DRMacIver's Notebook
Noticing things as life happens
Noticing things as life happens
I was at an event recently where someone tried to kill me.
I’m being a little overdramatic here. It wasn’t personally directed at me. Also I wouldn’t have died even if they had succeeded in their attempt, it would just have ruined my day.
Probably very few people indeed would have died from the specific thing they did. Plenty would be hospitalised, certainly, and even among those not hospitalised, many would have had a much much worse time than I did.
But only slight variations on what they did could absolutely have been fatal.
I am, of course, talking about the catering.
To be less vague, here’s what happened: I was having the pleasant experience of looking around a buffet and seeing a lot of things I could actually eat, all clearly labelled with allergens.
I’d actually already eaten, so I didn’t get much, but I did wander over to the desserts section. There there was a selection of delicious looking creams. Unfortunately, I cannot eat delicious looking creams, as they’re made mainly of wheat and dairy, my two big dietary nemeses.
But! They had vegan cashew creams which, unlike their non-vegan neighbours, were not listed as containing gluten. Hurrah, dessert for me. I piled a small plate with them.
Then I looked at them, and I looked at their gluten-containing neighbours with a literally identical shell to the allegedly gluten free ones I was holding, and a little voice in my head said “hmmmm. I have doubts.”I queried with the staff, and they confirmed that yes in fact the vegan cashew creams were, while vegan, not gluten free.Side note: It’s an ongoing bugbear of mine that “vegan” is often treated as maximally inclusive. Big fan of there being vegan food for vegans, but it’s actually quite a lot harder to make vegan food compatible with other dietary requirements and also still be good and massively limits your options.
Anyway, I put down my plate, sulked away, and kicked up a fuss with the event organisers. They, thankfully, took it very seriously, and raised it with the vendor.
I think there are a couple of interesting things about this story.
The first is: This error is really really bad. The dish in question listed allergens, and other dishes listed the allergen I was looking out for, but this dish did not list that allergen despite containing it. This about the most dangerous possible way to be unreliable with your allergen info, because it’s practically guaranteed to create a false sense of security. Doing this is much worse than not including allerrgen info at all.
As I say, I’m lucky in that my dietary problems just aren’t that bad. I’d have had a bad day if I’d eaten these. People with celiac disease would have had a much much worse time. And if someone had a really severe allergy to an ingredient they’d done this on, they could have died.I do expect that anyone with that severe an allergy is even more cautious than me and would have caught this, but I sure wouldn’t want to count on that.
The second is: Boy did I not take it seriously enough given that. I should have stayed with the tray until it had a big sign saying “contains wheat” on it.
Part of the problem is that I’d had a day of petty food annoyances at this point. Nothing serious, just a mix of bad luck, oversights, and mild inconsideration from various people. This sort of thing makes me disproportionately annoyed, because an already stressful experience of trying to navigate food is made more stressful, I’m extremely picky about meal plans being disrupted, and I have to deal with all of this while hangry.
What this meant is that when this happened to me I went “Oh, another bloody petty food annoyance. Fuck sake”. It was only when thinking about it some more and reporting it to the event staff that it dawned on me quite what a big deal this actually was.
Another interesting thing about this was that apparently it was relatively common knowledge among the attendees that this vendor was not trustworthy in this way. I was just left ignorant of that as a relative newcomer. I don’t quite know what could have been done to communicate that to me (especially as I hadn’t made a big deal of my dietary requirements, which I usually don’t), so I don’t really blame anyone for that, but it’s interesting context.It probably also means that the event was safer than it seems due to the relative lack of people who could be affected.
Yet another interesting thing is that I noticed this at all. Visually, the shell of these creams wasn’t blatantly wheat based. It’s totally plausible they could have been made out of some sort of gluten-free flour. Without the reference point of other similar things that were clearly made of wheat, I could easily have fallen for it. But there was that moment of looking from one to the other and paying attention to a dawning suspicion that made it worth checking. I think this would have been easy for me to overlook, but I didn’t. Possibly this is because my bad food day had primed me for suspicion, possibly this is just because this is the kind of discrepancy I look for in the world.
But the final interesting thing is just how many interesting things there are about this.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is storytelling. My ability to write fiction is often a really good barometer of my mental health.Pay no attention to how long it’s been since I’ve written any fiction. I’m fine! Fine, I tell you! I think it’s partly because in order to write fiction I have to be able to tackle questions like… what sort of life is worth paying attention to? Like sure I could write some sort of trash litrpg but I probably couldn’t because the whole point of litrpg for me is disengagement, and story telling requires you to engage with the lives of the characters.
Which uh, requires engaging with life at all, and as you may be picking up a certain vibe from recentAnd not so recent. I keep looking at random notebook posts and finding posts from years ago about depression that are annoyingly relatable. I’m a bit depressed at the moment, which makes that difficult. Mostly what I want is stuff to hyperfocus on so I can ignore all… this (gestures broadly).
I was rereading this old post of mine about relearning curiosityOn the subject of old posts about depression… and it strikes me that the precursor to curiosity is finding things interesting, and cultivating the skill of doing that and applying it broadly.
And, depressed or not, I’m actually quite good at finding interesting things. It’s the same skill as the one that let me spot the secretly wheaty cashew creams, or write a post about standing on one leg and generalisable lessons from that. You look at stuff, you notice how it fits in with other things, and you notice how it doesn’t.
One of the foundational realisations that set me on my current path is this: You’re allowed to find your own problems interesting.
I think this perhaps doesn’t go far enough. You’re allowed to find all of your life interesting, whether it has problems in it or not. Paying attention to what happens and engaging with it is probably very important, and learning to tell interesting (to you) stories about what happens in it is probably a really important tool.