Field Notes from a Gastronomic Experiment

So, it turns out that if you eat hardly any wheat for three weeks, then have three sources of it in the one day, it kind of hurts.

After the first week on my self-imposed low gluten experiment, I was reasonably certain I didn't have to care about a gluten intolerance. I was feeling a little less bloated, a little "lighter" and a little more energetic - and my bowel movements had improved a bit (you needed to know that, I'm sure), but my dyspepsia hadn't radically improved and I wasn't thinking "Oh, my word! This has made such a huge difference in my life - I wish I had done this years ago!"

Or anything like that.

I felt a little better. For a major dietary change like removing all wheat (I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how much wheat is in the stuff we eat?), you want a slightly bigger payoff than "I feel a little better".

I did come to realise how much of my food was basically centred around one grain, and resolved to shake things up a bit more rather than being so wheat dependant in my food, but I figured I could probably go back to eating wheat again without too much bother.

After two weeks, I tried some bread and had no problems. A few days later I had some spaghetti and was fine. On Friday I had a hot-cross bun, a piece of cake and a pasta salad for lunch. By that night I was feeling decidedly put-out - as though I had something in my stomach that my stomach didn't particularly want to process. By Saturday morning, I was reaching for my dyspepsia pills and heading back to bed until midday, when I finally felt like being upright.

Of course, to make it a true experiment, I'm going to have to repeat it to see if I get the same result. That does seem reasonably unpleasant, but I am nothing if not a semi-rigorous quasi-scientist.

The main thing I might be learning from this experiment is that giving up wheat "just to see what happens" is a stupid idea if it means you aren't really much better off than you were before you gave it up, but you now experience pain when you attempt to eat the kinds of things you used to eat without problem...

Things I am learning so far:

• As a society, we are far too dependent on wheat - even foodstuffs that don't contain anything resembling flour have "flavors" which are wheat-based - which is really annoying and kind of weird because without those particular flavours they would be able to call it gluten free and sell it to more people.


• If you are currently giving up coffee, avoiding wheat and trying to resist the temptation to replace everything you aren't eating with chocolate, cafes completely disappear. They have absolutely nothing to offer except overpriced tea.


• Buying groceries is surprisingly easy, buying food "out" is surprisingly difficult


• Wheat is really sticky. It has some strange elastic property to it that makes it work for things like bread and pasta and muffins that other "flours" can't quite pull off. I wonder if that coats your innards and is harder to process?


• Quinoa based pasta does not taste very pleasant.