The Mayor of Glutenberg
About five months ago, I began getting cripplingly sick every single day. At the same time in the afternoon, around 3:30-4 pm, my stomach would implode and I would re-enter the fetal position and eat a sleeve of saltine crackers to try and numb the pain until I would fall asleep and start the cycle over again the next day.
As I would come to find out after an esophagogastroduodenoscopy (which, if you were wondering, is a mere 19 letters from being the longest word in the English language), the crackers I was inhaling to placate my ravenous stomach were in fact the very poison it was trying so hard to reject on a daily basis. I was allergic to gluten.
After a short period of gratitude for not being doubled over in pain every afternoon, my gratitude was replaced with hunger. Hunger, because apparently gluten is a key ingredient in everything edible. Having next to zero experience cooking anything but eggs, I began to eat 6 to 7 eggs a day for lunch and dinner. On the nights in which my wonderful parents weren’t around to cook me a delicious, gluten-free meal, I would spice things up and microwave a bag of rice to go along with my next three eggs. For dessert, instead of a hot brownie or chocolate chip cookie, I would hammer a fist-full of chocolate chips into my mouth and force myself to be satisfied.
But the ultimate sacrifice, the real gut-punch, the insult-to-allergy, came on the first Friday night since the news was broken: no beer.
Now let me be clear: I don’t drink beer every day, there’s not always a cold 30-rack of Natural Ice in my fridge, and the days of loading Miller-Lites into a Lands End backpack are long behind me. BUT, there are few things foodwise I love more than a good, hoppy, local beer. My favorite thing was going into a liquor store and grabbing the most out-of-bounds, random beers I could find. Give me the 16 oz. can that looks like a comic book, give me the double, triple, hop-scotch Belgian IPA, give me all of that. All of those hilariously hurtful memes about dudes who like IPAs were about me.
The brand new, post-gluten world in which I had found myself was full of avoiding my favorite restaurants, passing on desserts at the dinner table, and grainy and flavorless snacks that, despite tasting like a sandy pinecone, cost one-hundred and seventeen dollars. And of course, worst of all, no beer.
Having almost entirely given up on the idea of the pleasure of eating and drinking, coming home from work one evening, my beautiful and loving mother decided to surprise me by making her signature chocolate chip cookies, replacing the regular flour with the gluten-free variety for the sake of my innards.
When those Crisco-filled delectables came out of the oven, I couldn’t believe my eyes. They looked the same, felt the same, and smelled the same as the famous cookies my friends have begged for at every gathering since we were old enough to chew solid food. The only question was: did they taste the same? And right when that first sweet bite hit my lips, I knew the answer: ehh, not really.
I was immediately disappointed and disheartened. They were CLOSE, and they were GOOD, but they just weren’t my mom’s cookies I had eaten my whole entire existence. And worst of all, I immediately realized that if it were the case that if even the slightest of changes to my mom’s recipe made it to where her cookies were unmistakably and depressingly different, the same must be said of all gluten-free deserts. It was if any hope that I had of enjoying any of the pleasures I’d had in my gluten-filled ignorance were baked away along with the taste of my mother’s cookies.
As she usually does, my mom made an inordinate amount of cookies to send back with me to my home in Lexington, and out of gratitude for the loving efforts of my mother I took them back, planning on letting them sit untouched until they were stale enough to throw away.
The next day comes, and after eating a bread-less dinner, I fought my daily battle of suppressing my desire for dessert. “If it’s bad for you AND it tastes bad, might as well just go without,” I told myself for the 100th time. But as I walked in the kitchen to get my handful of chocolate chips I use to temporarily ease the dessert craving, I saw my mom’s gluten-free cookies sitting in a Tupperware bin on the counter. I then thought about how my mom would feel if she knew I were eating semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of the chocolate chip cookies she so lovingly made for me and the guilt drove me to pop them open and give them another try.
They were still gritty due to the gluten-free flour, and even more so after a day of sitting in a Tupperware bin. But after chomping them around for a couple of seconds, I noticed that they were somehow different, somehow better. I started to wonder how this could be; the cookies were objectively stiffer and grittier than they were when I last ate them fresh out of the oven just yesterday. It wasn’t until I finished my third or fourth cookie that I realized that they weren’t better cookies than they were yesterday, they were better than the fistful of chocolate chips I was headed towards putting in my mouth. Compared to the other (minimal) options I was given, my mom’s gritty, gluten-free cookies were better.
Many weeks passed since my gluten “road to Damascus,” and although I was slowly inching towards appreciating gluten-free deserts, I was having no such luck adjusting to weekends without craft beer. Meeting my friends at a craft brewery and ordering a margarita was as embarrassing as it was painful, and every craft cider I tried was like drinking another sugar-free juice box left out in the sun.
On another uninspired trip to the local liquor store, as I did my routine of walking through the craft beer section to reminisce on what was, I stumbled upon something I had never seen before. “Glutenberg IPA” the can read. Was this a beer from a serendipitously named German town? Was this a beer that was so filled to the brim with gluten they decided to name the town in which it was brewed after the protein itself? Or was this finally what I had been hoping for: a craft, an IPA, that was above all, gluten-free?
After some quick detective work (reading the clearly marked label) I confirmed they were gluten-free, paid the $389, and rushed home to crack one open. Was this the answer to my micro-brewed prayers? Or was this the next chapter the rest of my inevitable, tasteless future?
I cracked the 16oz can, gave it a smell, and took a sip. It. Was. Amazing.
It wasn’t the best IPA I’d ever had; it clearly had a malty, thickness that comes with being a gluten-free beer. BUT, it was better, WAY better than the White Claw and Truly that had taken its place. Back in the wheat-times, I would’ve shrugged Glutenberg aside about the 74th best beer and never tried it again, in search of the next beer to take the number one spot on my list. But in the year 0 PG (post-gluten), I have given the gluten-free distillery so much business my roommates have bestowed upon me the loving title: The Mayor of Glutenberg.
The months between tasting my sweet mother’s first attempt at gluten-free cookies and cracking open my first gluten-free beer have been formative months in my life, and not just in my digestive system. When you’re forced to avoid gluten, your options become slim. VERY slim in most cases. At the beginning of my journey, everything I ate was disappointing because the memory of better, gluten-rich foods reminded me of what was.
But after that first eye-opening sip of the Glutenberg, I realized that what also happens when your options are slimmed, although it removes your old favorites, it does something simple and beautiful: it removes the second best. To put it in economic terms (I am the mayor, of course) the opportunity cost is removed. Even though a crusty, gluten-free cookie might not be the best option out there, it’s the best option for me. Even though there is a more micro-brewed, hoppier, more cleverly named, American Pale Red Coffee Dunkel Stout out there somewhere, the Glutenberg is the best I got. And the comfort and contentment that comes from appreciating the best you got is a lesson I am lucky to have been taught from my body’s inability to process gluten and a lesson that I look forward to taking into office as I continue to serve you as Mayor of Glutenberg for many more terms to come.
