Allergies bring on a rash of restrictions
Pandemic, tariffs from Trump presidency still plague the industry even in new year
DearAmy: I currently am wrestling with several serious food allergies.
Lab bloodwork has just revealed an autoimmune disorder. I am scheduled to see a rheumatologist in two months.
My body is thrown into a vicious cycle for weeks after consuming foods that trigger allergies.
What should I do when I get together with friends or family for dinners and they try to make special food for me? I don’t want to risk even trying this food because of past experiences with bad reactions.
Recently, a host assured me that all of the ingredients were safe for me, only to learn later that they’d buttered the pan with margarine, which set off my allergies.
They don’t understand how I have to pay for eating even a trace of that for the next three weeks, but they feel bad because I can’t eat what they eat, and they love food so much that they want to share it with me.
What I prefer to do is bring my own food, but of course people are either very offended or feel so sorry for me that they will try to make something just for me.
What can I say to people who insist I try their food because they made it just for me? I’m tired of being sick and tired of offending people.
— Sick and Tired
DearSick andTired: It is hard to imagine a person with an undefined autoimmune disorder gathering with others for dinner parties during a pandemic, but, in the absence of that concern, you need only know this: You are responsible for your health and well-being. Don’t leave something so important to someone else.
Your question is full of anticipation and speculation regarding how others will (or might) respond to your self-advocacy. Don’t concentrate so much on how others might pressure you.
The answer is that you must bring your own food to gatherings involving food, because you can only safely eat something that you have prepared. Communicate with the host beforehand: “I am on an extremely restricted medical diet because of my allergies, so I need to bring my own food. Will that bother you? I really don’t want to impose, but until I get my diagnosis sorted out, it is vital that I only eat food I’ve prepared myself.”
If you feel pressured, respond, “Sorry, no. I know this is a bummer, and I appreciate your efforts, but I have to be very strict about this.” If your friends and family don’t or won’t adjust to your needs, then yes, you will have to avoid situations where you can’t safely resist this pressure.
DearAmy: “Conflicted” wrote to you, describing herself as an adopted woman who is hesitant to share news of her birth family connection with her sister. You are right. Birth family relationships affect everyone in the family.
Both of our children are adopted, fully open with three of their four birth families. Knowing their individual birth families has been a tremendous benefit to both children.
Each birth family seems like another in-law relationship. Everyone loves a common child, so we have come to love one another.
We have a “family orchard” instead of a family tree: one tree each for my husband’s family, my family, and each of their birth parents’ extended family.
Our kids are the roots, intertwined with their birth families, us and each other.
— Fully Open Adoptive Mom
DearFully Open: A “family orchard” also describes my own family — and many others.
Thank you for the beautiful imagery. It’s the perfect way to picture the experience of being in a loving, complex, modern family.
DearAmy: “Afraid Grandma” was frantically worried about her grandchildren corresponding with pen pals, thinking that they might be endangered.
Surely, she is old enough to remember when every year most people received a big directory of everybody’s name, phone number and address? Also known as: the phone book?!
— I Remember
DearI Remember: Touche! I think it is wise to be careful about any correspondence — physical or virtual — but these children had parents close at hand, so Grandma needs to let them parent their children.
It’s a new year, and there’s a new administration in Washington, but the American wine industry remains tangled in the same set of thorny problems: COVID-19, government tariffs and climate change.
The most immediately challenging, of course, is the unrelenting pandemic, which has crushed restaurants and other elements of the hospitality industry that are a crucial part of the sales and promotion system for wine. More than a few wineries also rely on their own tasting rooms and restaurants for sales and for building long-term customer bases.
Many of those producers were at least able to pivot to direct-to-consumer and e-commerce operations. They developed relationships through Zoom tastings, and converted their public spaces into headquarters for shipping bottles to distant shoppers.
A recent analysis of direct-to-consumer shipping by wineries found a 27% increase by volume in 2020 over 2019, not surprisingly the largest annual jump by far over the past decade, as locked-down consumers turned to online shopping.
Like the rest of the country, the wine industry must await the mass vaccination of the population before it can return to some semblance of normality.
What will that new world look like? It’s hard to say with any degree of certainty. The failure of governments at all levels to offer sufficient support to restaurants and their employees, while rightly demanding they operate at a fraction of capacity or close entirely, means that the hospitality industry will require years to recover.
Though the pandemic is the greatest obstacle for restaurants and the wine industry, it is far from the only one.
When the coronavirus shutdowns began last March, wine importers, distributors, retailers and restaurants were already reeling from the punitive tariffs the Trump administration imposed the previous October on many European foods and beverages. As a parting gesture, the administration ordered additional tariffs, which took effect Jan. 12, just before Inauguration Day.
The tariffs were part of an American retaliation against the European Union over subsidies the union gives to the European aerospace company Airbus. In 2019, the World Trade Organization ruled that the company had violated global trade rules.
In response, the United States placed a 25% tariff on wines below 14% alcohol from France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, along with various European whiskeys, cheeses, olive oils and other foods. The additional tariffs that took effect in January include wines from France and Germany above 14% alcohol, and other beverages. Sparkling wines have so far been excluded.
The Trump administration has never explained why it targeted wine and food in a dispute over aviation equipment. Indeed, while aircraft parts were also subject to tariffs, they were taxed at a far lower rate, 10-15%, than the 25% on food and drink.
Economists may argue over the efficacy of using tariffs as a tool in international trade, but these particular tariffs have caused more harm to small American businesses than they have to the countries they were intended to penalize.
According to the U.S. Wine Trade Alliance, an organization representing the wine trade, American imports of wines from the four countries affected by the tariffs over the first five months of 2020 dropped by nearly 54% compared with the first five months of 2019.
Data compiled by Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates, a wine industry analyst, demonstrated that for every dollar’s worth of wine not imported because of the tariffs, consumers spent $4.52 less at U.S. distributors, retailers and restaurants.
It’s difficult to calculate the precise effect of the pandemic on these figures. Many European wine producers hit by the tariffs simply found other markets for their products, said Ben Aneff, managing partner of Tribeca Wine Merchants in New York and president of the trade alliance.
In an additional move that seems thoughtless at best and spiteful at worst, the Trump administration did not exclude goods in either round of tariffs that had already been purchased by American businesses months and, for some, years in advance and were in transit to the United States. That required those businesses to pay the entire duty when the goods passed through customs, with no effect on the foreign businesses the tariffs were supposedly meant to penalize.
“They could have chosen not to punish U.S. businesses for past purchases, and they chose not to,” Aneff said.
“It’s like designing a medicine with all of the side effects and none of the cures.”
The Biden administration has not taken a position on the tariffs.
It has nominated Katherine Tai as the next United States Trade Representative, who is required to review tariffs every six months, with the next review scheduled for this month. It’s not clear whether Tai will be confirmed by the Senate in time, or whether a decision will have to wait until the next review in August.
Biden could lift the tariffs with an executive order, as chefs Kwame Onwuachi and Alice Waters recently urged in an opinion column in The Washington Post. It would be unusual for a president to step in like that, particularly given the other current priorities, but for restaurants in particular, the need is desperate.
“The tariffs do significantly more damage to small U.S. businesses at their most vulnerable points, and, particularly for restaurants, this is their most difficult time,” Aneff said. “That seems really wrongheaded. These are businesses that are struggling as much as any in the U.S. They need to be supported.”
The Trump trade policies likewise walloped
U.S. agricultural companies, which lost markets in China and Europe. President Donald Trump paid billions of dollars in subsidies, much of it to big agricultural companies, but no such payments were offered to the restaurant and wine industry.
Trade disputes unrelated to the European Union also cost the U.S. wine industry much of its market in China, which placed retaliatory tariffs on American wines sold there.
“It’s really had a significant effect on our exports in a market that was growing fast,” said Charles Jefferson, a vice president of public policy at Wine Institute, an advocacy group for California wine producers.
He said exports to China dropped 33.9% in 2019, and another 40.8% in 2020.
“We’ve opposed all these tariffs,” Jefferson said. “Wine should not be used as leverage in unrelated disputes.”