Others have probably said this more eloquently than I, and I know I've griped about related issues in the past, but let me just say again, it is downright criminal how little food manufacturers and retailers care about people with food allergies.

My daughter has EOE. It's not life threatening in an anaphylactic sense, but it does severely limit quality of life for her, and impacts every facet of her existence. We're in the process of identifying her triggers, one of which we know for sure is dairy. The amount of stuff that's unnecessarily made with dairy is awful; it's even worse how much stuff gets casually contaminated, and companies aren't required to label it.

Those little "made in a facility with/that also processes" tags? The "may contain" warnings? Voluntary. Optional. So unless it's made in a dedicated dairy-free facility, it could have traces in it, and we simply wouldn't know unless they decide to be kind.

The worse part is, in our case, we don't always know what food did it. EOE is a delayed reaction. It could have been something from yesterday, or last week. Trying to pin down which foods are safe and which aren't becomes a billion times harder when we can't rely on labeling. Sure it doesn't contain milk or whey or caseinate or butter, but could it have been made in the same processing line? Who knows! The manufacturer didn't bother putting that on the label!

And grocery stores and restaurants aren't much better. Those deli meats are sliced on the same equipment as the block cheeses. The lettuce is right next to the shredded cheese at the taco bar. I watched an employee use the same serving utensils for the ice cream as the dairy free sorbet.

And we're lucky! Her allergy isn't going to kill her outright if she gets contaminated. But it is turning out to be extremely sensitive, so we're struggling. I spent two and a half hours the other day trying to shop for 10 things, because I had to keep researching the different brands' manufacturing processes and ingredient sources. I had to go to three different stores. Again, we're lucky; we live in an area with a pretty big market for vegan and "specialty" foods.

We're facing down the very real possibility of having to also eliminate soy and/or wheat in the near future, and I'm so exhausted just thinking about it. Soy is in everything. Wheat is in everything. Dairy is in everything. To avoid it, you either have to eat exclusively from the produce section and/or pay through the nose for one of about three specialty products that have an extremely limited distribution. Just going fully dairy free alone has almost doubled our grocery bill, and it's not like we were splurging before.

It's just frustrating. And if it's this bad for us, who have the luxury of not needing an epi pen and an emergency plan, I don't even want to imagine how bad it is for people with near-fatal or anaphylactic allergies. People shouldn't have to jump through a billion hoops and pay quadruple price for infinitely fewer options just to not die.