The Secret Is in the Sauce

My son has a soybean allergy.  We haven’t yet gone through the rigamarole of allergy testing yet, though that comes soon, but trust me when I say that his body reacts poorly to soy.  Now that he is eating table foods pretty much exclusively (with the occasional exception of a toddler-meal soup here and there), this makes for some interesting challenges.  Grocery shopping takes longer now because I have to read labels carefully (note: the absence of the words “Allergens: soy,” does not necessarily mean soy is not an ingredient).  Some previously-loved foods have become absent from our cupboards because it’s easier to just avoid keeping them in the house, than to allow my husband I access to them but disallow them from Buggie.

However, the biggest challenge we’ve found centers around restaurant-eating.  Over the course of the past couple of weeks, O and I have started what we’d like to have become a tradition of Friday Night Dinners Out.  What used to be as simple as just making our minds up where we wanted to go now has a whole set of extra hoops to jump through because we also have to make sure the restaurant will have Bug-friendly foods.  We’ve lucked out both times we’ve gone recently.  And we learned that Red Robin actually gives out allergen information on all of their core menu items upon request.  Color me impressed!

Covered in non-soy spaghetti sauce.

On the flipside, however, I am having serious issues with the idea of soybean oil being used in, of all things, pizza/pasta sauces.  We wanted to take my mother out for an early Mother’s Day dinner on Saturday evening.  She wanted pizza and suggested Pizza Hut, figuring it to be reasonably kid-friendly.  My husband called them, and we were surprised to learn that there is not one single item on their menu that our son could eat.  Not only does every one of their different crusts contain soybean oil, but the same is true of each of their various sauces.  I have been making yuck-faces about this since O hung up the phone that evening.  When I make (or, more accurately, when O makes) sauce, there’s no oil in it at all.  Tomatoes, spices, water, etc.  Why would you need oil in sauce?

But even laying aside personal preferences, it’s frustrating to find situations like that.  We ended up at Friendly’s instead, which honestly wasn’t much better.  In their case, there is soybean oil in the butter they use (which to me sounds rather like they’re using margarine, rather than butter), which means … there is soy in almost all of their food as well.  Luckily their macaroni and cheese (pre-made, from Kraft) is soy-free, so Bug was able to eat.  But of course, I couldn’t order him a vegetable because those tend to be slathered in butter at restaurants.  So his dinner was macaroni and cheese with applesauce on the side.

As if it weren’t difficult enough to feed a toddler (because let’s face it – toddlers are picky by nature), and to find him something that isn’t absolute junk, we have this extra challenge.  It’s not the restaurants’ faults that my son has an allergy, and I can’t – and don’t – expect them to cater especially to him.  But it is frustrating.

And I still maintain that soybean oil in pizza sauce sounds gross.