The Allergy Arms Race

It started with peanuts.
One request, one substitution, one careful note scribbled in the corner of a ticket. Fair enough. Life or death, no one’s arguing.

Then came gluten. Dairy. Shellfish. Eggs. The kitchen bent and adapted, swapping sauces, steaming instead of searing, improvising with starches. A little clumsy at first, but doable.

Now? Now it’s a battlefield. Keto meets vegan. Paleo meets pescatarian. A diner who eats “plant-based” until the steak arrives. A diner who swears off dairy but orders extra Parmesan. A diner who has “a nightshade allergy” except when pizza is involved.

It’s not accommodation anymore, it’s negotiation. A new table-side power dynamic where the chef is forced into an endless game of substitutions, and the diner gets to play judge.

Somewhere along the way, the word allergy stopped meaning what it once did. Real anaphylaxis sits shoulder to shoulder with fad diets and food philosophies — all flattened into the same urgent language. And when everything is an allergy, nothing is.

The result? Exhausted servers who recite endless warnings, cooks who mutter darkly about chickpea flour, and chefs who keep secret menus in their heads just to stay sane.

But maybe the strangest part is this: restaurants don’t say no. They can’t. To refuse is to look cruel. To accommodate is to look gracious. And so the arms race escalates, one almond milk panna cotta at a time.