Regardless of your cultural or religious background, food is often at the center of traditional holiday celebrations. However, when you’re managing food allergies, just because it’s tradition doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, some of those food-related holiday traditions can make celebrating stressful and overwhelming.
As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth taking a moment to explore why food is core to our celebrations and how we can navigate the holiday season with food allergies safely.
Symbolism & Rituals
Some holiday food traditions are rooted deeply in symbolism and ritual. Passover provides plenty of examples of this. The charoset represents the mortar slaves used to build cities of Pharaoh. The hard-boiled egg represents rebirth at the seder table. (It also represents the same at Easter!)
The good news is with a little planning, other foods can step in and substitute your allergens with safe alternatives without sacrificing the symbolism and ritual. You’ll find some suggestions for Passover, as an example, here: Celebrating Passover with Food Allergies.
Cultural Traditions
Different cultures have different holiday traditions. A family in middle America may sit down to a mustard-glazed ham garnished with pineapple slices. Italian-American families may finish off their meal with a traditional Italian Colomba Pasquale (Easter dove cake). A family with roots in Hispanic culture might enjoy empanadas or a fish dish and wrap the meal with a scrumptious Mona de Pascua (Easter cake).
These dishes connect us back to our heritage. Our grandmothers made these meals using the same recipe her mother used and her mother before her. You don’t need to give up the tradition because you’re avoiding some of the primary ingredients. You can adapt. This recipe from Bio Farma is one example of what might look like to create a family tradition in an allergy safe manner: Gluten-free & Vegan Easter Mona
Community
Humans are innately social creatures – yes, even for those of you that identify as introverts. We need other people. Our mental health and well-being benefit from our connections to other people. Our basic survival and well-being are tied to collaboration and mutual support systems. Sure, there are plenty of practical applications of this that we could explore, but we’re talking today about holidays. In this context, sitting down over a shared holiday meal is one way we foster community.
The good news is that these food allergies don’t need to inhibit our ability to gather and celebrate a holiday over the dinner table. It may require us to adapt recipes. It might require us to swap out common components for something safe. It may mean that we bring a different safe set of dishes for the allergic family member we’re caring for. But it doesn’t mean we need to isolate and skip the whole thing.
Here’s the deal. When we step back and really assess what’s special about these days, it’s not the food on our plate. It’s the people we’re spending the time with. Go ahead and forgo that passed-down recipe for an allergy-friendly variant or bring your own allergy-safe meal to someone else’s home. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating the same main dish your great-grandmother made. It just matters that you’re eating whatever you’re eating with the people who mean the most to you.
Nostalgia & Tradition
Sometimes our holiday menu looks the same year to year just because. It’s not tied to our cultural heritage. It’s not because our religious practice prescribes a certain set of ritual components to help us remember where we came from. We’re making that ham with pineapple slices because our mother did and her mother did. We’re doing it because it’s tradition. Because we went to the supermarket and all the smoked hams were on sale because everyone and their brother is making one for Easter.
It’s just what we do, because it was just what generations before us did. It helps us feel connected to them (are you sensing a theme yet?). Except, at the end of the day, it’s just food. It’s not a thread that twists and turns between your great grandparents and you. It’s simply a dish and if it’s one that has components that don’t work for your food allergic family members, you can make something else.
You can adapt a dish to honor the family tradition while keeping your family safe. You can put your grandparents' fine china dishes out on the table for a bit of nostalgia and serve dairy-free mashed potatoes on them even though your new, allergy-friendly way to make them is not the same way your family enjoyed them decades ago.
