I’ve been allergic to fruit just about as long as I can remember. Of course, I ate it anyway (for the most part) and I still do. I stay away from cherries because they’re the worst. Kiwis are pretty bad, but I like them and still eat them. But fruit, I love fruit. I eat a lot of fruit.
Apples used to bother the hell out of me. I suspended my ban long enough to be Eve in The Apple Tree. (I actually finished a lot of those apples backstage, even though I was only required to take one bite onstage near the end of the first act.) But after that, I went off apples again until very recently. The itching of the sensitive skin inside my mouth, the way my throat felt contracted, it wasn’t worth it. I never had an allergic reaction bad enough to alarm me. The discomfort would last awhile, I’d drink a lot of water, and eventually it would go away. I never went to a doctor, for instance, and definitely not the emergency room. Not a big enough deal, really.
But since we moved to Austin, I’ve been eating the occasional apple. And in the last two weeks, when I started having groceries delivered from Greenling, I’ve been eating several apples a week. The apples from Greenling are organic and they bother me surprisingly less than I’m used to being bothered by apples. Could it be I’m getting used to the fruit? Or could it be a case of pesticides, or lack thereof?
I do feel that my fruit allergies have been generally less bad since I moved to Texas. I’ve been exposed to a lot more organic food, that’s for sure. But I don’t know—the fruit here is sweeter, too. And even in Ohio, I had noticed that the sweeter the fruit (or the more sugar I added), the less my allergies complained.
To make things more interesting, I picked up a carton of blueberries from Sam’s Club last week. They were definitely not organic… and they made my allergies crazy.
None of the organic blueberries I’ve had in the last few month have done that.
What do you think of that?
