Okay - I admit it. Despite the fact that we usually eat really healthy, sometimes we succumb to the lure of junk food. It’s always very carefully selected junk food, however, given that we have a long list of ingredients to avoid.

As a result, I generally make our own meals. With allergies, it’s the best way to ensure that your dishes aren’t contaminated with something you don’t want. Unless you ask a ton of questions and are sure that language is not a barrier (as it is at our favorite Chinese place), you just can’t be sure what’s in any given dish. In fact, we’ve just had to give up Chinese because our daughter started reacting to some unknown item in our regular order.

Given the variety and severity of allergies in my immediate family - plus my mother’s recent discovery of a serious latent egg allergy - it’s often simpler to know my substitutions and make it myself. Pizza, however, is a whole other story.

Pizza requires a level of patience that I find excessive. There’s the whole gluten free crust (don’t get me started) and then figuring out what ingredients can go on top for which person - and doing that at least 4 times to cover all four members of my family and their various eccentricities.

Despite my long-standing love affair with all foods italian (and pseudo-italian), I have shied away from pizza.

If you, like me, have been avoiding this food, here’s some good news: Uno Chicago Grill has released gluten-free pizzas across the US! So, if you are celiac, have food intolerances to wheat or are simply allergic, you can get your pizza on a crust that won’t irritate your system.

Celiac sprue affects about 1 per cent of the US population. While that doesn’t sound like much, that’s over 300,000 individuals and their families who are looking for gluten-free food in restaurants. Add to this the numbers of folks who are avoiding gluten for either allergy or other health reasons, and you have a substantial market segment just waiting to be serviced.

Uno Chicago tested the new gluten-free offerings first. Their press release indicates that they weren’t willing to settle for just providing gluten-free dishes unless those dishes would satisfy both the taste buds and the alimentary tract. Word of mouth response to the new offerings was so great that Uno Chicago soon found that its restaurants across the nation were receiving unsolicited requests to carry the new products!

You can now find both cheese and pepperoni gluten-free pizza at over 200 Uno Chicago locations.

Source: PRNewsWire.com