Can Food Allergies Be More Than A Hollywood Punchline?
As Hollywood reckons with increased representation, it’s time to rewrite the narrative of the food allergic character.
The recent Netflix romcom Love, Guaranteed, one of the streamer’s 10 most popular titles in September, is not remotely realistic. The plot follows a man, Damon Wayans, Jr., who goes on 1,000 dates through a dating app that guarantees its users will find love. When he doesn’t, he enlists the help of Rachael Leigh Cook, a do-gooder lawyer who mostly takes on cases pro bono because she’s just that much of a sweetheart, to sue the company. If you’ve ever seen a romcom, you probably know what happens next, but…spoilers are no fun.
No one expects a romcom to be realistic. That’s half the point of the genre! But Love, Guaranteed makes an assumption that a lot of popular culture does — that people with food allergies are weird, socially unnerving, picky, hyperbolic, and not to be taken seriously.
Wayans Jr.’s character goes on a date with a woman whose profile seems perfectly adorable. But when he meets her for dinner, she lists her food intolerances and allergies. He’s so turned off, he downs a bottle of wine, makes fun of her with the waitress, and tries to make a joke about shellfish being selfish when she’s trying to figure out how to not die. The joke of the scene is that there’s no one normal out there to date — as his thousandth date, she’s a striking example of everything that’s wrong in the dating world, all the high maintenance, socially awkward women out there who no self respecting man would fall in love with.
But the only person not worth dating in that scene was his character. Sure, she could have spoken up about her food allergies before the date — when I was single, I avoided first date dinners like the death trap they were, once even cooking dinner in my apartment for a new potential suitor to avoid disclosing my medical history in full in public. She should have brought her Epi-Pen (though bringing a life-saving injection whose best-case outcome is to keep you alive until you can get to a hospital isn’t a valid reason to eat poison). But he should have been sensitive to her needs, instead of mocking her. And the film should have represented disabilities better.
Yes, food allergies are disabilities covered by the ADA. Imagine a scene, where, instead of mocking her food allergies at dinner, he considered her a bad date because she was in a wheelchair and couldn’t ice skate, or because she was deaf and couldn’t enjoy the music at the concert, or because she was blind and needed Descriptive Video at the movies. Only sociopaths would laugh, and he certainly wouldn’t be a romantic hero.
Love, Guaranteed is not alone in its inaccurate portrayal of food allergies. Monster-in-Law (one of my favorite romcoms despite the following), features a scene in which Jane Fonda’s character purposely serves peanuts to Jennifer Lopez’s character, knowing she’s deathly allergic. Hilarious hijinks! Or, as some would call it, attempted murder.
The scene calls to memory the summer when I was 15 and on a youth tour to the West Coast. My allergy to cabbage had just turned airborne, which I learned that the hard way when the chef served cole slaw or cabbage salad almost every night for dinner. My airborne reactions were “mild” — lightheadedness, dizziness, confusion, all things that could be curbed by leaving the room briefly or sipping a ton of water — but my contact allergies led to hives and swelling. I accidentally touched a plate with cabbage on it, ran to the bathroom to soap my hands in scalding hot water, and returned to my table, where the camp clown threw a piece of cabbage at me, laughing, “So if you touch this you’ll die? Let’s see!” I didn’t die (YAY!) but developed a cabbage-shaped patch of hives through my shirt where the leaf had landed. I was lucky.
It’s not just romcoms, either. Advocacy led to Sony’s apology for a scene in Peter Rabbit where the mischievous rabbits throw blueberries at Mr. McGregor, knowing he’s allergic. The Big Bang Theory used allergies as a marker of the characters’ nerdiness. Typically, when characters have food allergies, they’re either socially inept, privileged Karens, or totally oblivious to their allergy until their nemesis uses it as a plot device to wage an attack.
What we see in pop culture reflects how we view the real world, and the trickle down effect can have real impacts on people’s lives. People say things like, “I just put in a teaspoon of bouillon into the soup— it won’t kill you” (it might) or “You can’t be allergic to lettuce, it’s 95% water!” (I guess it’s the other 5%, then) or “What do you mean you just had an anaphylactic reaction, who will give Celebrity X their coffee when they come in for their meeting?” (anyone else in the office who knows how to operate a Keurig?!).
All of the above are real responses I’ve gotten to my food allergies. The last highlights the bigger problem: People in Hollywood need to understand food allergies in order to create content that reflects them accurately. The same way we need disability representation for less invisible disabilities, we need it for food allergies. But there are barriers to entry baked into the system.
For instance, a major part of moving up in Hollywood is networking, often conducted over lunch, dinner, or drinks. I’ve navigated that pretty successfully in my career, but it means explaining to almost all of my contacts that I’ll be brown bagging my lunch to the restaurant they pick, and spending a lot of time fielding questions about my medical history and explaining that my diet isn’t a craze I picked up, but a medical reality.
Most people in Hollywood start as production assistants or office assistants, where part of their job is getting lunch or setting up platters for important meetings. Sometimes, my bosses would let me avoid doing those runs; other times, I had to risk it, driving with my windows open to waft out the airborne allergens, using napkins to carry the bag of food in case any food items spilled onto the takeout bag, soaping my hands immediately, and occasionally popping Benadryl if I wasn’t so successful.
Craft services — the buffets offered to production crews and casts — are problematic for people with food allergies who can’t cross contaminate and, especially at the entry level, aren’t in a position to make special requests. That means bringing lunch, dinner, and snacks to set to cover a 14-hour shoot at a location that may or may not have a fridge. Cooking takes time, a hot commodity with Hollywood hours, and shopping isn’t quick either — especially with the new FDA guidelines that require reading the ingredients and all marketing claims to verify said ingredient labels.
It’s certainly possible for people with food allergies to have successful careers in Hollywood, but I can’t help but wonder if the wildly off-base portrayals of food allergies in pop culture stem from a lack of representation with the content creators. Even though I’m very open about my allergies, I would hesitate to pitch a concept with accurate food allergy portrayal or correct someone else’s misrepresentation, out of fear that I’d be seen as overly dramatic and a pest. I’ve been told enough times that my allergies are a nuisance, and I don’t want to ruffle more feathers than the ones I need to simply to stay alive.
But in this moment where we’re learning that representation matters, that accuracy matters, that advocacy is okay, and our human differences deserve to be seen and celebrated, I’m asking us to do better. In Hollywood and elsewhere.
If you go on a date with a person with food allergies, don’t write her off as being a kook; recognize her as a human being who has something other than food to bring to the table. If you want to exact revenge on an enemy, don’t use their allergy to poison them if you wouldn’t consider arsenic a reasonable revenge option. If you know someone with food allergies, invite them to socialize with you in a way that doesn’t involve eating. Make space for the 32 million Americans who haven’t been seen and the world better for the 5.6 million children who deserve equity.