Notes From Vietnam
One of those indelible legacies the pandemic has bestowed upon me — besides the heightened sense of anxiety and a borderline pathological cleanliness OCD — is a mild gluten intolerance. “ Anathema to an itinerant food and travel writer,” one might say. An emphatic “ no big deal” is what I’m known to shoot that down with these days. There’s a gluten-free alternative to just about anything edible. Yes, even good old beer!
But long before the culinary world sought out such benign alternatives to cater to us gluten-challenged souls, the Vietnamese had an ace up their sleeves for a whole other set of reasons. But more on that a little later.
