterers have not taken my allergies seriously. My research, time and energy in explaining my allergies in advance and on the day of dining was all wasted energy. The implicit or explicit response I often received was,
‘Just relax and don’t be so uptight’
It became clear that catering for customers was at the bottom of the hospitality hit list of priorities. Does it seem reasonable to put your life in another’s hands when they are nonchalant and dismissive about their responsibility? Does it seem like a good use of time and money? After all, ‘eating out during a cost of living crisis is more expensive than ever’. I would argue that no! it’s irresponsible for me to keep trying to eat out safely when my experiences are riddled with near misses. I decided to stop putting myself through the wringer. Could your business change my mind?
Summary – Would You Take the Risk?
If you are repeatedly shown that placing your trust in somebody or something in a high-stakes situation is precarious, would you keep doing so or tell a loved one to? Imagine you’re out for the evening and don’t have a lift home. A guy who has been sinking pints of beer all night offers you a ride home. Would you get in the car with a drunk driver? I bet you wouldn’t. I’ve made peace with not eating out. Yet I wonder if I and other diners have let caterers off the hook? Does the absence of allergy diners mean that they can ignore us further?
We live in changing times. 1 in 20 consumers have a food allergy or food intolerance, according to FSA research last year, which became a headline in The Guardian. My glass may be half empty. Yet if I were a caterer, I’d be wondering how to tap into engaging allergen consumers’ confidence and loyalty in a tough market. After all, we’re often the decision-makers at office parties, family, and birthday celebrations.
I’m positive that the ‘report tool‘ can engage caterers and consumers to report more near misses and improve hospitality for all. I’m just fed up with being a guinea pig myself, so I urge the rest of you to take this forward.
Let me know if you will?
A bit about our author:
To learn more about Oli Weatherall and what he does, such as being a Nutritionist, Research
Advisor, and Writer. Feel free to connect with Oli on LinkedIn. Oli also, writes a Substack
newsletter which you can check out and/or subscribe to here.
If you need support for your allergen management policies please get in contact either by calling 07732637292 or by booking a 30 minute online call by clicking here