In the process of discovering food allergies and chemical sensitivities, and dealing with them, many Special Foods customers experience fear, heartache, discouragement, and financial difficulties. We know about these problems at Special Foods! We have experienced every one.

Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows fall?
Why should my heart be troubled?
When all but hope is gone?
For Jesus is my fortress. My constant friend is He.
His eye is on the Sparrow, and I know He watches me.
His eye is on the Sparrow, and I know He watches me!

These words are from an old hymn that many churches sing; they were especially comforting when times were very hard. And as I look back, I realize just how true they have been.

My gentle introduction to the problems with food allergies began about 15 years ago, when I struggled to cope with a never-ending set of problems with my first child. This child never seemed to be well! There was constant congestion, repeated ear infections, occasional bronchitis and pneumonia, susceptibility to viral infections, occasional diarrhea and constipation. But we had no clue that food allergies were a problem. Our son was treated symptomatically, and my husband and I really thought we were doing something wrong! Could it be that we didn't wash our hands enough? Took him out too much? not enough? Was it because he was born a month early? Would he outgrow it? When he was 1 year old, we had a nine-month period where he was sick with one thing or another the entire time. Still, there was no suggestion that there might be an underlying cause.

By the time this child was 5 years old, he had had 36 ear infections, and bronchitis and pneumonia frequently enough for them to become commonplace. He was also having great difficulty with other children his age, and was royally flunking kindergarten.

Our second child was by this time 3 years old, and we did not even realize how ill this child was until we checked the medical records. She had such a quiet, sweet disposition, and she was so easy to handle, that we were shocked when we checked to find that in one year alone, she had had pneumonia 7 times, bronchitis at least that many times, and ear infections even more often. Not counting episodes of severe diarrhea, nose bleeds, and itching (which she scratched till she bled). She would often go to bed at night crying, complaining of a stomach ache, but the pediatrician could find no reason why, and there was nothing I could do for her. I had to pat her on the back and tell her I loved her, but I did not know what to do to make it better. I felt so helpless.

My RUDE introduction to food allergies came when my third child was born (the other two were 5 and 3 years old). This child didn't fool around. He experienced skin rashes and severe digestive problems from birth. In his first five months he vomited over 100 full feedings, and earned the well-deserved title "choke and puke"! Do some of you other mothers know what it's like to have your child throw up INSIDE your clothes! I'm sure!! I tried desperately to nurse this child, but he would nurse briefly and then turn away, turn red in the face, writhe in pain, and scream bloody murder for two hours. I knew if I only knew what I could eat that would agree with him, I could nurse him. But I had no idea what to eat. He was acting like he was being poisoned.

Within a few weeks he was totally formula dependent, and not doing well. We frantically began switching formulas, all the while this child's health was deteriorating. Ear infections! Bronchitis! Pneumonia! Eczema! Sleepless nights! No feeding schedule! No sleeping schedule! Irritable! Colic! Restless! And fearful! Extreme terror caused by the slightest motion, touch, sound! Asthma! Vomiting! Diarrhea! And the medicines made him worse, not better. By the time he was 5 months old, we ended up in the hospital. He had a severe case of bronchiolitis, and we had gone through every single baby formula there was, and alternatives to milk such as goat's milk, and he could not tolerate even one. On simple electrolyte solution he threw up for three days!

At this time we finally got a diagnosis of severe food allergies (why did it take so long?) and the hospital planned to keep us until they had found something the baby could eat. After 8 days we were discharged, with a very ill baby and nothing to feed him. The blackness of despair and ANGER. I knew my child was not the first severely allergic baby, and certainly would not be the last. But our pediatrician and the specialists I consulted could only say – "There is food out there somewhere your child can eat, and we know you'll find it!"

Until this third child was born, I had held top level positions in major environmental consulting firms. One month after the birth of my third child I left my last such position (Vice-President in charge of Environmental Science and Technology), to start my own firm. I managed to cope with an emerging business and the emerging illness of my baby until we left the hospital.

The day we left the hospital, coping with food allergies became my full time occupation. It did not take much to realize that a baby who suffers an asthma attack every time he eats, who gets pneumonia about every three weeks and an ear infection in between, who does not respond well to antibiotics, and who gets asthma attacks from medications, is not going to last too long.

I began trying new foods, one at a time. The baby reacted to them all. I exhausted the foods in the grocery store, and found one thing he could eat - sweet potatoes. He could tolerate no common meat at all. In desperation, we made arrangements with the local fire department, and my husband and a group of firemen traveled to a deserted island off the coast of Virginia, where they shot a wild bull! They field dressed it, transported it across 8 miles of open water, and finally brought it back to us to try. Sadly, not even the purest meat possible was non-allergenic to us.

When we tried venison, it worked! And we finally had the beginnings of a diet. I was able to add sunflower oil, and from those foods and papaya (which we soon had to eliminate) I was able to develop a reasonably well balanced diet. The transformation was DRAMATIC!!! I always knew there was a wonderful child in there somewhere, and the right diet finally let him out! He became essentially symptom-free, and began a calm, almost businesslike exploration of his world that was simply wonderful to watch.

But as the days went by, this child, now eight months old, slowly began to turn yellow and then bright orange! We battled vitamin A toxicity for the next several months. I would go to the market, and spend literally hours 'pinching' sweet potatoes looking for the one in twenty that was lighter in color. I called everywhere to try to find white ones, but the season was wrong.

In desperation I began looking for more foods in the only place left, local ethnic markets. What a hilarious situation! Nobody could speak much English, and I could not speak Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and more. Still worse, I learned that the shop keepers did not know what much of their merchandise was, and knew even less about what to do with it!! So I walked up and down the aisles looking for something strange.

It was not too hard to find frozen, boiled poi, and the baby tolerated it! Everything went along well for about a month. One day when I went to get my poi it was all gone. The unconcerned shopkeeper said it had not come in and maybe she would order it again in two weeks! What was my baby to eat in the meantime? We were not able to find poi again in our area. It was back to orange sweet potatoes and more ethnic shopping in a hurry.

When I would find some new food, I would get the name in whatever language, go to the library, translate the name to English, key it out in taxonomic guides, and determine whether the new food was closely related to something I had already tried. If it was new and looked promising, I would return to the shop to talk with other customers so I could gather ideas about ways to cook the new food.

One day I walked into a Spanish market and saw several fresh roots, one was camote or boniato, and had creamy white flesh. In the library I learned it was a sweet potato! Great!! But it surely did not look like a sweet potato. It was huge! Shaped like an overgrown, slightly flattened turnip, and deep purple on the outside. When I tried to peel it, it was hard as a rock! I had no idea what to do with it.

Do I cook it first? How do I peel it? If I do not peel it what about mold? It is so hard, maybe one is not supposed to peel it! So while I was trying to decide what on earth to do with it, it sat on my counter till it rotted. I got back in the car, traveled the one-hour round trip, and bought a second one. It sat on the counter till it rotted too! I went back a third time, and it sat till it rotted too!! (Haven't we all been here at one time or another - knowing we have to do something, but not knowing what?) Finally when I came back with the fourth camote, I knew I had to do something. I plopped the whole thing, root and all into the top of a steamer and let it cook forever. Finally when the whole thing was tender, I took it out and tasted it. It actually tasted a lot like a regular sweet potato, and so I had a better idea about what to do with it. I took a hammer to the next one so I could cut it up in pieces and peel it before cooking.
Again all went well for about a month when it became clear that you can not feed children on boiled roots alone without a major revolt! The kids were so sick of boiled, baked, fried sweet potatoes that they lost interest in eating and began to lose weight. There had to be more variety.

So I began thinking about making flour. What a discouraging prospect! All the books said that if you could make a flour, without gluten you could not get the dough to hold a rise, and so good baked products were not possible.

I tried making orange sweet potato flour first. I got a dark flour that looked and tasted like burned bricks. I tried to make a simple pancake anyway. What a mess! As the 'pancake' cooked, it fell apart just like regular orange cooked sweet potatoes, and it tasted simply awful.

I decided that white sweet potatoes could only be better, and this time I managed to produce a nice white flour. When I tried to make a simple pancake, the results were much more promising. It did not take too much longer to make a decent pancake, and the children were delighted.

The bread was a different story! The first tries were resounding failures! Horse shoe bread - tall on the sides and nothing in the middle. But each try only made me more determined, and I used what I learned from each batch to improve as I went. More than a year and well over 250 tries later, I finally produced a fairly decent loaf that could conceivably be called bread.

Times were extremely difficult in the beginning. "When you leave the hospital facing the unknown with a very ill child, it's like being in a room in total blackness where there are terrible pits and traps that you can not see, and you have to find the way out with nothing to guide you!" I had no idea what I would do, but I was absolutely certain in my heart that we would find some foods for my baby. When the baby turned bright orange, I knew there was an answer somewhere. When I was trying to make the first bread, even after 50 and 100 and 200 tries, for some reason there never was the thought that it might not work!

And through it all, the more I worked, the greater the peace that came over my heart. A sweet, gentle, reassuring peace, that let me know that what I was doing was what I was supposed to be doing, not only for myself and my family, but for others too.

As I look back over my adult life, I realize that there has been a gently guiding hand in my life that prepared me for this work. From the difficult and trying times, I have discovered skills and talents I never knew I had; I have discovered a way of service that I never would have dreamed of, and I have found a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction I never thought was possible.

And so I come back to the point where I started, and I understand the meaning of these words more now than ever:

His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me!
For those of you who are still going through your "trial by fire".
Please be encouraged. There will be better days -
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches you!