Allergies and Food Fears
Complicate Dinner Parties

Rozanne Gold thought she had the perfect menu for her recent dinner party. Her guests thought otherwise.

One was allergic to the pistachios on the pesto-smeared salmon. Another balked at the paprika on the Moroccan carrots, while a third pushed away the mesclun salad with pancetta. Still another wouldn't touch the wine cake because it had alcohol. Then, the crowning blow: a dieter who skipped all the food -- and drank only Champagne.

By dinner's end, Ms. Gold was reeling. "Do we need new friends?" she quipped to her husband.

The latest casualty of America's growing obsession with health may be the dinner party. Thanks to growing concerns about everything from food allergies to mad-cow disease, many hosts are finding they can't keep up with guests' individual demands. On the suspect list: milk, garlic, unpasteurized cheese and even, as one host discovered, Italian pasta -- because it was "produced too close to Chernobyl." Indeed, those who cater private parties say special requests, once rare, are now a routine part of almost every event.

Blame it on a groundswell of finicky eaters. One in three Americans say they suffer from food allergies, a condition seldom discussed a few decades ago, according to the National Institutes of Health. One in five say they are lactose intolerant. Making things more confusing: One guest's food is another's poison. The number of vegetarians in the U.S. has doubled during the past five years, while many others are on diets that have them eating nonstop meat. And just when America's three million sufferers of peanut allergies persuaded United and other airlines to stop serving them, another group wants nothing but the nuts. (Coming to bookstores soon: "The Peanut Butter Diet.")

The upshot: a lot of alarmed and discouraged dinner hosts. "If you're that picky," says David Kargas, a Minneapolis executive who recently watched his guests turn up their noses at the cheese and olives he served, "you should just eat at home."

But they aren't. In fact, the $5 billion catering business has enjoyed a 20% increase in sales since 1996, in part because dinner hosts have had to turn to the pros to satisfy so many fussy guests. Picky eaters are also giving a boost to food producers and specialty stores: In six years, for example, sales of Lactaid brand products have nearly doubled, to $219 million, says market researcher Information Resources Inc.

But for many hosts, it's not the cost of having to buy specialty foods for guests; it's the frustration. Tina Smith recently opened her Boston-area home to some 40 parents of her son's classmates, offering up three pasta dishes and three salads, enough -- she thought -- to please everyone. So she was left speechless when one health-conscious guest made a scene, demanding to know "every single ingredient in every single dish."

Of course, for some guests, those ingredients can pose serious health problems. About 2% of Americans have major, even life-threatening food allergies, and the number of allergy sufferers has doubled in the past 50 years, according to the NIH.

Take Katie Workman, a 33-year-old New Yorker who is severely allergic to nuts, poppy seeds and buckwheat. At dinner parties, she usually tries to ask discreetly what's in the food. When one recent hostess didn't know, Ms. Workman was left eating only the ruffled edges of her ravioli. (She ran home afterward to devour a bag of popcorn.)

Faking It

On the other hand, for every person with a documented food allergy, many more may just be imagining things: Dr. Dean Metcalfe, who runs the allergic-diseases lab at the NIH, says his research suggests that one-third of Americans simply think they suffer from allergies.

That doesn't surprise Paul O'Connell, chef and owner of Chez Henri in Cambridge, Mass., who has seen diners claim allergies to mustard, wheat and even garlic. His pet peeve: guests who insist they are lactose intolerant -- and then wolf down ice cream for dessert. "People just figure that the quickest way to get a food substitution is to claim they're allergic to it," he says.

So what's gotten into dinner guests? Some point to the Great Restaurant Boom of the '90s. Americans ate out more than four times a week in 2000 -- up 11% from a decade earlier -- and became more used to having their every culinary whim satisfied. "I think this carries right over when they go to dinner in private homes," says Barbara Caplan, who studies dining trends at market researcher Yankelovich Partners.

Indeed, guests are making some pretty odd demands. Mickey Bakst says that at private parties he handles, as many as one in five guests asks for an adjustment to the menu. At one party just this month, he received a slew of unsolicited orders: chicken-only, vegetarian, vegan, and vegetables cooked, not raw. Plus one he'd never heard before: Two diners said they eat only fish they catch themselves. "Now what am I supposed to do," says Mr. Bakst, general manager of Tribute restaurant in Farmington Hills, Mich. "Put a fishing rod next to their forks?"

Offended by Eggplant

Not everyone, of course, approves of such behavior. The Emily Post Institute, set up by the late etiquette doyenne, actually took a poll on the issue and discovered yet another topic on which Americans are split down the middle: 50% of respondents expected hosts to cater to every special dietary request; 50% said it was rude even to ask, unless there's a serious allergy involved.

Some hosts, like Andrew Freeman, are laying down the law. The San Francisco executive used to spend extra hours in the kitchen making special meals for his pal, a strict vegetarian. Finally, he balked. "I called him up and told him that if he wanted to attend, he'd better bring his own meal." His friend took him up on it, bringing couscous-stuffed eggplant. Unfortunately, other guests chose that over Mr. Freeman's own lasagna and baked ziti. "Frankly, I was a little offended," he says.

But others keep taking requests. After Ms. Gold's party was hit by allergies and other food issues, she headed back to her kitchen and pulled some leftover chicken out of the fridge. Still, the New York cookbook author says she has learned to add a new line to her dinner invitations: "I say, 'Hello, would you like to come to dinner -- and what are you eating these days?' "

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