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.

@futurebird I have a fun one! Something that likes to grow on (or is produced by something that grows on) temperature-abused cooked meat dishes. Eat a dish and it's fine, eat the leftovers that weren't fridged until a couple hours later than ideal, and there's a small chance I get anaphylaxis from it. Took years to figure out the pattern because there was no shared ingredient among the triggers!

I started being a real hardass about either keeping the food hot/refrigerating the leftovers promptly, and not eating meat leftovers unless I was confident that those had occurred (even at some risk of offending someone that I didn't trust their food handling). Still rarely got it from restaurants. Started vetting restaurants by checking to see if they had a pattern of food holding temperature violations on their health inspection reports and it's been a good number of years since my last reaction. Still carry epi-pens, of course.

Would love to know the actual trigger, but at least I figured out how to avoid it!