Fun with Food Allergies

It seems that I developed a new food allergy (or food intolerance, I'm not quite sure) in the last couple of weeks. After I got rid of nearly all my other allergies last year, it is a "nice" change to have to be on the lookout for specific foods again.

So, to make things interesting, the new allergy is - of course - soy. And as you might imagine, just about everything in Japan is somehow contaminated with soy. But the most interesting part is not the fact that there is soy in many foods, it's the fact that I can neither read the labels, nor communicate properly with restaurant staff!

So, as a first emergency response, I memorized the characters for soy beans: 大豆. So now every time I go shopping, I have a detailed look at ALL the labels and try to find the soy bean characters. Next to the usual suspects (tofu and soy sauce), I discovered soy in some varieties of bread, cookies, chocolate, and ham. Luckily, there is bread (and ham) which is free of soy, but you still have to find out which is which among the different types of bread (or ham) on offer.

In effect, this also rules out buying stuff in a bakery where you don't get to see a detailed label before you purchase (not that Japanese bakeries are all that good when it comes to bread, anyway... they don't really deserve the name when compared to a German bakery!)

As for the sweets - most of them seem to have soy (most likely soy lecithin). It's really frustrating to go through an entire shelf of sweets, only to discover over and over again that it does indeed contain soy. But it's probably healthier to eat fewer sweets anyway, so I'll just take this as a hint ;-)

To make things a little more complicated, daizu (大豆) is not the only word used when soy beans are involved. There are different words for soy sauce (shoyu, written as 醤油 or しょうゆ) and tofu (豆腐), and even more words for the different varieties of soy sauce and tofu. But so far, it seems that scanning the labels for daizu is sufficient - most types of soy sauce and tofu are easily recognizable just by looking at the product.

I have not quite finished testing whether small quantities of soy are ok, but smaller quantities definitely result in fewer symptoms. So there is hope that I will be able to eat sushi with soy sauce again next time - it tastes ok without soy sauce, but definitely not as good ;-)