How Expensive Food Allergies Are

Do you remember when you could go grocery shopping and compare prices rather than ingredient labels? *sigh* Those were the days.

With inflation and supply chain shortages and entering year three of a global pandemic, I think it’s a good time to point out that grocery shopping with food allergies can be an insanely expensive endeavor. For one, food alternatives are (almost) always more expensive than the real thing. Sunbutter is 2.6x* more expensive than peanut butter. Oat milk is 2.3x more expensive than cow’s milk. The winner in this category? All purpose “wheat free” baking flour is 8x (EIGHT TIMES!) more expensive than the run of mill (pun very much intended) wheat flour. The only cheaper alternative I could find? Using the dry “egg replacer” powder rather than real eggs in baking. Don’t worry, though, the egg replacer in the refrigerated section that you cook up like scrambled eggs is still way more expensive.

Also, more expensive? Products made from the top 9 allergen replacements. Wheat free bread: more expensive. Dairy free cream cheese: more expensive. Dairy free yogurt: more expensive. Because the original products are more expensive, everything down the line is more expensive, too.

Another problem? Having to deal with possible cross contamination. Let’s say you can have almonds, but not peanuts. The regular jar of almond butter is $0.52/ounce, while Barney's (the brand we have to buy that is made a facility separate from peanuts) is $0.87/ounce. If you can eat graham crackers, the store brand ($0.15/ounce) which sometimes contains milk, is always cheaper than the safe Honey Maid crackers without milk ($0.31/ounce). I never thought I would care about brand name ("Cream Between" chocolate sandwich cookies taste fine, okay?), but now I am forced to (only the best name brand processed cookie sandwich whose cream inexplicably doesn't contain real cream for my kid, please).

We are extremely lucky that we can pay extra for safe food. I do not know what we would do if we were adding food allergies to food insecurity. The school lunches in our town have a special disclaimer that due to substitutions and commercial kitchens, they are “unable to guarantee that any food item will be completely free of food allergens.” I’m sorry, what? There are so many kids that rely on school lunch and there’s no way to make sure it’s safe? Well let’s add that on to the list of things that need to change.

This quick exercise I did comparing the price of foods just scratches the surface of how expensive food allergies can be. Once you add on constantly having multiple doses of epinephrine on hand, frequent visits to the doctor for allergy testing, possible trips in an ambulance to the emergency department… the costs really come through wherever you look.

*All of my prices were chosen from Amazon.com. I tried to use the most common products in midrange prices (rather than picking the most or the least expensive) to make the comparisons fair. The numbers change a little bit based on which ones I picked, but one thing stayed constant- eating with food allergies IS ALWAYS MORE EXPENSIVE.