There are many different ways of ruining my mood. Mood, and not vibe, I hate the overuse of the word ‘vibe’ lately. Here, we say mood. Usually, I am quite good at keeping my emotional demons at bay. I am an eclectic character, so I have all these silly tools at my disposal. Layers and layers of irony, the ability to be sassy without being rude (Gay 101, duh) and a charming theatricality that serves me as a coping mechanism.

I was having a somewhat OK Monday until someone came out of nowhere, bursting my bubble. In my mind, this person appeared like a puppet in a pantomime. If I transcribe what happened, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Me and one of the chefs were working, this person appeared and gave us a pep talk about how the allergens in the menu that was displayed on the screens were wrong.

I quietly listened because the person seemed moody, and I didn’t want to spark any new fires.
He came again, as they do in Celebrity Big Brother when they are not done, to underline the idea that allergens are very important and that you could, in fact, kill someone with a bit of gluten. That’s absolutely not true, but I looked at the moody person with my best poker face and tried to explain something, but they went right back into ranting mode without listening. Then, they vanished.

I have a lot of qualms about all this. Qualms I shall dissect for my own entertainment.
FIRST: The moody person holds a position in my company, of course, but this position remains a mystery to me. It’s one of those ‘office people’ that shows up every now and then to do I don’t know what. I am not stating that the moody person does nothing, I am saying that they are not integrated into what I do every day, and therefore, their duties are unknown to me.
I am not going to fool myself though, I do think that there is an issue in capitalistic organisations in general and within the UK in particular of middle management being absolutely all over the place. I get a lot of people above me with uncertain roles that I need to obey to. 2024 is all about calling out people at work whose task is not clearly defined, because I get too much trauma working in the service industry for a person to be the manager of I-don’t-know-what to come and treat me in a way I certainly do not approve of.

Let’s all build a brighter and more horizontal future, with fewer hierarchies and far fewer middle managers.

SECOND: The obsession in this country for allergies. I don’t know if this is a UK thing or a London thing. In Spain, the person who is allergic is held accountable for their own actions and consequences. In Spain, they would tell you that they were allergic to this or that, and I would kindly communicate to the kitchen whatever the situation was, just to come back and tell the customer that if they have a severe allergy to that, they should indeed eat somewhere else. White people being allergic to stuff is almost a cliché, and I really don’t want to dismiss the risks of allergies and their consequences. But it will always be interesting to me how in London, the accountability for the consequences of an allergic reaction lies with the entity that has sold the bagel, and not the human being that has consciously bought and eaten it, while being allergic themselves. Like, when did this happen?

And again, I do not want to make a charade out of this, because a person died and laws were written afterwards, but sometimes, I do think that there is some level of lack of common sense.
Now, let’s discuss allergies. I just happen to know quite a bit about it, because of my Biology studies back in the Basque university I ferociously hated.

An allergic reaction is a very specific biochemical response to a specific allergen. It is basically the immune system going crazy over a substance that is harmless to most people. Peanut or crustacean allergy can trigger a reaction that can actually kill the affected human being, via anaphylaxis.

It turns out that gluten allergy, DOES NOT EXIST. What we happily refer to as ‘gluten allergy’, is technically an autoimmune disorder that operates in a different way in each body, and in severe cases, might degenerate into celiac disease. Gluten is a bitch of a molecule to digest, and the nuances of intolerance branch out eternally in many different directions. This means that some people might react very badly to gluten, yes, but the probability of killing them in the act (as if it was anaphylaxis) is very low.

So here I am, with all this knowledge, being aggressively told that I should write down gluten as an allergen in the sausages because someone might die from it.
And don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the need for a system to identify any substance that might be problematic, such as gluten or milk, even though most people are not allergic to them, but intolerant (knowing that few people will be, in fact, actually allergic to milk, for example).

However, I would love to see an advancement in how the service industry workers are trained regarding allergies. They (not me this time, I don’t feel alluded to) are almost frightened for life in a shock therapy situation in which an ‘allergy’ becomes code for someone almost dying, and while we absolutely need to be mindful, have the right information and communicate it carefully, I am pretty sure that the statistics of someone dying from a gluten allergy eating a sausage are pretty close to zero.

Let’s all as a society push each other to mindfully differentiate an allergy from an intolerance. Let’s all escape from the reductive impulse of calling everything an allergy.
And this is maybe my anti-capitalist / sick of working in the service industry brain BUT I do believe that calling everything an allergy actually brings us closer to the stupid tyranny of the customer being this entity that constantly complains and yet somehow is always right.
Calling everything an allergy gives people the chance to jump onto their ego and tell people off, even if nothing has really happened.

My mood is not going to be ruined because of disinformation and people almost doing things.