The day after the birth of our first child, my husband Victor and I purchased a property in cottage country north of Toronto. A nature lover who thrives on solitude, it had been Victor’s dream to own land since coming to Canada. He had grown up with a conservation park as his backyard in Nairobi, [...]

As readers who are parents know, safeguarding a child with a food allergy can be daunting. Household routines, such as grocery shopping and food preparation, require adjusting, and decisions about where to dine out or travel often revolve around what’s best for the food-allergic child. While speaking on behalf of Anaphylaxis Canada, I’ve had many [...]

EVERY school year, we are flooded by calls from parents who want to know when their allergic child should begin carrying his or her own epinephrine auto-injector. While the national consensus guidelines, Anaphylaxis in Schools & Other Settings, recommend 6 to 7 years of age, the fact is, this is not a hard and fast rule. [...]

  I am very proud, honoured and humbled by the success of Sabrina’s Law at the 5th anniversary of its passage in Ontario. We live in a good world where something like Sabrina’s Law comes out of such tragedy. It is truly remarkable. I feel Sabrina is proud of the law that’s named after her [...]

No one should have to go through what my two kids and I have just gone through. We’re the people you may have heard about in the news. On February 15, we got tossed off a Mexicana Airlines flight simply because I’d asked that the attendants not serve peanuts. I’m at risk of anaphylaxis to [...]

So much more than pasta When my husband-to-be and I told people that we were going to Italy for our honeymoon, everyone had the same reaction. “What! That’s the land of pasta and pizza. You have celiac. What are you going to eat?” I smiled and said, “you’ll see.” For months, I’d been doing research. [...]

For almost as long as I have been alive, I have wanted to be a writer. But no one could have told me that my first book would be a gluten-free food memoir. As a pre-pubescent, I poured out my heart in a teddy bear journal. Later, I dreamed fictional worlds, wandered through words on [...]

On a warm July day, my friend Jeanne and I stand side by side, in companionable silence. She and I are slicing strawberries, the juices staining our fingers red. The tips of our knives click on the cutting board. One more topped and sliced, ready. We are making jam. Jeanne has come to my home [...]

Having lived through an entire seasonal cycle of eating gluten-free, I learned one lesson most profoundly: pay attention to the rhythm of the kitchen. Before I went gluten-free, I cooked according to recipes. If the pasta dish in a cookbook called for tomatoes, I bought tomatoes, no matter what the season. Now, I can’t believe [...]

Before our daughter was born, my husband and I thought we knew what would happen; a planned Caesarean section meant we knew the date she would be born, our bags were packed, and our birth-announcement e-mail was already saved as a draft. The only hitch was the food. We asked one of our childbirth preparation [...]