Walking down the aisles of a Safeway in Canton, Jules Shepard remembers learning to cope with a gluten-free diet after becoming pregnant with her first child. After a year of “food depression” she realized that she had to eat ? now for two.
“In Southern culture, food is the way you make people happy,” the Florida native said. “There were one or two [gluten-free] cookbooks on the market at the time, but they were all about rice flour and I don?t like rice flour.”
The Catonsville author and lawyer remembers four- to five-hour shopping trips, studying every label for potential landmines. Tuesday, she talked about substitutions, and their cost ? Hamburger Helper costs $2.49 a box, compared with gluten-free Mrs. Leepers Beef Lasagna at $3.29 a box. “Uncle Ben?s rice is pretty much out,” Shepard said. “It?s rice, but they add wheat flour.”
Most cereals use malt extract ? a wheat derivative ? as a sweetener, she said. “You have to be really up on reading every label and you have to know a lot of different names of things.”
Shepard has written a book, “Nearly Normal Cooking for Gluten-Free Eating,” and developed her own flour substitute, available in Roots Market in Clarksville.
She teaches newly diagnosed celiac patients to look out for things like malt extract, modified food starch and monosodium glutamate ? often derived from gluten-containing grains ? and almost anything labeled “creamy.”
Federal labeling rules are voluntary, she said, but many products, as well as Safeway in some instances, blaze “gluten-free” across packaging or price tags. “Two years ago, you didn?t see that,” she said.
