Seems like everyone is intolerant and sensitive these days.  The protein gluten has become the scapegoat for stomach ailments and the poster child for genetically modified foods.  Everyone with a yoga mat and fedora has joined the ranks of the staunchly gluten free from Zoey Deschanel to Gwynth Paltrow.   Chelsea Clinton had a gluten free wedding cake and there’s even a dating website for gluten free singles.  Being someone who likes to swim against the tide, all of this gluten free talk makes me want to dip my head into a vat of Pizza Dough.

Gluten, I recently learned, comes from the Latin word for glue and even though I am not a fan of chugging Elmers, gluten is actually the protein that makes baked stuff taste good.  Gluten makes pizza dough doughy, bagels fluffy and good bread chewy.  Buddhist monks who were trying to get around the whole vegetarian rule by creating fake meat discovered it. They realized that when they submerged dough in water, the starch washed away and what was left was gummy meat like mass. Namaste.

The problem is of course, that in America we eat more gluten than is good for us.  Even worse, our wheat has twice the amount of gluten than it used to making it harder to digest. But the jury is still out on what this all means.

The fact is gluten sensitivity is a self-diagnosis. There is no test or screening. One simply need to eliminate it from their diet to see if they feel better and this is where I have trouble swallowing the gluten Kool Aid.  One of my closest friends suffers from severe Celiac disease. If she even eats a French fry that has been cooked in oil used for gluten foods (i.e. Onion Rings) she could be sick for days.  It is a serious and potentially life threatening illness that put her in the hospital for two weeks when she was a seven years old.  The rest of her childhood was spent watching her friends eat pizza and ice cream cake at birthday parties while she ate chocolate bars.

Now, everyone loves to tell my celiac diseased friend that they are Gluten sensitive.   I find it gluten insensitive to say that.  Telling my friend they are allergic to gluten is like telling an amputee you get a cramp when you run marathons.  It’s not right.  Of course my friend doesn’t see it that way.  In fact she has been insisting for years that I should try a gluten free diet. Since I met her in my twenties, I have been plagued with various digestive issues all under the general category of IBS. (Irritable Bowel Syndrome)  The very name annoys me and well, makes me irritable.

In my mid twenties, my gastroenterologist wanted me tested for Chron’s   disease and sent me for a colonoscopy. I won’t share the details. We all know the joys of the treatment.  I do however vaguely remember opening my eyes during the procedure and seeing a giant screen starring my colon.  I remember being struck by how long it looked, like those tunnels we crawled through as kids, but longer.  Way longer.  Luckily, the doctor was happy with the look of my colon.  With the exception of some strange bumps and turns along the way, everything was fine.  So I soldier on, wondering why it seems everything I eat makes me sick. I have missed cues onstage; often become as bloated as a Thanksgiving float and keep purses and medicine cabinets filled with GasX.

This past summer, after suffering for over thirty years, I decided to bite the bullet and become gluten free.

It was not easy.

After a few moments in a restaurant, a basket of warm, fragrant bread is plopped down.   Italian restaurants are the worst; their menus filled with pasta and breaded dishes.  On Staten Island, you can feel the chef’s eyes burning through the walls of his kitchen when you ask the waitress “Can I get the chicken parmesan without flour?”

Thankfully, gluten free food products are much more readily available than when my friend was a kid. Even on the remote Island of Staten there are thousands of products lining the shelves of supermarkets trying desperately to simulate the foods you can’t eat. There is gluten free bread, gluten free cereal, gluten free bagels, gluten free pizza, gluten free pretzels and gluten free flour.   All these products cost twice as much as its gluten filled cousin and to be honest, they taste like shit. That’s right. I said it. I don’t curse on my blog, but this crap deserves it.  Since when does a bagel weigh more than a block of cheese and cost more than caviar?

Worst of all, all this gluten free food is made with rice and corn so when I went back to my gastroenterologist, I had actually GAINED four pounds.  He then proceeded to regale me with some of the downsides of a gluten free diet, how oftentimes one misses out on important fiber and vitamins and corn has been more genetically modified even more than gluten.

Just shoot me.

My sister, my mother and too many friends to count have begun to go gluten free too.  Good for them.  In the meantime, I started eating a little bread here and there. Nothing crazy, just a mini bagel at a kid’s party or a cracker at a friend’s house.  I haven’t died.  I haven’t even bloated.    The reality is, I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life never eating bread again. Of course if I had celiac disease I would, but otherwise, what’s the point? Like everything in this country, we take things to an extreme that is perhaps unnecessary.  If there’s twice the amount of gluten in things, I’ll simply eat half what I used to.  I mean, how bad can it be.  Jesus ate bread.

I can even imagine Jesus arriving in present day Park Slope to “feed the multitudes.”          He would take his five loaves of bread and his five fish and magically make it enough for the entire population of Brooklyn until a demanding voice from the crowd would yell,

“DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING GLUTEN FREE?”

“I’M A PESCATARIAN!”

“IS THAT ORGANIC?”

Jesus would shrug his narrow shoulders and be forced to join the Park Slope Food co-op so he could  buy organic and save some money feeding the masses. When the skinny tattooed twenty something guy attempted to check him out, Jesus would try to remain patient, reminding himself that this man wasn’t a cashier at all, probably just a writer working his co-op shift.

“DUDE! This is A LOT of Gluten free bread!” the cashier would say packing the last reclcle bag with the two thousand loaves.

“The masses are very sensitive,” Jesus would say rolling his eyes and disappearing into the night.