Halloween Wrap up

Do you want help with that? No, I'll carry my own poison, thank you.

Well, we survived our first Trick-or-Treating with food allergies experience! Despite my kid’s food allergies, she is irresistibly drawn to candies that could kill her. To be fair, with a severe milk allergy, there are a lot of candies that qualify as deadly. But she was especially interested in ones with multiple top 9 food allergens. She came home with 5 Reese's. A packet of peanut M&Ms. At least 2 Snickers. If she had actually tried to get more unsafe candies, I am not sure she could have broken her current record. 

Our plan? Just let her choose what she wanted to choose. And we would make them disappear when we got home. Definitely no grazing on candy while Trick-or-Treating. Plus, a required 5 minutes hand scrub when we got home before eating dinner. 

What did we learn?

Individual packages “not labeled for retail sale” are the wild west of food labeling

There are generally three options:

1. No ingredient information. No allergy information. 100% not helpful in this household. On one hand, every Skittle package I’ve ever seen has been top 9 allergen free. On the other hand, you never know! Large Laffy Taffy’s have egg but small Laffy Taffy’s have soy. What if this weird sour skittle have something extra mixed in? C’mon, Mars. Just put some allergy info on each package! Having the ingredient information only on the large bag in my neighbor's trash is completely unhelpful.

Great, thanks. Literally anything could be in this package.

2. No ingredient information BUT top 8 allergy information. Wonderful! This seems like a great solution.

Twizzlers have wheat? I didn't know, but now I do!

3. Full ingredient info and allergy information. This may be a little overkill but, you know what, gummy bears, I appreciate it. I do not appreciate that they may contain traces of milk (get your factory together!) but I do appreciate the warning.

Yep, this package has got everything! Full ingredient list, a may contain statement, and maybe even milk!

We need to have a lot of candy to “swap” out next year

This year she’s really too small to eat much candy and she didn't realize when her whole bag disappeared. Next year, though, if she goes for 100% Reese's again, we are going to need a whole bag of Sour Patch Kids just for her. Even when she’s old enough to know which candy not to get, there were a lot of houses that didn’t have any safe options for her. And then there’s the problem of the candy that’s probably safe but isn’t labeled with any information so unless we want to play allergen Russian roulette we just need to have some switch out.

I really missed milk chocolate candy

One plus? There was a lot of candy that we were forced to consume. You know, for the safety of the baby. Candy I wouldn’t buy (it seems mean to buy something only ¾ of the family can eat!), but candy that when I’m at the store I daydream about the days when I could buy without a second thought.

Getting to eat all my kid’s Halloween candy doesn’t make up for the stress of dealing with her food allergies all the time… but it’s nice to get a treat once a year! And man was that milk chocolate, peanut, nougat candy good.