Non­fic­tion

Feed­ing Eden: The Tri­als and Tri­umphs of a Food Aller­gy Family

Susan Weiss­man
  • From the Publisher
March 7, 2012
What do you make for din­ner when your child has such severe aller­gies that even one bite of the wrong ingre­di­ent can be dead­ly? Sad­ly, Susan Weiss­man knows the answer to this all too well. On one fright­ful day, her son Eden, after tak­ing only a few bites of a sim­ple lunch of rice and lamb, began claw­ing at his neck, his face became lumpy, his hands puffed up like two tiny base­ball mitts, his stom­ach broke out in patch­es, his eye­lid start­ed swelling, and his lips inflat­ed. Susan fran­ti­cal­ly rushed him to the emer­gency room where doc­tors would lat­er tell her that Eden suf­fered from life-threat­en­ing food aller­gies, just like twelve mil­lion oth­er Amer­i­cans. 

Feed­ing Eden is one of the first food aller­gy mem­oirs in a grow­ing trend. It’s an engag­ing mother’s sto­ry of how child­hood food aller­gies — a preva­lent and poten­tial­ly dead­ly health issue — affect­ed the life of her fam­i­ly. Susan writes with hon­esty and humor about becom­ing her son’s health-care advo­cate in a world of spe­cial­ists, her inves­ti­ga­tion of inter­ven­tion and cog­ni­tive ther­a­pies, her for­ays into alter­na­tive med­i­cine, and her attempts to find safe yet sat­is­fy­ing food for her fam­i­ly. She describes her heart­break, shares her strug­gle, and she describes how she main­tains her sanity. 

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