Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mundane activity of eating with or near others became physically hazardous and normatively fraught. Nourishing oneself outside one's home could raise serious risks to one's health and wellbeing, and was suddenly subject to new policies and prohibitions aimed at minimizing harm and liability. The decision to eat out demanded personal calculations of risk and benefit, as well as interpersonal negotiation, sometimes prompting contentious conversations about the realities of disease transmission and our moral responsibilities. For many people, coming to think about eating outside the home as a pressing and significant threat to health and life was a radical shift. Yet, as Michael Gill's Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk details, the experience of eating meals as risking lethal consequences, demanding active personal risk management (including knowledge and negotiation of laws and policies), and straining important interpersonal relationships, is quite familiar to those living with food allergies. Allergic Intimacies offers a rich and generative exploration of the challenges of living with food allergies in the United States. A disability studies scholar, Gill frames the book as an examination of the "meanings" of food allergy from an intersectional perspective that centers both disability and race (ix).