It’s pretty rare, as a restaurant critic, that I become immersed in the niceties of theological debate – but that’s the rabbit hole in which I found myself recently. At an Anglican Eucharist service in Cambridge, I heard the priest issue a warning from the pulpit that anyone intolerant to gluten should not step forward to receive the host.

Some of the greatest schisms in the church have developed around the complexities of transubstantiation – whether, at what point and how the blessed bread and wine transform into the actual body and blood of Christ. There is a gigantic quantity of writing about the practical details. I willingly plunged in to find out.

The Church teaches that to be valid, the Eucharist “must be offered with bread and with wine in which a little water must be mixed”. The Code of Canon Law specifies that bread “must be only wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of spoiling”. So can you have a “gluten-free host”? Not if it’s made solely from wheat, as prescribed. And so, faced with the awful possibility of having to opine on whether the flesh of the son of God, at the point of transubstantiation, is fully gluten-free, Canon Law has stuck with the marginally less controversial ruling that coeliacs shouldn’t take communion. My point? If you think religious law is confused, take a look at the hospitality sector.

As well as writing about food, I run a café and bakery. In common with many of my colleagues in the hospitality industry, we handled the food-intolerance issue badly at first. We were baffled, incredulous and often angry when a vast surge of allergies and sensitivities presented themselves in our dining rooms. When the hell did everyone start thinking that a bakery was a good place to expect gluten-free food? Nut allergies and anaphylaxis, we could handle, we were trained. Besides, we reasoned to ourselves, people with EpiPens had always known how to handle themselves. But this new stuff was uncharted territory.

And then the law changed. Governments across Europe began legislating for product labelling and new service behaviours across the food industry to meet the problem. The costs of complying were astronomical, the cost of failure unimaginable. For a while, the genuine rage in the industry was palpable. We knew that allergies were a serious issue; they always had been. But now law was being written pandering to the worried, the neurotic and the self-diagnosers. Ask any front-of-house staff and even today they’ll have 100 war stories of customers ordering an egg-white omelette “with no egg” or finishing a diligently prepared gluten-free meal by spontaneously diving into the chocolate cake. And it’s not just a few tales retold; every single person working in hospitality had regular experience of customers “crying wolf”. Then things changed again.

It’s difficult to pinpoint any exact moment. Certainly, as the numbers increased, everyone knew people with intolerances or allergies personally. Allergies and intolerances affected everyone. In supermarkets and food manufacturing, the changes in labelling progressed. You couldn’t miss the aisles of “free-from” food and the increasingly detailed labels wherever you shopped. But hospitality required more nuanced changes in attitudes and behaviour.

Today, the question arrives right at the top of the order of service: “Does anyone at the table have any allergies we should know about? Let me get you some menus.” Your preferences are carefully noted and acted on. Restaurants now talk about “dietaries” in the same way they talk about wine preferences or whether a customer is a decent tipper. There’s no more judgement of an individual customer avoiding hot spices or members of the nightshade family than there would be of avoiding peanuts or pork. We’re geared up for it now, and whether your preference reflects millennia of your culture or something you heard last week from a very thin person on Tiktok – be it a diagnosed medical condition or a complete whim – it’s nobody’s damn business but yours as an individual.

Is this a sign that the hospitality industry has grown up a bit? Well, yes, but customers have changed too. High-maintenance punters still delight in giving staff the run-around with complicated requirements but there have always been people like that. Before they realised that they could request “nothing red on the plate”, they would have been complaining about the noise of the air-conditioning, the proximity of the bathroom or deploring the placement of a side plate. They’ll always be with us. Meanwhile, the eternally fretful “picky eaters” have moved on to part-time veganism, fear of carbohydrates or plant-based dietary demands. There’s still a long way to go but, importantly, a more mutual trust has grown and people with genuine allergies or intolerances are beginning to feel heard.

Perhaps the best indicator of this is the presence on menus, along with a slew of “free-from” options, of the ubiquitous quiet announcement, “While we try to ensure that our products are made without allergens, they may be used in our kitchens. Please ask your server for details.” This isn’t a disclaimer; it’s a discreet invitation to talk. You want to see exactly what allergens are in every dish on the menu, sure. We have a stack of spreadsheets as thick as a loaf of bread. But we can sort this out a lot more comfortably with a 30-second chat, at the end of which everyone feels heard, understood and, above all, safe.

There’s a model in psychoanalytic theory called Transactional Analysis, which posits that both sides in a relationship will occupy one of the three “ego states”: parent, adult or child. If one participant acts like a child, the other is inclined to, or sometimes forced into, acting like a parent, and vice versa. In therapy, the aim is to achieve a simple equilibrium, a grown-up state where I, as an adult, speak to you, also an adult.

For a long time, the hospitality industry, shocked by the pace and manner of change, behaved like children, refusing to take responsibility for the food we served, forcing the customers to do all the grown-up thinking. Sometimes, customers behaved like children, expecting the industry to cater automatically to their every imagined need, forcing us to take control and responsibility.

Today it feels as though we might finally be communicating, talking about a shared responsibility like adults. It’s a more relaxed and hospitable state of affairs. We care about you as guests; you trust us as hosts. It’s how it was always supposed to be. And that should have our blessings.