Month: September 2023

One of the most well-known food allergies is peanut allergies. It’s so well known that some parents don’t feed their children peanuts without a doctor’s supervision. You can grow out of childhood allergies which is very common. What is less common is developing food allergies as an adult. Approximately 10% of adults have food allergies and only half of those adults had them develop into adulthood. I am one of those 5% of people who developed food allergies in adulthood. If I took time to list out everything I am allergic or have intolerances to it would be a grocery list. The short answer is peanuts, and corn.

If having an allergy to one of the most common food ingredients wasn’t enough, being a picky eater on top of that limits the food choices on campus. Penn State only does a limited amount of allergen warnings and corn is not one of them. I will eventually get set up with the dietary office but until then corn roulette it is.

A frustrating part of eating on campus is having to go through every dining hall to see what’s for dinner, and then trying to figure out what is and what it should be made with.  This semester I am going to document my journey in the dining halls and figuring out the allergy system at Penn State.

There are many things that make me happy. I love working with dogs, making food for people, and reading. The thing is though, living on campus I don’t have a lot of access to the things I enjoy, so one of the ways I make myself happy is by finding places my friends and I can eat together. Having different food allergies, we have very limited choices to eat on campus at the same place, outside of the buffets in the commons, so my idea for a passion blog is eating in state college, or just eating in general, with food allergies and sensitivities. I was thinking about talking about eating with a few different allergies, explaining some of the ways that eating with food allergies can limit the places to enjoy food on campus or even make it more expensive. I was thinking I could do a post on the ways Penn State makes eating on campus accessible, and the ways it could improve. I could tie in how since I am a first-year student living on campus I need to have a meal plan and talk about managing a meal pan and buying food for outside of when I don’t eat in the commons. I would like to focus on this because, while food allergies are a risk while eating on campus, food injustice ties into this problem as well.