starfall

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

jai!!

You can just be a girl. Or a boy, or something else; those aren’t my areas of expertise, though I imagine the process is roughly similar. But you can just be a girl. If you want to. If you’re not already.

You can grow out your hair. You can try on new clothes. You can take that stumbling first step into something new. You can have your awkward teen years in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, and on. You can never arrive late, as long as you still arrive.

You can throw away all the things you were told were gifts but which never brought you any joy. You can finally give yourself what you actually wanted but were told to never ask for.

You can drop the act. You can dismantle the walls you were taught to build. You can pick at the callus you formed around yourself to protect from the friction of the world, peel it away to find yourself soft beneath, and discover the relief of being tender. You can find sisterhood, and feel it fill all the empty promises brotherhood made before. You can have love, and you can finally give it too. You can delight in how the world seems frictionless now that you don’t have to pretend anymore.

You can melt your flesh down and recast your body into a home instead of just a tool. You can listen to every stitch pop as you rip yourself from the social fabric, free to weave yourself anew. You can rend yourself open, reach in, and gently raise the girl you could have been before you were taught to be a man. You can shed the false self you hid inside, claw your way out sticky and bloody and gasping for air, and you can finally start living. With freshly soft hands you can seize the hammer of your will, and with it — day by day, blow by screaming blow — you can beat your fate into a shape of your choosing.