What makes this worse is restaurants who can't tell you their ingredients lists. I just give up and get the most basic foods.

Then there are the things that no one believes: like the "shelled peanut problem"

I can eat peanuts, love them! but not if they have been shelled in a "facility" because whatever they do it gets some kind of other nut dust on them and down i go! Toss me the epipen it's gonna be a long night.

Allergies are so odd. Obscure but serious ones are annoying.

@aredridel

I really want to know if I was born this way or if it is caused by what foods I ate when I was young?

My husband can't tolerate apple peels. Just the peels, the inside is fine. I wonder what the strangest food allergy must be?

@futurebird So just the peels: probably oral allergy syndrome; there's a lot of pollen proteins on the surface.

In general pollen exposure at formative moments seems to have a huge impact.

It's regional too: peanut allergies are way more common in the US than in Europe. Sesame allergies are vanishingly rare the US, but common in MENA.

And then I think a hidden component is a general sensitivity in the form of subclinical MCAS, and new immune learning caused by stressors and viral illnesses. Suddenly new allergies pop up, either real ones (due to inappropriately large IgE production in response to something) or MCAS-like ones (where normal-high amounts of IgE inappropriately trigger mast cells.)