Good question.

It would be easier to say what you can't eat!

But the question is, what can you eat. So let's start there.

Well, for a start, obviously you can eat meat, poultry and game. That's unprocessed meat. Avoid burgers, sausages, grillsteaks and similar items, as they almost always contain filler which is wheat based (though the highest quality may be gluten free - check the label for anything like wheat, flour, starch, and in particular monosodium glutamate).

If you like gravy, ketchup or sauce with your meat, take care. These products are almost always made with flour. Gravy granules and powders might be thickened with cornstarch, because it mixes with boiling water more quickly than wheat flour, but you do need to check, particularly with the cheaper varieties. Soy sauce (except for the gluten free variety) is also off the menu, because the soy beans are fermented with wheat.

Next on the list: fruit, raw or cooked, but without thickened sauces (custard may be ok, check the label to make sure any thickening is either corn or egg based). You can also have cream, but not if it's squirty cream containing starch to thicken it.

Vegetables are usually pretty safe. Potatoes, green vegetables and roots are almost always served without any thickening added. Again, if it's a processed product, check the label! Watch out for coatings and fillers in frozen potato products. If you use packet mash, read the label carefully, best go for the top quality brands.

Salad prepared by your own sweet hands is great. Prepared salads are also fine, so long as you don't use any dressing packed with it, unless you first check the label to make sure there is no wheat flour, unspecified starch or monosodium glutamate in it. Dressings you buy to put on your salad need to be checked as well. Good quality mayonnaise should be fine - Hellman's for example - but be careful of low fat varieties of anything, as thickener is often added to make up for the lost viscosity of the oil they removed, and this is usually based on some variant of flour.

Milk, cheese and yoghurt should be fine - but again, be careful of the low fat varieties, for the reasons already mentioned. Also, don't buy grated cheese, unless you see the deli grate it in front of you, as the pre-packaged variety is coated in - you guessed it - flour.

You can eat gluten-free bread and cakes, but these are mostly ridiculously expensive, and not very nice. A good substitute are Corn Thins from Real Foods Pty, an Australian company. They have a page on their site listing stockists around the world, including major supermarket chains. Alternatively, if you don't mind eating food that squeaks, you can eat rice cakes. Kallo do a chocolate coated rice cake that is probably very nice, but as I do object to my food squeaking, I haven't tried them.

As far as takeouts go, you can eat Indian food, but not the breads and chapatis. Poppadoms are fine, though. You need to check that they don't use any thickening in their food (apart from chickpea or lentil flour), or ask them to make you a version without.

Another takeout style that you can go for is Chinese - no noodles, apart from rice noodles (sometimes called Singapore hot noodles), and ask them to leave out the "taste powder" (monosodium glutamate). I'm afraid fortune cookies are off the menu as well, although there's nothing to stop you reading the contents and throwing the cookie away! Like I said earlier, soy sauce must be the gluten free variety, so get them to leave it out and add it yourself at home.

All drinks except for whisky, beer, and malted drinks like Ovaltine, Milo and Horlicks should be fine, but avoid the cheaper varieties of instant coffee, as flour is sometimes used as a filler.

So there you are, a pretty good selection of gluten-free foods you can eat to your heart's content.

Bon Appetit!

2006 Frann Leach