Share this with your relatives when they badger you about not eating their homemade whatever

Screenshot from mcsweeneys.net

If you have any dietary modifications at all and you haven't seen David Kadavy's "Regarding Your Reaction to My Gluten-Free Diet" on McSweeney's, please go there now. You don't even have to come back.

#2 through #7 hit closest to home for me:
"7. I also used to thoroughly enjoy croissants. It’s reassuring to know that you would 'die' without them."

Oh, and #11.

It was posted in time for Thanksgiving, but in preparation for Christmas I'm revisiting it. And relishing the idea of printing up and passing out cards with each of the 13 items on them as needed.

Kadavy perfectly skewers the blurtings of hapless people bumping up against things that aren't like them and are therefore weird, stupid or neurotic. People seem to think that they're having an original, thoughtful reaction that they owe it to you to share. I think it was David Sedaris (I tried Googling it, OK? I couldn't find it, and I don't feel good and I miss gluten) who described watching people in a novelty shop pick up fake eyeballs and hold them up to their own eyes as a lazy "joke" for whoever they were shopping with. Over and over and over again. And how each person seemed to think this was an inspired spark of whimsy from his or her unique imagination, not the obvious thing that everyone tries first. 

Maybe she's never really had the logic behind these behaviors challenged before, they think to themselves. Maybe everyone's been too politically correct to tell her that her gluten-free dinner rolls suck and those bags under her eyes are from a wheat deficiency. Maybe I'm gonna be the one who saves her from herself.

If you have IBD, you are that shop owner watching people hold eyeballs up to their own eyes all day, every day, thinking they're actually doing something. We have heard it all. Let me save us both some time. I have thought this through. And we bought wheat dinner rolls just for you.