I'm not blaming the victim, but would never trust my life to random restaurants and employees. There's just no way that strangers give a damn enough to risk it, even if you tell them to be careful.

At first I tended to agree with that notion - most restaurants are staffed by people who don't get paid enough to really care, and even if they did, humans are fallible.

Then I realized that even cooking at home, you're using ingredients from some random factories that are similarly staffed by people in the same boat capable of making similar mistakes.

I have no idea what the perfect solution is, as personally growing every single thing you eat(or drink) seems absurd if not impossible.

This is an argument commonly raised in favor of a whole food diet: if what you're buying is recognizable, there's less room for tampering. Buying an apple, there could be pesticide residue on the skin, but buying applesauce, goodness knows what they put in there, intentionally or otherwise. And in fact, this is advice I've encountered when buying spices (which tends to be international and a lot of middlemen): buy whole to reduce the chances of adulteration. Whole cinnamon is hard to fake; ground cinnamon could contain literally anything.

While no defense is perfect, and you'd generally like to know and trust the source of your food (and this is an important piece of the puzzle), preferring things in a visually verifiable whole format does offer a way to limit the possible or likely damage. It works in restaurants, too: you can order an unadorned steak, and might still worry about peanut oil residue from the grill, but it beats ordering stir fry and wondering what the abundant gloopy sauce is made of and if the cook even fully knows or if he gets it out of a can too.

There is no perfect solution. However, factories are much more controlled environments than restaurant kitchens, so your odds are much better. Plus, these days, they require foods to have labels for potential allergens for things like using the same facility that makes other foods with those allergens (i.e. even if the product doesn't have $allergen, if other products made there do, they warn you).

So if I had a condition like this, I'd feel much safer with factory-made foods/ingredients than with food from any restaurant.

When you have a potentially life-threatening allergy, everything involves calculations about potential risks and tradeoffs, all the way back up the supply chain to the farm.

Otherwise you're condemned to staying home with no social life, eating unprocessed basic food. And that's no way to live.

Even then, that's not risk free, either. I've had a severe peanut reaction to porridge I made from plain rolled oats, from a brand I'd been eating for years and trusted.

> Otherwise you're condemned to staying home with no social life, eating unprocessed basic food. And that's no way to live.

You can live a full life and still bring or prepare your own food without eating out. If a place bars you from bringing food, I think that's lawsuit worthy with a condition like hers.

The point is that food you're preparing yourself is only marginally safer than food at a restaurant. You still have no way of knowing if the ingredients you're using haven't been accidentally contaminated with the allergen.

No, you can't be 100% sure, but factories are much more controlled environments than restaurant kitchens.

are you suggesting that people with allergies should always cook every one of their meals?

That's quite unreasonable.

Should they have prefaced their statement of personal preference with 'I'm not making a universal normative declaration' to make it clear they weren't doing that?

If your allergies are as life threatening as they were here? I would definitely prepare my own food.

Well this just means that for you avoiding death at any cost is more important than leaving a full life.

Other people often voluntarily partake in activities that involve low-to-moderate risk of death because they enjoy them.

> Well this just means that for you avoiding death at any cost is more important than leaving a full life

Don't be hyperbolic. It means that avoiding death at the cost of preparing your own meals is more important than eating at restaurants. Restaurants aren't very important and preparing your own meals isn't very taxing, so it's not a high bar to clear.

Many people would consider food to be the greatest joy in life, and eating out at a restaurant to be a treat.

There is also the social aspect, it's one of the best opportunities to enjoy a good moment and bond over, be it with family, lovers, friends or colleagues.

Even outside of all that, the new generation of city dwellers rarely cooks at all because of their active lifestyle.

Preparing meals is about an hour a day which would be more than 50% of my free time outside of work, sleep and training. This is extremely taxing and I'd happily exchange it for a low probability of death in a restaurant.