[conspire] CABAL (in-person + Jitsi Meet), Sat. July 10, 4pm - 12m

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> I'm thinking about bringing pasta salad.  Only I will use spaghetti
> squash instead of wheat because I like it that way and I found a
> squash at a reasonable price.  Should I read the dressing label
> carefully so its gluten free?   Never thought much about gluten in
> salad dressing before.

Thank you for thinking about, in addition to you liking that stuff,
Deirdre's non-gluten needs and using the spaghetti squash pasta.  It was
really delicious.

I honestly never really considered the problem -- if any -- of gluten 
(from wheat, rye, or barley[1]) in salad dressings.  It frankly sounds 
just a bit unlikely, though, of course, the USA is the land of 
More Different Types of Sauce Than You Can Shake a Stick at, so 
weird outlier cases are quite possible.

Our rule of thumb around Chez Moen is:  When in doubt, read the label.


[1] To continue the tedious celiac-lore litany, this includes 
by implication wheat's close kin that amount to "wheat by another name", 
such as triticale, spelt, einkorn, emmer, durum, farro, kamut, khorosan,
or triticum.  Oats are sometimes to a degree problematic, but not
because oats contain gluten (they don't), but rather because oats are
frequently grown in fields that have previously grown wheat, which then
crops (pun intended) up in the oat field and contaminates the harvested
oat crop.

The above roster of suspects _generally_ crops up because some
semi-clued foodie tries to be helpful to celiacs and find or cooks food
with blessed saintly spelt instead of evil harmful wheat -- not having
any idea that spelt is a variety of wheat.