by Paul Graham
The winner of the Swedish study was Kronenbourg 1664, a pale lager measured at 10,000 PPM gluten (curiously, no exclamation mark here). In the celiac world, this is nuclear weapons–grade gluten. The fact that it’s a lager and not a stout also reveals the difficulty of predicting gluten content based on style. While it’s generally accurate to say that darker beers have higher gluten contents, Kronenbourg 1664 does not look like Guinness in the glass. If you were to point to the pint of stout and say to a celiac, “That will kill you, friend,” many would think the light, golden Kronenbourg safer. They would be wrong. And yet, Carlsberg beer, which the Swedish study found to be “safe” at under 20 PPM—though it’s not sold as “gluten-reduced” and is not widely known for having low gluten—is also pale gold and translucent. Budweiser, which looks much the same as Carlsberg, is not safe, but Coors Light, Modelo, Pilsner Urquell, Pabst, and even Duvel—at 8.5% ABV, fruity, hoppy, and strong—potentially are all as safe as any GR beer, because the breweries use Clarex in the same way as Omission. They just don’t advertise that fact. The gluten reduction is coincidental, their facilities are not dedicated, and they aren’t paying for third-party testing.
So I never tried any of these beers, not even when I was out of Omission or Glutenberg and hating on the sorghum brews that always seemed to find their way into my fridge out of hope and desperation. I wasn’t willing to take the chance on a Carlsberg, and certainly not a Duvel; it would be like playing Russian roulette with my gut. Losing an entire week to GI issues, chills, and foggy thinking has a way of making a guy walk the line. I also had come to believe that every time I got glutened, there was a good chance I was setting back the recovery of my intestines a little more. I might have been exaggerating, but even if I wasn’t, it is an awful feeling to have absolutely no control over the way your body is reacting to a toxin.
This was why I came to love a beer like Glutenberg, which appeared on the market at about the same time as Omission, but is entirely gluten-free, since it is made from malted corn, millet, quinoa, buckwheat, sometimes chestnuts (in the case of their Red Ale, which is excellent), demerara candy syrup, and hops. Though it doesn’t taste quite the same as Omission, this beer is without risk, and, of all the completely GF beers on the market, comes closest to imitating the body and hop flavors of the pale ales and IPAs that I loved. Ground Breaker Brewing’s Harvester IPA, Pale Ale, and Dark Ale—which include in the mash tapioca maltodextrin and lentils, of all things—are also especially good beers with carefully chosen mixes of hops. They’re less easy to obtain, especially on the East Coast. (I once spent as much on shipping as on the beer itself, just to check out their latest offerings, and to confirm that, yes, lentils work—and so the makers of Mumm might not have been totally crazy for including beans.)
In the midst of the GF beer renaissance, a question arose: If I had alternatives, and if I wouldn’t drink those beers that are GR by coincidence, then why did I keep drinking the Omission? For one thing, at the time, I didn’t know about the debate over the validity of R-5 ELISA test results for beers. By the time I read the salvos being launched at GR beers, it was too late; I wasn’t going to give it up. I also trust my body. It’s basically a Geiger counter for gluten, and it comes through a bottle of Omission fine. If I’m going to be completely honest, I do sometimes wonder about “silent” side effects—even though my symptoms over the last couple of years have never been close to silent when I get glutened.
If I was knowingly putting gluten into my system, albeit in microscopic amounts, I had to justify, or at least explain, the risks I was taking—to myself, but also to others who sometimes raised their eyebrows as if wondering whether my drinking a GR beer meant that I was making celiac disease up, or wasn’t as disciplined as I claimed to be. It seemed odd to some people, even stupid, that the only gluten I ever deliberately came in contact with anymore was in the form of beer. After all, I wasn’t attempting to estimate 20 PPM’s worth of crumbs of bread or cracker or cake, and eating them just to experience the momentary neurological fireworks.
That tiny amount of barley in the bottle of Omission (or any other GR beer I later encountered) was a thin, tenuous tie back to the eater and drinker—and so, in some ways, to the person—I used to be. My feelings would be exactly the same, I imagined, if I were eating bread that had been rendered safe with the God Enzyme. When I brought this beer to parties, or had one with friends, I felt as if I had been returned to an equal footing. Unless you’re eating and drinking alone, the rituals around food and drink are about inclusion, and sometimes you feel the pangs to be included.
So I made a deal with myself. I only drank one bottle of Omission at a time, and usually only one bottle in a week. It was a good strategy for preserving something we could not get easily, anyway. Slow beer to match the slow food: I poured and I savored. And when the glass was empty, I looked forward to the next time.
* * *
*1 I suspect they’re lying.
*2 Yes, please.
Late afternoon, midsummer. Someone was throwing one of the season’s many parties: a backyard barbecue on the river with friends, an evening in the lengthening shadows with colleagues from work, or the annual “Food, Games, and Shit for the Kids” event given by a teammate on my summer softball team (who doesn’t have kids, and thus his curious umbrella term). The fare was always much the same: meat for the grill, salads, chips, and cakes and brownies for dessert. In the coolers were assorted beers, gin, and bottles of tonic water. The forecast called for full sun, humidity, and a 70-percent chance of eating foods—and an amount of food—that you wouldn’t eat at home. Kids would be everywhere, and if any group of humans can bring disorder to a table of food faster than drunk people, it’s kids. For someone with allergies, the whole scene could get dicey in a hurry.
When I came out of hiding, as I thought of it, and started attending these parties, I noticed that two things were beginning to happen. The first was that the hosts, and sometimes the other guests, made sure to bring things for me, foods that I could enjoy—rice salads, GF quiches, GF buns for burgers and sausages—which they kept in a sad, dark corner of their own freezer they had voluntarily made so on our account. Oddly, or perhaps not, such kindness had a way of making the fake breads taste a little better; generosity of spirit is an excellent seasoning. We threw them on the grill, toasted them, and ate them. We were together outside in the summer, and that was all that mattered.
The second thing that happened was that, by midsummer, I had stopped feeling much interest in many of the foods that everyone else at these events could eat but I could not. Mostly. It depended upon the genre of the food. At a certain point I noticed that I barely registered the presence of the tabbouleh, the cold salads of couscous and bulgur, the pasta dishes. I learned to ignore the hotdogs I could not source, or those sausages not made by the Bartons, because many others contained gluten or chemicals that could hurt me as badly as gluten. The Doritos ceased to trouble me. I did not for one minute miss the veggie burgers. For breads and certain cheeses and noodles I felt a momentary pang—nope, though it looks good—and then my eyes just ticked right by. It was almost as if, in my mind, these foods had ceased to exist as food.
Some of the forgetfulness I had cultivated came from discipline, a determination not to get sick. I knew that not everyone with celiac disease found it as easy to be disciplined, that plenty of people were willing to risk losing a few days in return for enjoying a piece of cake or something else that they loved—a fair trade for the eating experience, or at least that was how they said they saw it. I could never quite get there. Like many people with allergies, I found fear and suffering to be powerful behavioral modifiers.
I knew that discipline came from more than simple fear, though. Plenty of well-meaning, conscientious people I had spoken with had learned their personal threshold for a reaction to gluten—and then bumped up against it as hard as they could.
Much later, I attended a conference panel on the recurrence of symptoms in
people with celiac disease who should have technically been in remission because they had been self-reporting as gluten-free for months, even years. They were not intentionally cheating on the diet. I was shocked to hear that many in the survey were still symptomatic, experiencing a range of maladies, from GI distress to neurological issues, as frequently as two or three times a week. Furthermore, their intestinal biopsies revealed that they were not in remission. In some cases they weren’t even close. Yet these people didn’t quite fit the profile for refractory celiac disease, either. The study made me wonder: How often were these people who were suffering several times a week eating out at restaurants? What was their attitude toward sacrifice and risk? How clean were their kitchens? How much or how little time had they been able to take to educate themselves, given the demands of work, family, and chores? And, especially, how much support were they getting at home? Many of the people I had spoken to in the audience at that conference—and many people with celiac disease whom I have met since then—lived in houses divided. Gluten for him, not for her.
Among the greatest gifts Bec gave me was her own decision to eliminate gluten. She didn’t even ask me, Do you want me to do this? I would have said no, and she knew that. So she just did it—although some people assumed that I must have asked, even demanded it of her, or else she would have stuck to her old diet. Our friends quickly came to understand and admire her sacrifice, but whenever we met someone new, they were surprised. Some referred to her decision to give up wheat as martyrdom, which pissed me off—I knew that she had done it out of love, and that she wasn’t enjoying the GF life any more than I was. It seemed we were the exception and not the rule in how we were going about managing this.
The truth is that for many people with celiac disease, as well as those with other gluten-related disorders, cross-contamination is a real threat, and long-term medical complications can come from continued exposure to minuscule amounts. Supporting a partner is not an empty gesture. I would have done the same for her. If we believe that food can and does convey love, then turning away from food in certain circumstances must be a gesture of unconditional love as well. Anyone who wakes up one day with a condition that raises his risk for early mortality and diminished quality of life, if he does not heed the puzzling new demands of his body, should be so lucky as to have a partner who will sacrifice that much for him.
I understood, of course, why people who do not have intolerances are loath to make the sacrifice. Our eating choices are intimately personal, and they are far from rational. It can be tough enough to self-impose restrictions, let alone take up someone else’s.
Especially early on in our days as GF eaters, I asked Bec several times what she missed. I did this partly out of an ongoing curiosity, a measurement against my own experience, and partly to keep myself mindful of her. Although our eating habits are the same, our relationships to food are different; whereas I’ve come to acknowledge gluten as poison, she knows that it is theoretically still an option for her. Bread always made her list. Blue cheese. Dark beer. Like me, she pined for French toast or brioche when she saw them on menus. For a long while she walked around with a mysterious craving for a layer cake. She reconciled to losing pasta, but not the breaded, fried buffalo shrimp from our favorite restaurant, or sandwiches. She didn’t miss the stuff that no one ever longs after: soy sauce, teriyaki, raisin bran. Like me, she most longed for the freedom to walk into a restaurant and order whatever sounded good that day, instead of searching for the two or three options that would not violate the sacrifice. She said she couldn’t eat any of those other foods in front of me, not with any enjoyment. And, now that she herself had been GF for so long, she would feel sickened as well, and that wasn’t worthwhile.
Never encountering wheaten foods at home smoothed the road for me, though the sight of homemade bread in someone else’s kitchen continued to fill me with longing. Many homemade desserts that showed up at those summer parties cued the wistfulness, as well. Nobody in their right mind uses GF flour to make a carrot cake or a strawberry pie if they don’t have to, and I don’t blame them. The seasonal pies especially drove a dagger into me. On the “pie or cake?” personality test, I was always “pie,” though if given the chance to hedge I would say both. When I looked at the buffet table and saw these pastries, my eyes did not gloss right over them. There’s a reason desserts possess the power to make people immoderately happy. For this part of the backyard party, the potluck in someone’s spacious kitchen, Bec and I had no answer. If there was nothing safe, no ice cream or sorbet, and we hadn’t brought something ourselves, we grabbed some grapes, or another glass of wine, and wandered away.
I make it sound as if our life at the table was all discipline and sacrifice, but that is not true. Beyond the health reasons, beyond fairness and solidarity, beyond the inescapable truth that it’s easier to be “compliant” with medical mandates if you have support, and beyond the promises implicit in vows of unconditional love, we had found, by midsummer, some good gastronomical reasons for both partners in a household to relinquish wheaten foods if one of them must do so—or to make any sacrifice together for that matter, from dairy to peanuts to cholesterol. We discovered, together, the pleasures of Korean-style barbecue: beef and lamb sliders wrapped in red leaf or butter lettuce, or served, as one restaurant taught us, on a bed of sautéed kale or arugula. We explored the sea of gluten-free pastas until we encountered our ultimate favorite, a fresh egg pasta made with rice flour. We smiled the first time we cooked it, knowing we’d made a significant discovery and were closer to a total victory over longing. Bean noodles, glass vermicelli, seed-based crackers, and legume chips: we compared notes on all of them, determining which would make regular appearances in our cupboards, which we’d use occasionally, and those we’d never buy again. It was a comfort to decide together to keep tweaking certain recipes and to banish others. We scrutinized the results of flour mixes, and innovated solutions for oat substitutes in apple crisps, the best of which involved pecan meal. At times our opinions divided, but these happy disagreements were part of the exploration, too. I had not thought this new feature of my life could make eating better, and more companionable, but sometimes that was exactly what seemed to be happening.
—
The most difficult social situation I encountered that summer came on Friday nights. It wasn’t a backyard party or cookout, or wing-and-trivia night at a bar, or trip to watch a game. For the last several years, Friday night had been Softball Night, when, along with ten other men who had become my friends, I played modified fast-pitch at diamonds across our part of St. Lawrence County.
We played ball at a beautiful field with horse pastures beyond the fences and a river not far behind home plate; we played at a miserable dump known as “The Pit,” where the fences were so short that I saw balls go up but never saw or even heard them come back down; we played on freshly mown high-school fields, and in the shadows of water towers. Grown men, all of us, running hard and pulling—and, in a few cases, breaking—parts of our bodies, all because some flame of boyhood still burned within us. Most of us grew up on baseball fields, buying baseball cards from corner markets, and playing Wiffle ball with ghost runners. Now, every Friday night, some man over forty dove or slid or gathered up a difficult ground ball without even having to think about it, all because his muscles still remembered what to do. It was a beautiful thing to see, and even more gratifying to feel.
And after every game, there were always beer and snacks.
We climbed into our cars and headed a few miles from our home field to Eben’s Hearth, the restaurant that sponsored us because the owner was generous, and also because we drank their sponsorship costs back and then some. Or, if we were playing away, we stopped at a place called the Skunk’s Nest, or Zorro’s. And if there was no watering hole nearby, we drank beer out of a cooler at the field.
The Hearth had more than a dozen beers on tap. Omission and Glutenberg were not included in the rotation. They famously sold the Big
Beer, a frozen glass mug that held a liter. That’s 33.8 ounces, only 2.2 ounces shy of three bottles of beer in one glass. A draft Big Beer of something good, a craft IPA or hoppy amber ale, cost only seven dollars, a bargain. A Big Beer hid your face when you drank it, sometimes demanded two hands, took about an hour to drain, and tasted best after two hours in the field. A sign behind the bar proclaimed the rules: LIMIT OF THREE (3) BIG BEERS PER CUSTOMER PER VISIT. I never put back three, though I did once struggle through the last sips of a second.
For years, after every home game, I ordered a Big Beer of a West Coast–style IPA or Lake Placid Ubu. On especially hot nights I went for something lighter, like a Sam Adams Summer Ale, a Switchback, or a Long Trail. Then I sat with my buddies, smelling the effervescence of the hops and savoring the first bittersweet mouthfuls as our talk drifted from the game to work to vacation plans. Everyone bought rounds for everyone else. No one kept track. We knew it all worked out by the end of the season; and if it didn’t, well, that didn’t matter much.
When the season began, I thought I would be happy just to be able to play, which I was. Then I discovered that my only draft option at the Hearth was Bitchy Tree (there was a bottle of Redbridge or two, way in the forgotten caverns of the beer cooler; once when I asked for one I watched the bartender disappear shoulder-deep trying to retrieve it). I had always thought this cider was hard on a beer lover, but the food historian David Buchanan killed any remaining enjoyment when I read his observation that most commercial hard ciders, none of which he names, are wine coolers compared to the dry ciders drunk in the early American Republic. I knew immediately that he was right. Ciders made according to early practices are indeed making a comeback, including a local hard cider I’ve found, and I’m also always on the lookout for those that have been dry-hopped into a beer-cider lovechild. But I was never going to find ciders like those in the kegs at the Hearth, through no fault of the owners. The few times I gave into longing and drank a Big Beer of Bitchy Tree, I was sorry. I woke up feeling a little as though I had drunk a real beer. Too much sugar, too much malic acid.
