You Know You Have a Severe Corn Allergy When (list in progress)

1. You burst into tears of joy when a friend working on an organic farm offers to work with their butcher to get you safely processed food. 

2. Your CSA (weekly box of safe food) packs a separate box of food for you during corn season. And transports it in the front of the truck. 

3. You've heard of the new restaurants but they don't make up part of your mental map. There are zones that are just blank (food for other people here) blocks in your mind. 

4. You think of movie theaters and Mexican restaurants, with all the airborne corn proteins, as the Death Zone. 

5. You know the places where you can get a safe sparkling water in a bottle when you go out with friends. 

6. You have colleagues that you think of as poisonous, not for the quality of their work or their content of their character -- because of their cologne or perfume or soap or shampoo or dryer sheets or makeup or all of the above that is fragrantly off-gassing corn all day long. 

7. Your decision to attend an event includes figuring in both the likelyhood of a severe reaction and how long you will be sick afterward from exposure to "environmental" corn. 

8. You love people but hate their chemical-flowers-in-a-can smell. 

9. You have two first aid-kits in your car, one corn-free one for you and one for other people. 

10.  Your friends have created rules and earn point for not killing you. (My game is called DNKC -- Do NOT Kill Christine (tm). Yes, there are prizes. It used to be called Try Not to Kill Christine, but it was pointed out that the title was a bit pessimistic and Yoda would not approve.)

11. You have flinched when hugging/kissing an adored relative  because you touched your cheek to their face powder or got their lipstick on you. As the hives start popping out, you just keep smiling and ignore it for as long as possible. 

12. You know how long you can go without scratching in public once the itching has gotten to the "like a monkey" stage. 

13. You wonder if it would be appropriate to send holiday cards to your compounding pharmacy and your great doctor's office. Valentines Day might see a bit odd, but you do <3 them for helping you stay alive.  

14.  The day that Organic Valley started adding corn to their whole milk (aka. Vitamins A & D) was a day of mourning for you. 

15. You are still holding a grudge against Enjoy Life for not taking your report of a severe allergic reaction seriously in 2007, and ignoring/denying the continuing reports of many, many other corn allergy folks in the ensuing years. Nope, now that their chocolate is listed as "May contain traces of corn" in 2013 after they publicly denied it for 5 years --their  credibility far from restored. Can't believe they spend so much $ on marketing their product as allergy food and have such horrible protocol for dealing with reported reactions. 

16. You love Annie's Organics because of how wonderfully they dealt with a reaction report. (I'm still impressed years later wih how they dealt w mine -- they were concerned, researched the issue, made a correction with a new supplier, reported back. And 6 years later I recommend their products that I can't eat to people who can. Kudos to Annie's Organic's.) 

17. You know that if a product says "Corn Free" on the label, it's probably not. 

18. Recipes that are promoted as allergy safe including "Corn Free" make you laugh. 

19. You play "find the corn" on food labels for fun, not because you actually thought you could eat it. 

20.  You have learned how to cook/can/dry/grow/distill your own food. 

21.  You know more about our food system than you ever wanted to know about any industrial process. 

22. You don't think of yourself as a foodie or a control freak, but if: you don't know where it came from; how it was grown; what happened to it post harvest; and you didn't prepare it -- you surely are not going to eat it. 

23. You have a beauty regimen that consists of a soap, shampoo/conditioner,  food grade oil for moisturizer, deoderant  and safe toothpaste. (The oil may be the only item you can buy easily in your local grocery store). 

24.  Your lunch looks and tastes better than the leftovers everyone else brings to the office. You don't share. 

25. You would rather be hungry for a few hours than eat somehow that will make you sick. It probably won't kill you to miss a meal, but an anaphylactic reaction just might. 

Let's talk about it!

In the past few weeks I've received a few emails from people just starting out on their corn allergy journey. While I don't wish a food allergy on anyone, I do get get the fun of sounding like a grumpy old timer.  I like to fire up the Commodore 64 and reply, "Back when I was diagnosed, there wasn't anything on the internet for people with corn allergies. Just advice from the allergist on not eating popcorn and corn chips! Get away from that processed food before you drop dead."  I usually like to follow up such sage comments by putting on mom jeans, black socks, brown sandals and yelling at those darn kids to get off my lawn.

In the interest of being a good corn-free citizen who has survived an entire decade with a corn allergy and is now enjoying a large corn-allergy and corn intolerant community on the web here are a few good spots to hang out while figuring out how to live a corn-free life.

Facebook:
Corn Allergy and Intolerance Group  https://www.facebook.com/groups/cornallergy/
I recomend this group as an interesting place to start for people with either a corn allergy  or intolerance. Lots of people with different levels and types of reactions and good discussions. The group varries from people with a strict scientific testing perspective to people who are willing to try anything labeled a cure so there are lots of interesting discussions. Very friendly and helpful members who share info and support one another. The majority of very active posters are from North America, but there are members from across the globe.
Some group jargon that will help you communicate and understand a typical phrase that would be put at the end of a post about a product. If I posted saying something was safe for me, I might write: "I am a swift reactor to contact, inhalation and ingestion, only allergic to corn. I'm corn free, I can't do corn-lite at all!"

 Corn Lite: You can eat some foods that are cross contaminated with corn in the processing or have a small amount of corn derivatives and are either ok or willing to put up with the discomfort. Mostly people with a food intolerance or a non-anayphyactic allergy.

Corn Free:You (try to) avoid all corn containing products. Usually due to severe allergies and/or anaphylactic reactions.

Reaction Levels: immediate or swift reactor  vs slow or delayed reactor -- this is the amount of time it takes you to develop symptoms to exposure to your allergen, it can be min. for an allergy or much longer in the case of food intolerances.

Sensitive to: Contact (skin), Inhalation (fumes/dust), Ingested (food)

Corn Allergy Awareness https://www.facebook.com/groups/60220625854/
Smaller group, more focus on Canadian products but lots of cross over with the Corn Allergy fb group. Same friendly and helpful vibe as above.

Corn Freedom https://www.facebook.com/pages/corn-freedom/264504334407
Take this page with a grain of salt -- this mom w/ a corn allergic or intolerant child is interested in advocacy, which is great, but is at the beginning of her food allergy journey and IN MY OPINION still is eating/feeding a lot of corn intensive products and mistakenly promoting them as corn free. It may be that her child is able to tolerate corn lite foods, but she sees them as corn free -- it is a typical part of the journey and she is getting more comments from people with more experience w/ corn allergy.  As with any food recommendation -- use caution. More interesting to watch than to participate in for me.
 

Good FB Info pages -- not all corn specific

Corn Free Foods List https://www.facebook.com/CornFreeFoods NOT all corn free, many products are just low corn/corn lite and are tolerated by people with a corn intolerance and need to be tested CAREFULLY by you! There are only 4 safes thing for me on the the entire list, so proceed with caution. This is a good place to start if you are trying to find safe foods, but may foods on there need to be retested.  There is a visual Pinterest board maintained by fb folks that is a little more up to date -- http://pinterest.com/stripeysocks/corn-free-visual-the-list/ Assume EVERYTHING is corn-lite and test carefully. It is a good starting point but don't assume that anything is totally safe for you.

Asthma and Allergy Foundation https://www.facebook.com/AAFANational  Good info feed.

Team Anaphylaxis  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Team-Anaphylaxis/159511227477594  Mostly focused on advocating for children's issues, good info for communicating about threatening allergies.

Food Allergy Mom Doc https://www.facebook.com/FoodAllergyMomDoc  Interesting and thought provoking posts from a doc w/ two allergic children.

 American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology https://www.facebook.com/AmericanAcademyofAllergyAsthmaandImmunology 
Good info on current research for people w/ a science background.

_______________
Outside of Facebook
Avoiding Corn Forum on Delphi -- http://forums.delphiforums.com/avoidingcorn/start  The long running, sprawling and full of info forum. There is talk of the hosting platform transferring to a more usable format for mobile devices.

You are not alone! Feel free to send me an email (cornallergy at gmail (dot) com ) and go connect with some of your peers.

It's just food --people!

I've been quiet for a while. While I've had plenty to say, it hasn't felt appropriate for a public forum. Why? Because I am cranky. Having a food allergy is not easy, particularly one where that food protein is not broken down when it is fractionated for industrial uses (glue, cleaning chemicals, fragrances) so that you always need to be on guard. It is not easy to avoid these things, particularly if you 1. Work 2. Socialize 3. Go to school 4. Leave your house.

Right now I'm in the car outside of a funeral home. I'm going to the outdoor service but avoiding the jammed together with perfume and makeup wearing people part of the day. Hugs and kisses will be bad enough for my over active immune system. There is only so much you can do to change the behavior of elderly relatives who wear powder, perfume and lipstick and give you a big smooch on the cheek when the see you -- I'm happy to see them no matter what the occasion and as long as I'm not turning blue and flopping around on the floor, I'm ok with the fact that I'm going to have a hard time breathing for a few days after I touch them. Que Serra. There is only so much you can control.

What we can control, as food allergic people and food allergy parents is the food we eat and feed to our children. I've been both worried and dismayed by the number of people 1. are willing to "cheat" or regularly eat "corn lite" and admit to eating/feeding things they know are not safe to their children 2. . seem confused and surprised by how reactive and generally ill they are 3. spend a great deal of time and money on substitutes for "normal" food.

This is not just a corn allergy phenomenon, Ira Glass did a intro segment on This American Life with clips of people with food allergies who regularly wind up in the ER because they knowingly eat food they are allergic to -- repeatedly. Holy Flying Monkeys People! IT'S JUST FOOD! Living without a single food is not going to kill you, eating it just might.

With the corn allergy, I'm constantly exposed to blind tests where I will react to something in the air or on my skin. At this point, I can't imaging willing eating a handful of popcorn or biting into an ear of corn on the cob -- even though I can remember how good they tasted.

It's just food. I'm not starving. I really like breathing. I live in the US, I have access to locally grown corn-free organic fruit and veggies that I fortunately can afford to buy (instead of expensive shoes). Why should poison my food just because I'd like some mayonnaise on my tomatoes? I just don't know.

Seriously? It's just food! Have a food allergy? Do the hard sleuthing to find out what is safe for you. Eat that.

Please don't poison yourself knowingly. Is there something you love to eat that makes you or your child sick? It is poisonous to you/her/him. Poison. Period.

Be healthy. Live long. Prosper.