I ran to the bathroom and got sick.
My lips started to swell, I was coughing and I couldn’t stop throwing up. I was clammy and shaky and felt not like myself at all.
I thought I had too much sun that day in 2017. After all, we Maritimers certainly aren’t used to the dry forty degree heat of Manitoba.
I returned to my table in the reception hall of the museum and didn’t eat anything more that night. I sipped water and the next day I was still a little swollen around the mouth but I was okay. Weird, I thought.
Three months later it happened again. This time I was at a potluck for work. I took my first bite of a BLT dip and cracker and then did what you should never do if you feel ill, I went to the washroom without telling anyone. Again I got sick. Again I swelled. This time worse. My coworkers noticed me missing and knocked on the bathroom door. Luckily I worked with a nurse who noticed I was having an allergic reaction. We scoured the ingredients in the the BLT dip and realized it had soy bacon in it. A potential allergen. However, I had never had an anaphylactic allergic to anything in my life. “Very strange” my family doctor said and put in a referral for the three year wait for the allergy specialist (welcome to NS health care).
Two months later it happened again. Salad dressing. And again a month later, toppings for pizza triggered it.
Each reaction was getting worse and the common denominator was soy. Particularly meat that potentially had been fed a heavy soy diet.
I have become extremely careful about everything I put in my mouth. I hate eating in public. I would rather not eat than ask what is in it, it seems so untrusting. But it’s not so much distrust of people, but rather their lack of awareness of the ingredients they serve.
I was at first very apologetic to people about explaining I had an allergy (as is my personality). I would never want anyone to be offended or go out of their way for me so sometimes I over explain. (Which annoyed one woman so much at a table at an ag conference she snapped at me “it’s no one’s business why you have an allergy.” Gulp. “Sorry”)
I saw my naturopath and we discussed the allergy and I discovered it’s actually quite increasingly common for peri/ menopausal women to develop soy allergies. It can be a hormone disruptor, high in estrogen when my body was focusing on decreasing it. It was identifying it as a threatening substance to my natural system and attacking it.
It was doing its best to protect me.
People say to me all the time “Growing your own food so much work.” I agree usually, because it is. We always raised some of our own food because that’s how I was raised and I enjoy it. However, in 2017 we had to take it to a whole new level. (My biggest change was I gave up diet pop completely.) I was still working full time off farm in healthcare, but we starting slowly scaling everything up.
The trouble with food allergies is it causes such stress on the body and add in a full time working mom in healthcare and then a pandemic and I was in full blown adrenal fatigue in 2020. My weight went up and my cortisol skyrocketed as I went through the stages of peri menopause.
But then I found the sweet spot. The thing about peri menopause is if you were just “getting by” healthwise, watch out because you will be hauled under by all the demands on your body systems and hormones if you don’t get things cleaned up. For me, stress management made a big difference as well.
The alternative to all this work is to rely on a food system which is very soy and corn heavy, which isn’t an option. We do not have unlimited wealth or live in an area where we can access a lot of farm raised food, as it is predominately a fishing community.
There is an increasing body of research and evidence that proves negative impacts to teenagers’ bodies and minds as they have been fed such a heavy diet of soy/corn fed meat products and industrial seed oils for so much of their lives.
Marion Nestle’s website is a wonderful resource for unbiased reporting on such things. She works extremely closely with food writer and activist Micheal Pollen.
A movie just released called “Food Inc 2 “ highlights the increasing weaknesses in our food system including the dependence on soy for ultra processed food, and the fragility of our food system since the pandemic.
To be honest, the soy allergy was the best thing that ever happened to me, health wise. It heightened my awareness of the food system, something in our busy world, I could have become a little apathetic about because who has the time ?? We were doing what we could but there was a lot of room for improvement.
Cleaning up our diets seven years ago has changed our lives for the better, and not just physically, but also spiritually and mentally. We had started this journey a few years before due to our daughter’s diagnosis of post concussion syndrome (read that blog post Here )however this was a more all encompassing clean up.
We focused on our goals for growing our own food; sharing more abundance; more connection to the land and increasing our soil health to be much better stewards.
While I’ve always enjoyed cooking, preserving and growing, this is a whole level of commitment we’ve had to get used to.
Cleaner eating for us looks like rarely eating out, making most meals from scratch instead with most of the ingredients being grown here on the farm or sourced as local as we can get. We shop at farmers’ markets. We eat a lot of plants mostly in season, use meat as a side dish, bake fermented whole grain breads, raw milk, and try to use natural sweeteners as much as possible. It’s made us so much more aware of the work that goes into real food, and the REAL cost of food produced for profit, speed and efficiency, not necessarily for taste and health. Costs to the environment and not paying a living wage to workers aren’t reflected in the real cost of these systems. It is something you don’t see reflected in a food system that is propped up with government subsidies, payouts to shareholders and monopolies.
I see this first hand as a vendor at the farmers’ market the effect and hold it has on us as consumers. I see what a difference shopping local producers makes in their lives, changes our community narrative and how important it is to meet and support who produces your food.
These are deep and heavy thoughts, I know. They may not be ones you have space for. I know I didn’t make the space until I had no choice to. But like anyone who has had a “come to Jesus” moment, I should have probably be locked in a cage for a while. My family has become used to me talking about this at family functions or to strangers in line but I do raise even their eyebrows sometimes.
But one thing for sure, I had no idea what was going to come about as we embarked on that 4H exchange trip many years ago.
And that the little pork appetizer which made me sick in Manitoba?
It would became the catalyst for my strong advocacy for access to nourishing, whole food for our family, and our community.
Love, Jenn xx