About

rose_in_summer by rosewx12 on flickr

What

Find Safe Food is for people with food restrictions who want to live normal, healthy lives. The site’s motto is finding safe food should be simple. Its goal is to provide tools that make it easy to find things to eat at home and on the road. I hope that if we can pool the knowledge of the people and families dealing with food allergies we can all live healthier, safer lives.

The site’s first project is to create an interactive tool to support the corn free list. One of my daughters depends on the list for food to eat and I want to make it easy for people to keep it up to date and accurate. Once it is working well for corn I plan to expand it to support all allergies.

Why

The inspiration for the site came from my two daughters and their struggles with food allergies. It started over 3.5 years ago with the birth of our eldest daughter, Little C. By 3 months old we knew something was wrong but were told, “She’s growing. Babies are like that. Relax.” At 9 months old the doctors finally started taking us seriously when poor little C started vomiting daily. It took until 18 months old and a lot of failed testing, elimination diets and parents intuition before we finally figured out our daughter was allergic to corn, peaches and maybe soy.

Three years after the birth of our first we were blessed again with our second daughter Little R. It looked like we were in the clear right until the day she started randomly projectile spit upping and then broke out in hives! However this time we were seasoned pros. With an elimination diet and some trial and error we quickly discovered Little R was reacting to the nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplant) in my diet.

After going through food allergies with two kids my goal is simple. Let my girls live healthy, safe, normal lives. To provide them and all the people like them with the tools they need to know what and where they can safely eat. Finding safe food should be simple!

Who

Rose is a stay at home mom to two wonderful girls. In my life before kids I was a senior software engineer at a Silicon Valley start up. I have a Masters Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. In my (limited) spare time I like to keep my programming toes wet by working on projects like this. When not changing diapers, building marble towers or sneaking 5 minutes of programming on the computer I like to hike, cook, read and garden.