Fast food, although not the healthiest choice of dinner, can be extremely convenient. You don’t have to cook anything yourself, and you don’t have to do any dishes later on. If you have a child who has severe food allergies, things become a bit more difficult. How can you be certain that the items on the menu will be safe for your child to eat? This is where the Allergy Caddy app can be useful.
The more children that are in a family, the more busy that family will be. This is especially true if your kids all have after school activities that they must attend. It may be impossible to find the time to have everyone sit down together, for a home cooked dinner on those nights. This is the perfect time to dash to the drive in of fast food place.
The speed and convenience that a fast food place can offer can be quickly diminished if you have to take a lot of time to sort through the menu. If your child has food allergies, then you have to be extremely careful about the ingredients in everything that he or she eats. Fortunately, there is an app that can help with that.
The Allergy Caddy app is $1.99 on iTunes and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It has information on the ten biggest allergies and sensitivities: peanut, milk, egg, wheat, soy, gluten, fish, shellfish, tree nuts and MSG. This app has little switches that you can turn on and off for each separate allergy, depending on what you are specifically seeking to avoid.
Next, you need to select which restaurant you are planning on eating at. It has menu information for more than 30 restaurants including some nationwide chains like: Arby’s, Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, Chipotle, Dairy Queen, Denny’s, KFC, Long John Silvers, McDonald’s, Panda Express, Papa John’s, Quiznos, Red Lobster, Subway, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s, and more.
The app will bring up a list of the entire menu at these restaurants. If the item is highlighted in red or yellow, it means that the food contains one or more of the allergens that your allergic child needs to avoid eating. Menu items that do not contain any of the allergens that you selected are left unmarked. This make it much easier to quickly locate food that will be safe for your child to eat, without having to rely on a written menu, or the assumptions of a potentially untrained worker.
Obviously, parents should still use their best judgement, and not just blindly follow information that is in this, or any other, app. If it seems odd to you that a certain food is listed as not having an allergen that you highly suspect it should have, then don’t take that risk. When it comes to food allergies, it is much better to play it extra safe, than to be really sorry later on.
Image by Martin L on Flickr