A Post With Updates About Gluten Free Oreos and My Strawberry-Rhubarb Vegan Frozen Dessert

I assumed the Gluten Free Oreos I used in my Cookies & Cream Vegan Frozen Dessert made Tony sick because of the explanation I gave in that linked post: the oat flour used in the cookies was produced from at least one of the specific oat varieties that are problematic for people with celiac disease (PWCD). And that actually may have been the case. But I wanted to raise another possibility I just became aware of: Nabisco isn’t disclosing how it ensures its ingredients for the cookies are GF, and two gluten-free watchdogs, including Gluten Free Watchdog, are advising PWCD to be cautious about consuming this product because they’re not convinced every package will be GF.

Here is Gluten Free Watchdog’s statement on the cookies. And here is a post from Gluten Dude about Nabisco’s lack of transparency. (I think it’s a trustworthy article even though, I feel I need to point out, because it’s so highly visible, Gluten Dude’s first, declarative sentence has a question mark at the end. I appreciate the dude’s healthy skepticism when it comes to matters that involve my husband’s—and other PWCD’s—health.)

I also want to note that in the post linked to in my first sentence above, I neglected to mention a second way oats can become certified as GF. I had written that a certain, small percentage of oats are purposefully kept separate from wheat so they don’t get contaminated with that grain. But some (probably most) certified GF oats are produced by removing other grains from the oats until the resulting product has a small enough percentage of those contaminants to be considered GF. (Gluten Dude’s post does a good job of showing with individual grains of oat, wheat, and barley how that process works.) Understandably, PWCD are more comfortable consuming oats that were never tainted with wheat or barley.

In my earlier post, I also ignored the possibility that two or more of those three grains may be grown and harvested together and so are commingled right on the farm that produced them.

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I was able to buy fresh rhubarb at Sprouts the other day, so I made my Strawberry-Rhubarb Vegan Frozen Dessert again. And this time, I made a double batch.

I also discovered Sprouts sells 12-ounce bags of both frozen rhubarb and frozen strawberries. Those are exactly the amounts I need to produce a double batch, so I’ll no doubt be making that VFD using frozen fruit before too long.

This post was cross-posted from BillHawley.net.