it's all gravy

I poisoned my friend last night. Actually, we all ate the same thing, and it was very good. Even the poisoned victim enjoyed it. At first. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, there’s nothing wrong with wheat. Even Jesus ate wheat. A lot. So what’s the big deal? Well, obviously there must be something beyond umbrella morality that dictates what we can and can’t do. I don’t know, maybe the morality has to do with what is permissible, and the beyond part has to do with what is beneficial.
I’m terribly allergic to poison ivy. I’ve reacted so badly before that my eyes were swollen closed, and my fingers unusable. There is lots of poison ivy to manage around our house. Our neighbors have English Ivy between our houses and it was being infiltrated with poison ivy. Of course I can’t do anything about it, so I just tried to avoid it. Then one day the neighbor comes out there and spends the afternoon in the ivy pulling out all the poison. No problem. If I’d have even thought of doing that, I’d have been bedridden.
Sometimes the intolerance is only caused by a bad experience or with the questionable substance being associated with a bad experience. Once as a kid I got sick after eating thin mint girl scout cookies. To this day, I can’t even stand the smell of those little devil baits.
Sometimes things that are wrong for you become less wrong as you mature or grow older. I have definitely become more tolerant of poison ivy as I’ve gotten older. Sometimes, as you mature, you cease to have a problem at all, though you once were completely incapacitated by the same thing. My son Will spent the first years of his life unable to eat anything with maltose in it. Easy right? How often do you eat maltose? In just about everything, actually. It is used as a sweetener and is in every loaf of bread, save one. As Will has grown, he seems to have very little problem with maltose anymore.
By the same token, sometimes as we mature, we develop intolerance to things that never bothered us before. Perhaps our bodies have felt the build up of seemingly insignificant unhealthiness and now simply have to avoid it. Perhaps we just witness abuse of harmless substances and witness the destroying effects of the behavior and choose to refrain.
I’ve met people who could die if they ate mints out of the same bowl that had previously held peanuts. Others can suffocate in less than a minute from eating a strawberry. Most of us have no struggle with peanuts, strawberries, wheat, or corn syrup. But for those who do, it may as well be strychnine or heroine.
Most of us realize this about one another though. Those of us who have no problem with peanuts don’t think less of someone who does. Probably we would help our friend to avoid eating something dangerous for them rather than trying to talk them into enjoying it with us. Surely we don’t consider ourselves superior because we have no problem with maltose, do we? Surely people don’t think less of us for having given some things up, or developed intolerance to things we once enjoyed. It’s hard enough to avoid the hidden poisons in the otherwise harmless stuff, without being pressured by our un-understanding friends to grow up and stop being bothered by non-sense.