Haru
Living with a peanut allergy (anaphylaxis) / software engineer
I am in my thirties, and I have had a peanut allergy since early childhood. AllergySearch is the site I wanted to exist, so I am building it.
I am not a medical professional
I am not a doctor and not a dietitian. What I write here comes from living with this and from reading the primary material that regulators and restaurant companies publish. Whether something is safe for you to eat is a decision to make with your own doctor.
Why this site exists
Once peanut is in an oil or a sauce, you cannot tell by looking, tasting or texture. There is no moment where you notice in time.
Every reaction I have had came down to information that did not reach me. A school lunch — mapo tofu, where the peanut was in the seasoning. Tantanmen at a restaurant. A company cafeteria that was supposed to have this covered, where the listing had a gap.
And when I go looking for the information myself, the cost simply moves somewhere else.
You get stuck before you can even start. There is usually no way to find out online whether a restaurant discloses anything at all. Confirming means phoning, which does not always connect and is not free.
Even when the document exists, you cannot read it. The allergen tables I find are PDFs, and on a phone they are close to unusable: you cannot fit the dish name and the header row on screen at the same time, so you lose track of which column is which allergen. I have been handed printouts running to several pages in a restaurant, and been worn out before reaching the end.
Asking in person costs time and comfort. If staff check before you order, everyone at the table waits while they do. If the format is to choose first and ask after, being told no lands harder. I have been seated, served tea, told the restaurant could not accommodate me, and left. I have sat through work dinners ordering only a drink.
So sometimes you do not ask. Because it is a hassle, or because you do not want to impose, or because you tell yourself it is Japanese food so it is probably fine. That is when it happens.
Cross the border and the words change. Travelling abroad, I could not work out where "nut allergy" ended and "peanut allergy" began. A peanut is a legume, not a tree nut — but which items a country groups together is decided by that country's labelling rules, and they do not agree.
That last one matters if you are visiting Japan. Japan's mandatory list, the Codex list, and the US and EU lists cover different items and draw the boundaries differently, so a phrase that keeps you safe at home may not map onto what a Japanese menu is telling you.
What I am aiming at
That before you go, or before you order, the information a person with a peanut allergy needs is simply there. Findable online, or behind a QR code at the door. Most of what is written above stops happening if that is true.
AllergySearch is a first step toward it: what restaurant companies already publish about themselves, collected and made searchable dish by dish. This site does not test anything itself. What you see is the content of each company's own material, always with the source and the date we checked it.
Please tell me when something is wrong
If the information here is wrong, someone gets sick. If you spot an error, we take the listing down first and work out the details afterwards — so please do not hesitate.