You may remember that I brought banana bread to school this past week.  It was the most basic banana bread--basically banana, four, sugar, baking powder oil and eggs.  I am not even sure it can get any easier than that.  Then one of my colleagues asked me if there were walnuts in it.  I thought: no but that would have been great. Then I told her that in the States when I am baking for a crowd, I never put nuts in my dishes because I don't want to confront any food allergy problems especially with nuts.

My colleague then reminded me: we don't have food allergies in Bulgaria.  Okay, I know this. In theory. I am sure there are some people with food allergies but it seems to be much, much less common than in the United States. So I could have put the walnuts in!  But I forget and more than this, I've trained myself for baking in the States.

Food Allergies are a funny thing. I know plenty of people in the States who are allergic to different foods. Heck, between food allergies and the vegetarians, vegans and other lifestyle diets, it's almost impossible to host a dinner party among friends. Don't get me wrong, I am not down on the meat free and dairy free diets--I am a near vegetarian myself. All I am saying is that it's a challenge.

But I've wondered about food allergies. I mean, how did these happen? How is everyone allergic to something these days? And why doesn't anyone in Bulgaria seem to have food allergies?<!--more-->

Well, given this <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/health/research/12allergies.html?src=me&amp;ref=general#">piece in the NYT</a> maybe I need to rethink things--it suggests that about 30% of Americans <em>think</em> that they have a food allergy. This seems to be in part because of the kinds of testing that we do.  However, in reality the "true incidence of food allergies is only about 8 percent for children  and less than 5 percent for adults."  Hum.

So there are a lot of people in the States who think they have food allergies when they probably do not. Is it a case of food allergy as fad? or food allergy as dislike? Hard to know and this article doesn't even touch on that.

Still, this piece does clears things up a bit when it comes to Americans and food allergies. But what about Bulgarians?

I don't know a single Bulgarian with food allergies either that or they don't talk about it.  But not talking about something like this seems un-Bulgarian.

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer to a single question that I've just asked.  Mostly this is just a post of observations.  Probably that's annoying but I am not qualified to answer these questions. I am really only qualified to ask them, muse about them and wonder--what's going on?

All of this leads me to think Americans must be crazy and that I am going to put walnuts in everything now. Food allergies be damned.