Quest for Certifications
Ah gluten free, one of the many trendy health diets to flood the market in recent memory. Sadly, not all of us get much of a choice when it comes to the exclusion of gluten from our diet. Celiac disease is a right cunt and while gluten free (GF) diets and foods being in vogue should help the situation it can also give gluten places to hide. This is because the meaning of GF for a health trend setter does not quite match up with the meaning for someone dealing with Celiac.
For your average health conscious by standard GF usually just equates to not sitting down at an Italian restaurant and stuffing your face full of a clams & Linguini dish. Things however take a much more militant turn for those of us with Celiac, for us
GF means, has that food item ever even so much as cast a sidewise glance at a wheat field. While the overall trend or movement of GF as a diet or lifestyle has undeniably resulted in a wider variety of food item offerings the incongruity of the definition of GF has also resulted in a number of foods being labeled and sold as GF that are unsafe for those with Celiac but pose no real risk for those without. This typically comes about in the form of cross-contamination, this occurs whenever a typically GF food item is harvested, processed, cooked, stored, or otherwise comes into contact with equipment and surfaces that also come into contact with food items containing gluten. Lentils and oats are a great example, while both are naturally GF, they are often harvested with farm equipment that is also used to collect things like wheat, barley, and rye. So yes, lentils and oats are GF and therefore “safe” for a GF diet. Not so safe for a Celiac caused/forced GF diet.
So, what is one to do when trying to navigate their day-to-day life while also trying to maintain proper nutrition when every restaurant meal and grocery item is turned into the gastronomical equivalent of Russian roulette?
Why, food certification of course! If you are looking for an independent third-party who can audit and attest to the gluten levels of food products then you are in luck because we have three different such organizations, at least here in the US.
Brand Reputation through Compliance (BRCGS)
The Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO)
Each of these organizations have their own accreditation process for manufacturers to obtain their GF certification stamp. Since these are entirely separate organizations, they each have their own standards and procedures, though there are many similarities and lots of overlap they are still unique to each organization.