Sadly Gluten Free

It's a sad thing, but now I find I have to avoid foods containing gluten if I want my digestive woes to go away. For years I have been addicted to bakery goods. I adored anything that contained copious amounts of flour, especially bread. To me, there is no better aroma than the smell of fresh bread baking in an oven. I am drawn to baker's shops and those quaint dark little cake shops in St Kilda, ( a suburb of Melbourne) Somehow I never associated the bloating and burping with bread. I think I never wanted to. I did have a blood test done once and it came back clear. However everytime I eat anything with flour in, the same set of symptoms kick in.
My doctor suggested staying away from bread if I thought it was the culprit. Later another doctor told me that I have a cluster of illnesses now thought to be associated with gluten intolerance; asthma, osteoporosis, migraines and constipation that together suggest a gluten problem. I do not think I have celiac Disease though as this causes other more noticable problems.
Sometimes I just wonder if it is the wheat that we now grow for milling. When I was a kid I often stayed on a wheat and sheep farm in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of Koorda. There the wheat was so high that it came up to my chin as I ran through it. Now it would hardly reach my knees and no, it's not because I have grown. Wheat varieties are now shorter and they are higher in protein too. When I was a kid there where very few additives added to bread dough. Now flour is just one of ten or more ingredients listed on the label. Improvers, acidifers, finishing agents, added gluten, preservatives, all ensure allergy prone people have at least a few problems with eating bread.
In the 1940's and 1950's bread got stale and could only be used for toast the second day. Now here, some bakers only bake once a week and bread sold in this state, actually comes from Victoria.
Sometimes a gluten problem can be funny. A couple of months ago, my daughter Aly and I were having tea in Sizzlers. After carefully scrutinizing the salad bar menu, I selected some pumpkin soup for a starter. I only took a few spoonfuls when I realised that it was made from a packet mix and not from fresh ingredients. A short time later I burped very loudly. A little boy, around six years old looked at me with admiration and said "that was a big mans burp". His mother was horrified, but I thought it was funny. Here is this sixty six year old woman emitting burps that make our kids proud. My grandson Nathan thinks its cool. It is probably the only thing about me that is!