Add or Edit a Food Ingredient/Additive Danny's Story Additives Safety Biotechnology Product Labeling Kosher Certification   Danny's Story -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   How I came to write the book: The book has taken a little over 10 years to write Our family is Jewish and each week we celebrate our Sabbath ("Shabbat") beginning at sundown on Friday and ending at sundown on Saturday.  Each Friday evening, our family enjoys a carefully prepared Shabbat meal to which we frequently invite guests. One Friday evening we invited our neighbors, the Rileys.  They have two children one of whom, Daniel, has an extreme allergy to all milk products. I knew this when I extended the invitation to dinner and told the mother, Deena, that we would serve no dairy products.  I explained that we keep a kosher home and on Friday evening we would have a "meat meal", meaning no dairy ingredients whatever would be at the table. Daniel then was about to celebrate his 7th birthday.  He was quite a remarkable young man.  In addition to being born with an intolerance to all milk products, he also was born with an esophagus too narrow to accommodate most foods.  This further compounded his already severe dietary constraints.  Nonetheless, he always was willing to try new foods that he could tolerate. When the Rileys came to our home for Shabbat dinner, Daniel was told he could freely partake of anything at the meal without having to worry about the presence of milk products.  When it was time for dessert, I brought out a big homemade chocolate cake.  Deidre was concerned, since she did not realize it is possible to make a chocolate cake without dairy ingredients.  I assured her it was dairy-free.  Daniel, who until this time did not believe he would ever taste chocolate cake, happily consumed a large portion of it. Deena asked me for the recipe so she could make it at his family birthday party scheduled for the following week.  Not long after the party, she called.  Daniel had to be hospitalized only minutes after having eaten a few bites of the chocolate cake she had prepared.  I asked Deena if she could remember altering any of the ingredients included in my recipe.  "Well," she replied, "the only difference was that I used a non-dairy whipped topping as a frosting on the cake because its label identified the product as non-dairy". I knew immediately what had happened.  Here was a bright, educated young mother who understandably had relied on the labeling of a food product that claimed it was non-dairy.  She had no reason to suspect that this legally permitted label was, in fact, dangerously misleading for anyone having a milk product intolerance.  One of its listed ingredients, sodium caseinate, actually is a protein derivative of milk. How was it that I knew this and Deena, who needed to know of such things, did not? Because of the Kashrut standards to which our family adheres, we (and I, in particular, as the resident chef in our household) necessarily have a sensitivity to the actual composition and processing of food products.  Average consumers and even many nutritional professionals depend largely upon food product labels conforming to regulations published by the United States Food and Drug Administration (the "FDA") which usually offer only the minimum information required by law.