Thirst Safely

If tomatoes are spicy, you have an allergy to tomatoes.

If your mouth hurts, feels raw, or itches when you eat something, please don’t eat it! It might not be a full-blown allergy, could be something like a sensitivity to the acid content or maybe even Oral Allergy Syndrome, but also, you might very well be allergic. Unless it’s explicitly designed to be sour or spicy, it’s not supposed to do that.

Bananas are not spicy, prickly, or tingly! Kiwi is not unbearably sour and tingly! You people probably have an allergy! Stop eating the death fruits!

Mango and pineapple are a little odd. A lot of people react to pineapple because of an enzyme it contains which breaks down proteins; depending on your sensitivity level, it can make it feel like your mouth is being dissolved, because that’s kind of maybe what’s happening? You might not have a full-blown systemic allergy, but if it hurts, listen to your mouth and respect its stopping point. Mango has a compound super similar to urushiol, which is the stuff in poison ivy. A lot of people get oral allergy symptoms with fresh mango. Again, not necessarily a systemic allergy, but also, your body doesn’t like that. Please listen to your body.

Honey is not naturally spicy, sour, or tingly. (Spicy and infused honeys do exist, but I’m talking plain honey.) It might be a bit rich/overly sweet, but no, it should not make your tongue funny, ‘prickle,’ or otherwise hurt your mouth. You are probably allergic to honey. (insert “ghost bees” post here lol)

Many peppers are spicy, but bell peppers are not. Repeat after me: Bell Peppers Are Not Spicy. If they are spicy, you are probably allergic! This is yet another one my husband learned recently. Bell peppers/capsicum are also called sweet peppers, because they are sweet.

On that note, here’s a handy metric: If you find yourself wondering how people just looooove this food, or how they always fail to mention the weird sensory feature about it–primarily the spiciness, ‘fuzziness’ in mouth, or pain it causes–your experience is probably out of the ordinary and could very well be some kind of allergy.

And now, an update on my husband’s journey of allergen discovery, because I’m sensing from the tags and comments this might be relevant to a lot of y’all.

Yes, he is definitely allergic to tomatoes. Went and got him allergy tested to confirm it, and it came back pretty darn high on the list. Along with a crapton of other foods he’d been eating his entire life. We immediately got rid of all of those things in our diet, and wouldn’t you know it, his lifelong “IBS” went away.

So here’s a further PSA.

If you have “IBS” or a “sensitive stomach,” try to get tested for food allergies, too. Not all food allergies send you into anaphylaxis. Sometimes they give you smelly gas, diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, recurrent tummyaches, nausea, and headaches. And it doesn’t always happen right away, sometimes taking several hours or most of a day to produce the unpleasant results, so you might not be noticing what your specific triggers are.

Ask them what is up with food when they try it.

Like… My kid decided raw broccoli was evil. So we assumed he was being a kid and cycled it out of rotation for a while, but he still made faces when we brought it back in…

When the Good Place said "Why choose to be good every day when there is no guaranteed reward now or in the afterlife… I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.” 

It’s a shifter AU, arranged marriage, friends-to-lovers, 100K slow burn, canon major character death fix-it fic but with a big budget and a soundtrack and excellent costumes where everyone committed to the bit.