Jayne McLelland - Living egg-free: The simple guide to living with egg allergy

Jayne McLelland

Living egg-free

First published by Inkpot Books in 2018

Copyright Jayne McLelland, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First Edition

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Copyright 2018 by Jayne McLelland

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If you or someone you care for has recently been diagnosed with an egg allergy or intolerance, you can be forgiven for panicking. Not only will you wondering what on earth you can eat, you may think that your social life is over: no more eating out, and as for birthday cakeforget it!

Living Egg-Free aims to reassure you than this will not be the case. The title deliberately places focus on the livingi.e. live the life you want to live and have always lived without having to compromise on tasty food or special treats. The focus is on tips, tricks and strategies that will enable you to cope with the egg allergy without it taking over your lifeor taking up all of your time. It will also highlight the danger areas and teach you what to look out for. Im not suggesting that this wont be a big adjustment or you wont sometimes find it hard, but I hope that by sharing my experience of an entire life lived egg-free, I can take some of the stress away from you.

This book aims to support people who are not chefs, who dont have the time or inclination to spend their lives in the kitchen but suddenly find themselves catering for a special diet. It is not just a cook book, although I will include a number of useful recipes. For those who wish to experiment further there are many wonderful allergy-friendly cookbooks and blogs who specifically cater to people with egg allergies, and of course, vegan recipes are a fantastic source of information. There are also people who compensate for having an allergy by becoming a bit of a whizz in the kitchen and Im extremely grateful to those who do that and also share their recipes! However, I wanted to write a book that provided information, guidance and support for all aspects of living with egg allergy.

I write solely about egg allergy and while I am severely ill if I ingest a tiny amount of egg, I do not have an anaphylactic reaction.

This book is born of my own experience and is no substitute for any medical or dietary advice you receive from your GP, dietician, paediatrician or allergist. Please exercise extreme caution if the egg allergy you are dealing with produces life-threatening symptoms or if you or your child has complex multiple allergies OR is following an exclusion diet that eliminates other food groups.

The information in this book is correct at the time of publication but as mentioned in the text, ingredients can changeand often with no notice or warning. Please always check the label! (Ill be saying that a lot).

Please note: while much of the information will apply wherever you live in the world, some of it is culturally specific, particularly when I talk about brands and chains.

T his book is for anyone who has to avoid egg in their diet due to an allergy or an intolerance. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an allergy as:

a damaging immune response by the body to a substance, especially a particular food, pollen, fur, or dust, to which it has become hypersensitive.

The definition of an intolerance (also from the Oxford English Dictionary) is:

an inability to eat a food or take a drug without adverse effects.

While technically there is a medical difference between allergies and intolerance, this book is not concerned with thatif you or someone in your life has to avoid egg for whatever reason, then this book will be useful to you. For simplicity, the terms egg allergy, egg-allergic and allergic to egg will be used throughout, but the information is for those with intolerances too.

Allergies are common. The World Allergy Organisation estimates a prevalence of between 10-40%. They are also on the rise, year on year. Eight foods cause most food allergy reactions: milk, soy, eggs, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish. As you can see, egg allergy is in the list of the top most common food allergies.

Determining the prevalence of food allergies is tricky, due to the variation in study design and the reliance on self-reporting. As discussed above, many people may believe themselves to have a food allergy but might instead have an intolerance. Clinical studies indicate that between 1-5% of the population have a medically diagnosed food allergy.

Babies are more likely to develop allergies if theres a history of eczema, asthma, hay fever or food allergies (known together as atopy) in the family. Its quite common for an individual with an egg allergy to have a relative who is allergic to another food. It is also possible to develop food intolerances later in life.

People who are allergic or intolerant to egg can react to just the yolk, just the white, or to the whole egg. Some people only react to loosely cooked and raw egg and can cope with well-baked egg, and others react to all forms of egg, and egg as an ingredient even in small quantities. Egg is usually used to refer to chicken eggs, although there is an assumption that individuals would also react to duck, goose and turkey eggs due to the presence of similar proteins.

It goes without saying that cooking from scratch is the best and most foolproof way to ensure that no egg can make its way into your meals. However, as this book is aimed at the busy person who has limited time to spend in the kitchen we will be discussing short cuts, easy meals and cheats from the supermarket along the way.

Depending on your lifestyle, your family set-up and the nature of the allergy that you are dealing with, you will have some decisions to make about how allergy friendly you need your kitchen to be.

If the egg allergy is life threatening you may not have much of a choice and there will be no egg or products containing egg in your kitchen. If its more of an intolerance and you have other family members who still wish to eat eggs, you may feel comfortable stocking them along with products that contain eggs as an ingredient. I personally do not have any eggs in my kitchen as a rule and I dont buy them unless I know we have a guest who eats them regularly. I dont cook the eggsI dont want to handle them but I also have no experience of cooking them so probably would mistime a boiled egg. However I do permit products containing eggs in my kitchen - as Im the chief shopper and cook, I can be confident that I am not going to accidentally eat something that I havent checked.

If you do allow eggs or egg products into your kitchen, youll need to watch out for cross contamination. This may seem self-evident but I have seen people start to serve me food using a spoon that has mayonnaise on it. I dont allow any dishes that have contained egg into my dishwasher, and on the rare occasion that someone does cook eggs in my home I usually request that whoever has cooked the egg please clean up after themselves. If I do have to wash the affected dishes myself I use gloves, and run a separate basin of water once everything else has already been cleaned.