We were shopping the other day and had stopped at the frozen food isle to get some veggies and chips. Whilst mum was busy agonising over beans or peas, I noticed a dude taking packets of chips out of his trolley and putting them back in the freezer. He had about ten packets. He then rummaged around in the piles in the freezer, picked out random bags of the same brand of chips and placed them in his trolley.
I watched for a while, entranced.
Then I couldn’t help myself, I asked him what was wrong with the chips he had put back (they looked exactly the same to me.)
Mum gave me one of her dirty looks that says “Sibo! Why are you bothering strangers? Oh wait… WHY are you talking to strangers in the first place?”
The man shrugged his shoulders and told me he did not want “gluten free” chips. He pointed to a speech bubble on the top of the packet.
Mum clutched her head, completely forgetting he was a stranger and spoke to him herself. “Oh my word! Whatever next?” Then she checked our chips to see that they weren’t of the ‘gluten free’ variety.
A few weeks later we popped into a different store and mum grabbed a bag of oven-bake chips without thinking. When we got home, she noticed they were gluten free. She moaned to Dad about how they were taking all the goodness out of everything and soon we might just as well eat twigs.
Dad just smiled and gave mum a hug. Then he told her that chips are made of potatoes and there is no gluten in them to begin with. It was just packaging. Some people have gluten allergies and don’t know which foods contain what. So having the information on the package made it easier.
Think mum felt a bit foolish, because she huffed and puffed and said they might as well label them ‘boneless’ too then!
I did some research and according to Medical News Today “Gluten is a family of proteins found in grains like wheat, spelt, rye and barley. Gliadin and glutenin are the two main gluten proteins.”
Apparently most people tolerate gluten quite finely, but some folk suffer from a condition called Celiac disease and gluten is really bad for them.
The bottom line is—potatoes do not contain gluten.
You can have your chips and eat them people!
Sibo