Cafe highs and lows

Children from the local secondary school sample the Welsh cakes they just made.
It's satisfying to see our surplus food cafe succeeding as a social enterprise by offering learning opportunities like this. Hopefully these kids have  found out something about following a recipe and weighing and measuring.. (Last week I asked a teenage trainee to crack a dozen eggs and he replied 'Is that 6?' which reminded me that youngsters only do metric now.)

On the minus side though we are hampered in what we do by an enormous amount of form-filling and documentation, the bane of every small business. Health and Safety legislation requires us to keep tabs on every aspect of food preparation and storage. For example,  we have to record the temperatures of our 6 fridges and freezers twice every day; we have to measure with a probe and record  the temperatures reached when cooking, or reheating, every dish; we have to date and label each item that we receive, store, put into or take out of the freezer and  every jar or packet started; and we have to log each and every ingredient in whatever recipe we make.. At the end of last year new legislation was introduced that requires all caterers to provide  information on the presence of any of 14 common allergens in every item on the menu. Failure to do so could incur enormous fines which would bankrupt us. The list includes milk, eggs, wheat, fish, nuts, celery and mustard and must include the constituents of any ready-made sauce or spice mix we have included. Sometimes I get home and start to worry that I might have omitted to record an ingredient from my list...

I know that allergies can cause catastrophic reactions  but are these first world problems and if so how have we acquired them?  Earlier this evening I watched a TV programme about a chef visiting India and sampling street food in roadside eateries where huge vats of bubbling sauces and mountains of dough were being prepared, cooked and served virtually in the open among milling crowds. No observation of food safety was in evidence except for high heat and fast turnover. How do the allergic cope there? Do they exist? Does anyone have to avoid eggs or milk or mustard?