Room TemperatureFriday
I Haven’t Read a Label in a Store in Three Years
I pay for this one myself. It’s the app I use before anything goes in the cart.
I was online the other day and somebody was describing what grocery shopping turns into after you go gluten-free. Every label. Every aisle. Pick the box up, turn it over, squint at the back, put it down, pick up the next one. They said a twenty minute trip had become an hour and a half, and that by the time they got home they were too worn out to cook anything.
I read that and my stomach dropped a little, because I remembered it exactly.
That was me for a long time. I shopped scared. I’d be standing there holding something perfectly ordinary, reading an ingredient list full of words I couldn’t define, trying to work out if the thing I was holding was going to put me on the couch for two days. And the honest answer most of the time was that I didn’t know. I’d either buy it and hope, or put it back and go without. Neither one felt good.
So I want to talk about the thing that ended that for me, because I think somebody reading this is in the middle of it right now.
It’s an app called Fig.
I’ve been using it close to three years. I pay for it myself, out of my own pocket, and right now that’s $6.35 a month on the standard plan. There are tiers depending on what you need, and standard has always been plenty for me. Nobody is paying me to say any of this. If you download it, I don’t get a cent. I’m telling you because it works, and because I wish somebody had told me.
Here’s what it actually does.
You build a profile of what you can’t have. And I mean you really build it. The list of ingredients you can flag is enormous. It isn’t just the big allergens. It’s specific sugars, specific gums, the oddly named things you’d never expect to find on a list like that. When I worked out that I couldn’t process gums, I didn’t have to invent a workaround. I just added gums to my profile and the app has accounted for it in everything since.
Then you scan a product, and it tells you. Green, you’re fine. Yellow, slow down and look closer. Red, don’t.
It’ll also tell you when a company hasn’t published an allergen statement at all, which I didn’t know I needed until I had it. That’s the moment where you go to the brand’s website yourself and do a little digging. The app isn’t pretending to know something it doesn’t, and I trust it more for that.
From the Recipe BoxGluten-Free Honey Oat LoafSee the Recipe →
Now, I’m an introvert. Fully. I’m not the person wandering the aisles on a Saturday, and I’m very glad we live in a time where somebody else will do the walking and I can order from my couch. So I don’t usually scan anything. I just type the product name into Fig and it finds it and tells me yes or no while I’m building the cart on my phone.
If you’re the opposite, if you like being in the store, the scanner is right there the second you open the app. Point it at the barcode on the back and you have your answer before you’ve even straightened up.
The part that still surprises me is how often it catches something I’d never have thought to check. Butter. Plain butter. There are brands I can’t buy, and I would not have guessed that standing in the dairy aisle. Spices are another one. Sauces especially. Gluten and gums hide in the places you stop looking.
The photo at the top of this one is our actual cart. That’s Nash’s hand. I took it myself on a normal shop. Everything in it got checked before it went in. There’s a bottle of Yellow Bird Blue Agave Sriracha in there that I would never have tried a few years ago, and it’s gluten-free, soy-free, and has no gums in it. I only know that because I checked in about four seconds instead of standing there guessing.
That’s the whole thing. It’s not that the app does something magical. It’s that it takes the fear out, and the fear was the exhausting part.
What Fridays Are Now
This is what Room Temperature is going to be from here on. Every Friday. Recipes stay on Sundays where they belong, and Friday is for the tools we actually use behind the scenes here that make gluten-free living easier, and for anyone who is new to this and still working out where to start. An app, a website, a device, whatever it is. Things I already pay for and already rely on. If I find something new, I’ll tell you about that too.
Because here’s the thing I keep coming back to. Room Temperature is supposed to be what goes on behind the scenes at Brimly, and this is behind the scenes. This is what the kitchen runs on. Before anything gets baked, somebody had to be sure of what was going into it.
And there’s a timing thing worth saying out loud. Thanksgiving is weeks away. If you were diagnosed recently, this is probably the first holiday where you’re standing in front of a whole menu you used to make without thinking about it, and now every single component is a question. Getting something like this set up now is a small thing you can do for yourself before that lands.
When I started out, years and years ago, there was nothing like this. I worked it out the long way, product by product, mistake by mistake, and a lot of those mistakes cost me days. So if I can hand somebody a shortcut I didn’t have, I’m going to.
You’re not bad at this. It’s just genuinely hard at the start, and it gets easier, and some of what makes it easier is just knowing what exists.
One More Thing!
What’s the tool you wish somebody had told you about sooner? An app, a brand, a shop, a swap. Anything that made the first year survivable.
Write to me. I’m collecting them, and I’d like to put the good ones in front of people who are right at the beginning.
Thanks for reading, and see you next Friday.
Write to me at hello@brimly.co. Past issues are archived here.
Stephnie Grace is a recipe developer, editor, and co-founder of Brimly, specializing in gluten-free, soy-free, and gum-free baking. She writes Room Temperature, a Friday letter from behind the scenes at Brimly, for anyone who is new to gluten-free and not sure where to start.
