I am getting ready for a TV interview this afternoon on gluten free products. Looking at my cupboard this morning made me think about what things were like in 1996, when I first started eating gluten free.
Today I can go to my regular grocery store and have my choice of a dozen different breads. Most of them taste pretty good and there are a few I don’t have to toast to get them to hold together. Then, there was one frozen white rice bread in the store, and it fell apart whether I toasted it or not! If I went to a specialty store, I had a few more choices, but none of them were very good.
I have three different types of crackers on my shelf. I have no styrofoam-tasting rice cakes in the house, but I do have a bag of pretzels set aside for my upcoming business trip. I don’t eat a lot of dry cereal, but if I wanted some, I counted 11 GF versions at the grocery store on my last trip.
Today I can buy flour made from rice, corn, many different types of beans, tapioca, amaranth, sorghum, teff, sweet potato, and millet at any one of six different stores within 10 miles of my house. I have a bag of bread mix and a spice cake mix, ready for the next time I want to bake something quickly.
Then I had brown and white rice flour, tapioca starch and corn starch but not much else for options. My gluten free baking always tasted very gritty.
Most of the companies represented on my shelf didn’t exist in 1996 and those that did were tiny companies then. They have all grown and expanded their product lines since then, providing a range of options that match almost all the categories found in regular product lines.
I know part of the recent growth in the GF product lines is due to people adopting the GF diet as a fad, but I will happily take advantage of it.
