My brother was deadly allergic to even trace quantities of peanut products as a child. Nonetheless, we routinely ate peanut butter sandwiches and peanuts at home, never mind school or the many other spaces a child occupies, and it was never an issue. Reasonable precautions were sufficient to eliminate all practical concern and it didn’t require sterilizing the environment of all peanuts. This was easy and effective, same as with other kids with dangerous allergies. The only incident I can remember involved some Korean food that used peanut oil, and he knew it contained peanut the instant he put it in his mouth. He was quite capable of avoiding peanut products on his own.
Banning everyone from eating peanut products anywhere in the vicinity of someone with a peanut allergy is just another example of pathological safety-ism. And it goes far beyond actual deadly allergies now, we accommodate all manner of imagined hyper-sensitivities “just in case” with no rational or pragmatic consideration of the risks and costs.
anaphylaxis is highly individualized and can change within an individual over time.
It's also not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together. Most people will never understand the secondary effects of anaphylactic food allergies, no less CONSTANTLY downplay then as you did with your brother.
I know this sibling downplaying is very possible because my partner has MCAS, which causes random allergies to pop up like whack a mole. Her family caused her very much grief as a child but she developed strong coping mechanisms and it's similarly capable of "managing what she eats." However I am one of very few people who truly understand how completely alienated she feels because of it. The primary concerns (death by anaphylaxis) are bad but very infrequent. The secondary effects of social alienation are constant and boundaries are always being pushed even by close friends and family
I see, moving the goalposts to an even less defensible argument. Sharing food together doesn't mean eating the same thing. By this reasoning, we should all be forced to eat the lowest common denominator of least offensive food for everyone. If one person is vegan, we should all be vegan. If one person can't eat any nightshade vegetables (a common allergy), none of us should eat nightshade vegetables. Same for dairy, shellfish, etc. The set of foods all humans can comfortably and traditionally eat is approximately the empty set. This sounds like the very definition of a culturally and socially enriching experience around food!
You don't speak for my brother and he'd likely mock someone trying to "white knight" his eating experiences or suggesting his peanut allergy caused profound alienation. We all eat different things based on preferences, never mind allergens. Do people feel alienated and anxious because they can't handle spicy food but other people can? There is a ubiquitous food that I can't eat (for reasons unrelated to allergens) but never once did I feel alienated because of it, even though people tease me about it.
If people are intentionally being assholes about it, the issue is them being assholes and has nothing to do with the food. If one person is hyper-sensitive about what other people eat, the answer is therapy for that person, not changing the world to accommodate their hyper-sensitivity.
The current treatment of peanut allergies affecting people older than infants/toddlers is probably not an overreaction to the situation created by the fact that for a period until very recently (and maybe still now, as there is some social inertia), the attempt to prevent exposure in infants/toddlers was an overreaction, that produced a much greater number of very severe allergies than otherwise would have existed.
What "%" risk that your child would be poisoned do you find acceptable?
If so, I think the reality that needs to be dealt with is that there are going to be a lot of situations throughout their life where people are going to be serving arsenic. It sucks to be in that situation, but it's something that child will need to be taught to take into account (even if accommodations can kick that can down the road for now.)
If arsenic is poisonous for everyone in this analogy, then I have a lot bigger problems with this school than the lunch menu.
Yes, if there is a substance that's poison for one kid, they'll need to learn to take precautions. And if there's a substance that's poison for all, it should be banned from school meals. What if it's 10% of kids? 5%?
Food allergies are common these days.
Your attempt at an analogy was clumsy and nonsensical regardless. They aren’t serving poison at schools. Sugar would have been a better example.
Would you send your child to school if there was a 1% chance that they would be served something that would put them in the ER? .5% chance?
If you were a school administrator, would you serve food that could put 3% of the student body in the ER? 6%?
In the end, I don't (and imho, shouldn't) expect the world to put padding on the sidewalk to protect my from myself.
I would be happy if labelling laws included a "Manufacturing facility handles (allergen list). This product may contain trace amounts." as a statement for what there might be trace amounts of in terms of allergens not intentionally part of the product.
It bugs me a bit that if a kid wants a PBJ they no longer are allowed to at school.
But policies go above and beyond that now. They bar peanuts even if nobody has an allergy. Other places bar peanuts for self identified allergies (which cannot be confirmed 90% of the time by a doctor). That’s just bad policy driven by litigation fear.
I’m glad your allergies aren’t so severe. But minimizing contact isn’t enough for people who are deathly allergic to peanuts or sesame, where the best case for exposure is an epi-pen shot and a trip to the ER. It’s not so much asking for padded walls as enough information to allow people to live without fear of dying because of something they ate.
Every kid deserves an education without fear of being killed by some other kid’s snack. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.
Regardless, listing ingredients they aren’t willing to affirm aren’t in their products is helpful. It identifies products that aren’t for sure safe which is what you want.
What's the cost benefit analysis here? That the kid does not get to share the food?
Would touching someone that ate a PBJ be enough to trigger an episode? In what percentage of people?
How can you just say something like that without also stating a model? Without percentages and numbers?
Totally get that. Others do think that's too much to ask though, and I'm sure there are cases where you'd disagree with their "not too much to ask" in return.
I'm sure actually adding allergens to food and labeling them is a much better solution after-all.
Why, because nobody is going to make 10 mfg facilities each avoiding a different singular ingredient.
https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_F...
For instance, the following is a news item about a kid in a London school with a dairy allergy who died because his classmates flicked a bit of cheese at him as a joke:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...
A schoolboy with a dairy allergy was left gasping for breath and shouted “I’m going to die” minutes after a fellow pupil flicked cheese at him, an inquest has heard.
Karanbir Singh Cheema, 13, known as Karan, went from “absolutely fine” to unconscious in under 10 minutes after the incident at William Perkin Church of England high school in Greenford, west London, on 28 June 2017.
Karan, described as “so bright he could have been anything he wanted”, died 10 days later at Great Ormond Street hospital.
Most likely could being an over-sterilized environment during pregnancy or at birth, some chemical in common products, or something else effecting the micro biome or immune system.
> Asero and colleagues29 recently reported on a series of 1110 adolescent and adult Italian patients (mean age 31 years, range 12–79 years) diagnosed with food allergy based on history of reaction in the presence of positive skin prick test (SPT) or elevated food-specific serum IgE. Anaphylaxis was reported by 5% of food-allergic individuals, with the most common cause being lipid transfer protein (LTP). LTP is a widely cross-reacting plant pan-allergen. Offending food for LTP-allergic patients was most often peach, but included also other members of the Rosaceae family of fruits (apple, pear, cherry, plum, apricot, medlar, almond, strawberry), tree nuts, corn, rice, beer, tomato, spelt, pineapple, and grape. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440177/#:~:tex...
With speed limits, almost everyone suffers and almost everyone benefits. Of course, some people are more likely to be walking, and other driving, but it is not a core part of their identity.
Whenever something makes a specific small group much safer and around 100% of the people pay the cost, giving in and making those people safer is a slippery slope. There are infinite such cases, the system points towards more safety because of lawsuits, and careful cost benefit analysis is harder because there is no one person for which cost and benefit are similar -- for some it is just a small cost, for others just a gigantic benefit.
You'll get a small percentage doing a lot of activism and a large majority harmed, but not enough to fight it.
Your kid will be just fine if some other kid eats something with sesame in it, unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food.
This is why schools have taken drastic measures because all it takes is one incident to send a kid to the hospital, put the school in serious lawsuit territory and cause a massive news scandal. It's a matter of liability reduction.
extreme cases make bad policy.
If a kid assaults another with peanut butter, might I suggest the problem is the assault, not the peanut butter?
Good thing kids never do this.
What is the reason to that?
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/AllergiesNews/story?id=4659705...
I'm sure you can find an article about peanut allergies at any point in recorded history where they had peanuts.
This sounds completely absurd and hyperbolic, but let's say I took it at face value - why is this an issue now and not an issue when I was in school?