Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk by Michael Gill (review)

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• Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk by Michael Gill
• Megan A. Dean (bio)

Review of Michael Gill, Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk (Fordham University Press, 2023)

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mundane activity of eating with or near others became physically hazardous and normatively fraught. Nourishing oneself outside one's home could raise serious risks to one's health and wellbeing, and was suddenly subject to new policies and prohibitions aimed at minimizing harm and liability. The decision to eat out demanded personal calculations of risk and benefit, as well as interpersonal negotiation, sometimes prompting contentious conversations about the realities of disease transmission and our moral responsibilities. For many people, coming to think about eating outside the home as a pressing and significant threat to health and life was a radical shift. Yet, as Michael Gill's Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk details, the experience of eating meals as risking lethal consequences, demanding active personal risk management (including knowledge and negotiation of laws and policies), and straining important interpersonal relationships, is quite familiar to those living with food allergies.

Allergic Intimacies offers a rich and generative exploration of the challenges of living with food allergies in the United States. A disability studies scholar, Gill frames the book as an examination of the "meanings" of food allergy from an intersectional perspective that centers both disability and race (ix). The book analyses various cultural representations of and narratives about food allergy, and traces the health effects of social and institutional structures, policies, and practices, while interweaving these findings with Gill's personal experiences with nut allergies. The focus throughout is on IgE-mediated food allergies, the sort which can cause anaphylaxis and which are exemplified by peanut allergies. The book's central claim is that common individualistic approaches to food allergy—approaches that emphasize personal and familial responsibility for allergy management—are inadequate, failing to address the systemic and structural issues that significantly disadvantage food-allergic people in marginalized groups in the U.S., especially Black people. These structural [End Page 421] issues include barriers to accessing not only food and medicine, but also the social and economic resources necessary to advocate for food allergy needs.

The book contains a preface, introduction, and brief conclusion, along with four main chapters. The introduction presents a medical and epidemiological overview of food allergies, including various hypotheses about the apparent increase in the prevalence of food allergy in recent decades. It also discusses four "scenarios" to motivate the need to move beyond an individualistic, "single-axis" (i.e., non-intersectional) analysis of food allergy: access to epinephrine injectors (8-14), food industry allergen labelling practices (14-16), airline food allergen policies (16-18), and the treatment of food allergies on The Great British Bake Off (18-23). The first chapter, "Relational Food Allergy, Immunity, and Environments," explores responsibilities toward those who have food allergies and other dietary constraints, discussing themes of risk management, identity, and the ethics and politics of allergen-free spaces, including shared meals, schools, and airplanes. The second chapter, "Nut-Free Squirrels and Princesses with Peanut Allergies: Food Allergies, Identity, and Children's Books," offers a critical analysis of children's books about food allergies, suggesting that most English-language books center white boys with peanut allergies whose experiences reflect significant economic and social privilege. These children's books largely ignore challenges experienced by many marginalized families, such as the need to fight to have food allergies recognized and accommodated by schools, pushback from community members resistant to making such accommodations, and difficulty accessing allergen-free foods. The third chapter, "Allergic Reactions through Fluid Exchanges," raises questions about the ethics of kissing and sex for food-allergic people. Because allergens can be passed through bodily fluids, food allergies complicate what counts as "safe" intimate physical contact (57-58). Gill draws upon Mia Mingus' concept of "access intimacy" (2011) to argue for an ethics of interdependence that centers communication and consent while making space for pleasure and spontaneity. The final chapter, "You Ate What? Intentionality, Accidents, and Death," explores discourses of risk, responsibility, and blame in relation to those who intentionally...