Wednesday, after a long day of drenching rain, twenty determined guests from as far away as Slidell and St. Francisville drove through the continuing drizzle to the Denham Springs home of Medina, Rick and Melissa Binns for a pot-luck picnic.
There was no dance music and no one wanted to swim in the rain, so what was the big draw? The food. It was all about the food -- gluten-free food -- eating it, sharing recipes and talking about it with a sympathetic crowd of fellow Celiacs and their families.
Melissa Binns, 21, the daughter of the house, is a Celiac, one of those people whose body has a powerfully negative reaction to any food containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, barley and oats. Once it's diagnosed, a tricky proposition that takes an average of 11 years of being misdiagnosed, Celiac Disease (CD) can be completely arrested with a gluten-free diet, and therein lies the problem. Gluten is everywhere.
"When I finally found out what my problem was, I thought my life was over," Melissa said. "I went into denial and said, 'I don't want to eat this crap, I don't care.' But I got deathly ill, my hair fell out, I was depressed, I could only stay up for three to four hours, so I gave up."
Melissa went to a meeting of Celiacs of Baton Rouge where she met others with CD and learned how to cope.
"Melissa was scared to death when she got here," said Mary Mack-Jeansonne, who founded the organization in 1996 and acts as an unpaid consultant to other Celiacs.
With the advice of Mack and others, Medina, Melissa's mother, created a gluten-free kitchen. All three Binnses now eat gluten-free food, a healthy diet for anyone.
"I wanted Melissa to feel comfortable, so I came up with new ways to cook things. I'll stack my cooking up against anyone's," Medina said. "Look at her, so slim and strong and beautiful. She used to have this bloated belly like a starving Ethiopian child and I'd tell her to stand up straight and suck in her stomach."
Medina wasn't the only one to guess wrong about Melissa's symptoms. She began showing them when she was about 11 years old and went to doctor after doctor with no results. By the time she was a sophomore at SLU she become so symptomatic and exhausted that she had to withdraw from all her classes last spring.
" My high school years were horrible," Melissa said. You get depressed when you don't feel good and everyone keeps telling you it's in your head. I felt like crap all the time, so I didn't get involved. I had like a pregnant belly, 40 extra pounds of toxins.
"I was throwing up three to four times a day and I was tired all the time," Melissa said. "They said I was anorexic, I had bulimia, or I was stressed from being a type-A personality and a 4.0 student, and that I had ADHD. I even had my gall bladder taken out. Last year they finally did the scope (endoscopy) and a couple of blood tests, then they did biopsies (of the small intestines) and they showed the flattened villi ("fingers" through which nutrients are absorbed) that Celiac Disease causes.
" I went on the diet and in about a month I was fine. There are some things that might be wrong, like I have to take calcium for osteoporosis and I might have fertility problems and I have increased chance for some other things, but not very much. And there's a 10 percent chance of passing it on to my children. "
The diet is restrictive, but much better than the symptoms. Cooking your own food, with a careful eye on the ingredients on processed foods can provide a healthy and varied diet. Mack gets a grocery list every year and passes it along to other Celiacs. Heinz condiments are on the list because they don't use malt vinegar or fillers with gluten in their ketchup, mustard and pickle products. Hellmann's mayonnaise is also recommended, Mack said. Celiacs have to read labels very carefully and sometimes even have to call the manufacturers to be sure, she added.
Eating out is even more complicated.
"The first thing I say when I walk into a new restaurant is, 'Where is the kitchen,' Mack said. "The better the restaurant, the more willing the chef is to talk to you. You don't just have to know the ingredients, you have to worry about cross-contamination if the food is prepared with other foods with gluten in them."
In Chinese restaurants you should stay away from soy sauce and MSG, Mack added. Mexican restaurants are good because so much is made with corn flour, and Greek and Lebanese is good because the food is cooked on skewers, away from other foods. Salads are good, but most salad dressings are thickened with flours, so Mack asks for olive oil, lemon and wine vinegar.
When it comes to fast foods, McDonald's is the only fast-food place that has a designated fryer that just cooks fries, Mack said. Of course, you can't eat the buns anywhere and you can only eat Wendy's chili.
When eating at a friend's home, Celiacs must always ask how the food was prepared. That habit is so ingrained, Mack said, that everyone did it at the first Celiacs of Baton Rouge meeting, where gluten-free food was served, as it was at the Binns' picnic and at many events throughout the year.
"It's so nice to be able to relax and eat somebody else's cooking," one of the picnic guests said.
"And not have to worry and question the waiter," another added.
And that, of course, is why they drove through the rain to sit outside on the Binns' covered patio and watch the raindrops fall in the swimming pool.
