This Blog Now 100% Gluten Free

I ate a gluten free cupcake this morning for the very good reason that no other type was available.  I must admit I had no idea why "gluten free" was supposed to be desirable or indeed what gluten actually was.  I offered five dollars to anyone in the staff café at the time who was able to tell me what gluten actually was but I got no takers.

Now, however, I am an enlightened man.  I know what gluten is, in a practical sense at any rate.  When you eat a cupcake or slice of bread or whatever gluten is the stuff that stops it from dissolving into a soggy, sticky mess that coats you from finger tips to elbow while simultaneously gluing your keyboard to your hands and your mouse to your wrist if you've been silly enough to attempt eating the thing at your desk.  My supervisor is remarkably tolerant of snacking at one's desk.  He's less tolerant of my having to spend forty five minutes de-adhering myself from the tools that permit me to do my job.

Like most pieces of socially acceptable silliness a gluten free diet is of very great benefit to the small number of people to whom it is of very great benefit.  It's usefulness to anyone else is debatable which is a politically correct term meaning "bullshit!" 

Now, permit me to be clear, if you have celiac disease you should be totally into the gluten free diet.  In fact you should get guns, organise hunting trips and go out shooting gluten in your spare time just to be on the safe side.  If you have one of these vague, non specific anti wheat type things which are charmingly called "non-celiac gluten sensitivity" then perhaps gluten isn't for you either although once medical diagnosis gets that fuzzy you might as well say you're allergic to "stuff".

For everyone else its unlikely that the consequences of bingeing on gluten are sufficient to warrant having to wipe cupcake off every exposed surface whenever you want a snack.  It must be said that as our diet improves and we get healthier and longer lived our bodies seem to be compensating by turning into bunch of whiny arse cry babies.  I can't imagine a peasant in the middle ages getting non-celiac gluten sensitivity.  Plague yes, but not non-celiac gluten sensitivity.  Is it possible that we become more careful about what we put into our bodies and said bodies react by becoming ever more precious and finicky?  I personally have a minor (and I suspect largely psychosomatic) aversion to seafood but I rather think that if I lived in a seaside village in the middle ages I would have been hitting the seafood every night without too many ill effects.  It's amazing how broad your diet can be when the alternative is starving to death.

Of course its equally possible that non-celiac gluten sensitivity was rampant in the middle ages which is why most people died at an early age.  This does raise the ugly possibility that by improving our lifestyle we are essentially encouraging genetic weakness and promoting the breeding of people who would otherwise have been safely dead before hitting puberty thus ensuring that the next generation of people will be able to eat even less.  Does this matter?  Probably not as long as our civilisation manages to keep staggering along.

Come the zombie apocalypse though it isn't the walking dead that are going to wipe out mankind.  Most of us will die from our inability to source gluten free, vegan, low fat, sugar free, ethically raised foodstuffs.  That gurgling noise you hear is the zombies laughing at us.